Franciscan at Home

Time magazine may have named both Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II “Man of the Year” during their respective pontificates, but this April 27, 2014—the day on which the Church celebrates Jesus’ Divine Mercy—the Church will proclaim that these holy men are saints for all time! 

In September 2013, I had the privilege of attending an International Conference for Catechists in Rome, which was sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization. It was a true blessing to be in Rome during the Year of Faith. We listened to several speakers, including Dr. Petroc Willey, the English consultant to this Pontifical Council, and Franciscan University alumna, Dr. Jem Sullivan. Two extraordinary things happened during those few days. The best, of course, was being able to shake hands with our Holy Father Pope Francis. I began weeping as soon as he entered the Audience Hall and as I held his hand for a few brief seconds. As he began his catechesis, I continued to weep as he affirmed all that I have been striving to do in forty years as a catechist. I honestly felt that St. Peter, the simple fisherman from Galilee, was speaking through this simple man from Argentina. And then I wept no more.

The second experience was attending Mass celebrated by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the President of the Council for Promoting the New Evangelization and the many bishops and priests who were attending the conference. Mass was celebrated upon the altar directly under the Chair of St. Peter, the symbol of the authority of the first Pope and his successors through two millennia. It was then that I decided that I would devote the next several issues of The Sower to Peter and the Apostles.

I wrote about St. Peter several years ago when I did a series of articles on catechetical saints who were popes. I am sure the life of Peter is well known to the readers. It is clear in the Gospels, in the Acts of the Apostles, and in Peter’s letters contained in the New Testament. He was impetuous, he was flawed, and in the end he denied the One whom he believed to be the Messiah. Why did he do that? Did he reject Christ entirely? Hadn’t he left everything, including wife and family to follow Jesus? Was he afraid?

In September of this year [2010], during his Papal visit to England, Pope Benedict beatified Cardinal Newman. I realize that most people would not think of Newman as a catechetical saint, but I believe he is. First of all, we must remember that to be a catechetical saint, one must be a saint first, that is, be holy. The Church affirms Newman’s holiness in beatifying him.

I believe it is clear that he can be called ‘catechetical’. He is one of the most famous converts to Catholicism after St. Paul and St. Augustine. He was born in England when the Church of England was the state church, and had become for many a matter of form rather that a means of salvation. An evangelical revival was underway in the 1830’s. C.S. Dessain wrote that the Evangelicals’ ‘concentration on feelings of the heart led to a disparagement of the external and objective in religion, creeds, sacraments and visible Church. A man’s feelings were more important than his beliefs.’[i] This could be said of catechesis after Vatican II.

The depth and breadth of Newman’s life cannot be summarized in these few paragraphs, and I encourage everyone to read one of the many works on Newman’s life. Ultimately he entered the Catholic Church at Littlemore, outside of Oxford in 1845. He was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome in 1846 and joined the Oratorians of St. Philip Neri. He returned to England and settled first at Maryvale, the home of The Sower, and finally in Birmingham where he founded the Oratory there. Again, the breadth of his activities as a Catholic priest can in no way be quickly summarized here.

In this final installment of my series on Blessed John Paul, I thought that I would deviate from the regular format of these articles and instead help us all to reflect on the words of John Paul himself. In the huge corpus of his writing, he really took every opportunity to speak to all the members of the Church, in every state of life. Of course his witness would be enough to inspire us to personal holiness.

So, I am asking you to take some quiet time (a rare commodity for people actively engaged in the catechetical apostolate of the Church) and peacefully reflect on the words of Blessed John Paul.

George Weigel’s second volume of John Paul II’s biography is entitled: The End and the Beginning. In the book’s penultimate chapter he reviews Karol Wojtyla’s life through ‘the prism of the three theological virtues’.1 By divine symmetry, John Paul II’s General Audience reflections commences where his predecessor, John Paul I, concluded his teaching, on the first three ‘lamps’ of Sanctification’ as John XXXIII called them: Faith, Hope and Charity.

Weigel speaks of the threads of John Paul II’s life as being woven into a tapestry of ‘ongoing’ intellectual, moral, psychological and emotional conversion. Through each of these deepening engagements with the presence of Christ in his life, he grew in the triple grace of baptism previously noted because of a profound commitment to giving the gift of himself to God and neighbour.

I had the grace to make a pilgrimage to Mexico City in the fall of 1999. The experience in front of the image was mine. I do have to tell you that I was one of the first persons in front of the image in the morning, and I definitely was there when they were closing. The miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is one that has awakened faith in the hearts of many; here I look at her call to us in this Year of Faith.

Fr. Peter Conley highlights the importance of saints in catechesis and calls on us not to overlook some of their more unexpected sides.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, in his Fragment of a Life of St Philip, has left us an unexpected (and often overlooked) hermeneutic key to unlock the nature of holiness in both canonised saints and those in the making.

‘…a saint’s life may often have in it things not directly and immediately spiritual. To find a saint sitting down to cards, or reading a heathen author, or listening to music or taking snuff, is often a relief and an encouragement to the reader, as convincing him that grace does not supersede nature, and that as he is reading of a child of Adam and his own brother, and he is drawn up to his pattern and guide while he sees that pattern can descend to him; whereas that shadowy paper-Saint, as I may call it, bloodless, ideality which may be set up in the mind from the exclusive perusal of a roll of unconnected details, may, from the weakness of our hearts, chill us unduly, lead (us) to shrink from the Saints and to despond about ourselves. The lights and shades of the saintly character are necessary for understanding what a Saint is.’1

Blessed John Henry challenges us to admit that we can become susceptible to a diet of bland, lifeless accounts of holiness which emphasise the ‘sublime’ without ever delighting in the ‘ridiculous’ or, at least, the quirkiness about a saintly character. The passage pulsates in its appeal to search for a person’s humanity because it is in and through this that we encounter the kindly light of Christ’s divinity shining out from them.

Fr Peter Conley reminds us of the catechetical qualities of the Pope who had the shortest Pontificate in history.

I feel sure John Paul I would have incorporated the title of pop singer Taja Seville’s hit, ‘Love is Contagious’, in one of his Addresses. After all, he did suggest that we should ‘inject others with a goodness imbued with meekness and love taught by Christ’.1

His successor, John Paul II, spoke of him unleashing a ‘torrent of love’2 during his brief reign. The ‘Smiling Pope’ or ‘God’s Candidate’ to use Cardinal Basil Hume’s phrase, implored his audience to ‘throw me a safety belt with your prayers’3 and in imitation of his humble master admitted that Christ’s Yoke of Papal Office was laid on ‘fragile shoulders’.4 He literally, had an astronomic impact. Consider the Vatican preface to the collection of his homilies and addresses:

‘John Paul I passed in the Church and in the world like a whirling comet which casts a jet of inextinguishable light, like a flash of hope that leaves hearts ablaze, like a marvellous rainbow charged with promise for a poor, weary, divided and restless humanity.’5

His teaching was communicated with a brilliantly gifted catechist’s amalgam of compressed style, humour, honesty and humility. Seasoned with topical references, often from popular culture, John Paul I spoke passionately using simple yet profoundly-crafted observations on life, the universe and everything. This was a man who likened life’s journey to God to Jules Verne’s adventure stories and had the creative imagination to write letters to Pinocchio, Charles Darwin and even St Romedio’s bear! In his book Illustrissimi (the illustrious ones), he numbered Tom Sawyer’s creator Mark Twain and Sir Walter Scott of Ivanhoe fame amongst his favourite authors.

Sean Innerst helps us respond to the Church’s call to place Christ at the center of our narration of salvation history.

The General Directory for Catechesis (GDC) at number 39 says, ‘Catechesis, for its part, transmits the words and deeds of Revelation; it is obliged to proclaim and narrate them and, at the same time, to make clear the profound mysteries that they contain’ (emphases added). That is only the first of several references in the GDC to a form of catechesis, the narratio or narration of salvation history, that was a standard part of the initiatory practices of the fourth and fifth century Church.i

Those practices, many of which have been revived in the modern RCIA, gave way over time to the requirements of a changing Church in which the catechetical focus became not so much adults who needed to be given a Judeo-Christian worldview to replace a Greco- Roman one, but children who had grown up in communities that were more and more shaped by a Christian vision.ii With the fading of the ancient practice of narratio, many catechists today feel incapable of responding to the obligation to narrate what God has revealed, spoken of in the GDC, because they just don’t know what a catechetical narration should look like.

In the Prologue to his early 5th century work De catechizandis rudibus (DCR), which in its newest English translation is titled Instructing Beginners in the Faith,iii St. Augustine of Hippo tells us that the narration, or narration of salvation history, which he used to catechize those newly entering the faith is intended to display ‘the central points of the faith’ and that it ‘gives us our identity as Christians.’iv He goes on to say that it represents an ‘initial grounding in the faith’ and then even that through it ‘the content of the faith is communicated’ to these newcomers.v That a half-hour to an hour-and-a-half discourse could do all that might seem a rather exalted claim, but Augustine is clear that in either a shorter or longer form, when constructed properly, the narratio will be ‘at all times perfectly complete.’vi