Franciscan at Home

There is probably a screen in the middle of your living room. There has been a screen in the middle of American living rooms since the 1950s. Its presence rearranged furniture and changed the focus of the ones sitting in those chairs—no longer looking at one another, but pointed at that screen.

There is probably a screen in the middle of your parish youth room or classroom, too. Maybe it is a large white screen built into the wall with a 4K projector, or an old console TV precariously perched atop a moving cart. It wasn’t always at the center, but over the past five-to-seven years it crept into the middle and redirected the focus as video-based catechesis has presented itself (perhaps unintentionally) as the solution to many challenges we face in ministry.

It is a historic time to be a part of youth and young adult ministry. The upcoming Synod on “Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment” is inspiring conversations across the world. Here in the United States, the Hispanic/Latino community has engaged in the Fifth Encuentro with an emphasis on young, second and third generation Hispanics/Latinos. Another important movement is “The National Dialogue of Catholic Pastoral Ministry for Youth and Young Adults”, which is a collaborative effort between the USCCB, The National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry, the USCCB National Advisory Team on Young Adult Ministry, and the National Catholic Network de Pastoral Juvenil Hispana (LaRED).

It is well documented that many young people no longer affiliate themselves with being Catholic, or any religion at all. Before we can propose what can be done about this, some attention must be given to who these young people are. To do so challenges not only our pre-conceived notions but also the vocabulary we use when we speak of young people or youth or young adults.
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It remains to be seen how the usage of these terms may evolve over the next couple years. Regardless of how the words are used, it is important we don’t fall into a common problem described by Tony Vasinda of ProjectYM: “In the US, we have typically defined ministry to young people based on their age but not where they are on their spiritual journey.” While this “age-based” approach can have benefits in fields such as education or psychology, it fails when it defines our pastoral practice towards young people. One could argue that the continual debate about the most appropriate age for the Sacrament of Confirmation is a symptom of this issue.

There are seventeen-year-olds who are committed disciples of Jesus Christ; there are twenty-five-year-olds who are only just starting to think about their relationship with the Catholic Church. How might the Church give language to those pastorally accompanying such young people to guide them towards spiritual maturity?

The Catechetical Institute at Franciscan University has officially launched it's LMS (Learning Management System) FranciscanAtHome.com for online catechist formation in all areas of catechesis; we're adding new courses weekly. You can try it out for as little as $5 for the month, just for enrichment, or $13 for a month with a mentor to accompany you.

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This is a paid advertisement in the October-December 2017 issue. Advertisements should not be viewed as endorsements from the publisher.

My early years as a high school religion teacher overflowed with exciting moments of watching teens open up to the Lord in the midst of my efforts to bring them to him. Students’ faces lit up as they understood a truth of the faith for the first time; students expressed a sense that God was speaking to them in prayer; students turned away from serious sin because they realized God wanted more for them. But one year I had an extraordinarily difficult class. None of my previously successful efforts engaged these students, and try as I might to identify other successful means of reaching them, each of those failed as well. I recall sharing a part of my testimony with them, a story that had previously been very effective, and they burst into derisive laughter. While other teachers spoke of this group’s extreme immaturity, I thought I must be a failure as a teacher and a catechist. As the year dragged on, I experienced a growing conviction that I could not reach these students, or any students, and that I did not belong in this ministry. I lost hope that these students could meet the Lord, hope that God was at work in this situation, hope that I was even called to this ministry to begin with. The end of the year found me physically and spiritually exhausted, and hopelessly convinced that God had abandoned me. Catechetical ministry is often fraught with challenges to hope. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) observed, “The drama faced by our contemporaries is…that of living without hope in an ever more profane world.” The drama we face as catechists is to remain steadfast in our own hope and to help those to whom we minister grow in hope as well. According to Cardinal Ratzinger’s synthesis of Augustine, Aquinas, and others, beauty brings us to an encounter with Christ Jesus our Hope, giving us hope to carry on. By imbuing our catechesis with beauty, we nourish our own hope and create the conditions for realizing the definitive aim of catechesis: “to put people…in intimacy with Jesus,” stirring our “hope [that] he invites us to.”

When I was a full-time parish youth minister many years ago, Brian, who had been recently initiated into the Church, invited his younger sister Erin to our parish youth program. She was unbaptized and knew a little about Jesus through her family, who did not actively attend a church. Brian began by bringing her to our social events, where she was welcomed and began to meet “nice” teens, as well as fun, safe, and holiness-striving adults. As these relationships began to grow, Erin soon attended our youth group meetings and eventually our retreats. It was during these retreats that the love of Christ and his call became clear to her. Of her own free will, Erin decided to attend our weeknight prayer group. Little did she realize that this meeting was really a full, complete, and systematic unveiling of the teachings of the Church done in an attractive youth-ministry manner. We did not pressure her to attend; we simply invited her to our events and welcomed her when she participated. At all our gatherings, Erin heard us say that if any teen was ever interested in becoming Catholic, we would be happy to talk to him or her about it. For months, even though she was a regular participant at our social events, youth group meetings, retreats, and prayer group, Erin never said she wanted to become Catholic. Eventually, one day she came to us with the firm conviction to enter the Church. Since then, not only was she initiated into the sacramental life of the Church, she served the youth program as a young adult, did mission work, and is now a devoted young wife and mother. Watching Erin grow in faith was not only a joy, but was a living testimony of the Church’s wisdom as seen in the stages of conversion in the catechumen ate. If you are a coordinator of youth ministry, you are probably saying to yourself, “Oh no, this article is giving me another thing to do.” If that’s what you’re thinking, you are correct! However, what I want to discuss here is not another program to add to your workload but a process that will shape and define your ministry. In short, developing a teen initiation process has the potential of directing the entirety of our youth ministry to evangelization and conversion. To do so, we need to make initiation the heart of our programming for teenagers. In this article, I will first show how the parish youth program can be used as the foundation for a vibrant and solid teen initiation process, then demonstrate how the stages of the catechumenate can be the foundation for parish youth programming. I will also discuss how parishes without youth programs can serve teenagers who want to be initiated into the life of the Church. Second, I will highlight key components of an initiation process for adolescents, including important moments in the process and the issue of parent involvement.

When I had an opportunity to return to study in England after many years of active missionary life in East Africa, I took the opportunity to investigate the phenomenon of “school strikes” in Kenya in the hope of understanding what they were saying about moral decision making in adolescents. The school strike is a problem that has bedevilled Kenyan schools for many years, leading even to loss of lives and causing enormous damage to property. Many an education have been compromised by school strikes, which are basically student protests—often violent and destructive—against perceived injustices in the school system.

My own interest was primarily derived from a personal experience of a school strike that had taken place in the girls’ boarding school where I was working. Although no physical harm came to anyone, nor was there any damage to property, relationships between the staff and among the students themselves were strained, because many students were not even involved in the strike. It was difficult to simply return to a “business as usual” approach when there were so many unanswered questions surrounding the underlying reasons for the strike; the trust that had previously characterized our relationships had now been compromised. When asked afterwards—one by one in front of their parents—what grievance had provoked the strike, most of the girls had simply shrugged their shoulders and mumbled the word “influence.” Only some three or four felt they had some genuine reasons for protest but their influence had been strong enough to prevail over the majority.

As I investigated this phenomenon further with the participation of students from a number of other schools, layers of meaning were gradually uncovered. At surface level, a mistrust of authority emerged, expressed as outrage against the neglect and lack of concern for the welfare of the students demonstrated by school administrations in general. This was coupled with a sense of anonymity; one was known only by one’s peers but not by any significant adult within the school context. At a still deeper level, however, there emerged a much more preoccupying issue: a lack of a sense of life’s meaning and purpose that might guide moral decision making.

The most striking conclusion of the research was that, although most of the students were at least nominally Christian and many Catholic, very few of the students were influenced by their Christian faith. Their decisions were effectively pragmatic, a response to circumstances but without any reasoned consideration derived from principle.

In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis speaks of two necessary “arts” for evangelization: the “art of accompaniment” and the “art of listening.” The Holy Father stresses that these intrinsically linked arts should mainly focus on the persons being evangelized, by truly seeking to know them and binding ourselves to walk with them wherever they are at in life:

As a Clinical Child and Family Psychologist who works primarily in the field of catechesis, one particular interest of mine is the integration of what both faith and science tell us about the human person. In secular society, and even among some individuals in the Church, there is the misconception that science and faith are somehow incompatible. However, some of the greatest minds both in science and religion have disputed this assumption. For example, Albert Einstein famously said, “A legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist. Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”1 Similarly, in a letter to Director of the Vatican Observatory Reverend George V. Coyne, S.J., St. John Paul II wrote, “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish… We need each other to be what we must be, what we are called to be.”2

Christians have viewed the field of psychology with skepticism from its very beginning. After all, Sigmund Freud, considered by many to be the founder of psychology, called religion “an illusion.”3 But as the field of psychology has grown and its methods have improved, many have found it to be more and more compatible with Christian thinking. In fact, what we find by science to be true about the human mind and human emotion would necessarily have to be compatible with our faith, since God himself created us to think and to feel.

Using what we know about how people think, feel, and behave can make us more effective in faith formation. The following is a discussion of five pressing questions in the field of catechesis that may be answered, at least in part, by research in the social sciences.