Franciscan at Home

A frequently asked question from the young women I teach is, “Don’t you feel like it’s unfair that women can’t be priests?” As a woman working in the Church and teaching the faith, I think they expect me to feel cheated, as if my rights are being disrespected. While I have taken the time to consider the question and its implications, I would never change my answer: “Not at all!” The role I have is an absolute privilege and different roles do not mean unequal or unfair—they just mean different.

My job as a Catholic middle school religion teacher is a great privilege. Every day, I get to share the Gospel with my students. My classroom is a place where people are invited to know and love the Lord, where the Scriptures are spoken, where our story of salvation is told year after year. I have a fundamental task in the lives of my students. COVID or not, I am an “essential worker” in the vineyard of the Lord because what I teach must be shared. It affects the salvation of souls.

The human heart loves mysteries. By mystery, I mean hidden knowledge that requires a sleuth to uncover the truth. We love the idea of discovering lost secrets that upend our entire understanding of our world. Think of space aliens and the secret Area 51 in New Mexico. Think of movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark where the “true purpose” of the Ark of the Covenant is revealed or National Treasure, which divulges the “real” mission behind the Knights Templar and features the discovery of an ancient, buried treasure. There are even “mysteries” about the Catholic Church found in books like The Da Vinci Code, which “promised” to tell readers the machinations of the Vatican’s puppet masters, Opus Dei, and their effort to keep hidden forbidden knowledge that would expose the “true,” scandalous origins of Christianity!

Conspiracy theories make for interesting novels and entertaining movies, but, to the dismay of many, they are nothing more than conjecture designed to lead people away from the much more mundane truth of reality. Most of the time, what is obvious and clear is the truth: we haven’t found aliens, the Ark is not the ultimate weapon, and who the Church is and what she believes has been public since its founding by Christ and does not require a detective to find it. This aspect of the Church is what we call “catholic.”

The seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel captures an intimate conversation between Jesus and God the Father. Jesus and his disciples will soon cross the Kidron Valley and enter into the Garden of Gethsemane. He will be arrested and enter into his Passion. “The hour has come” (Jn 17:1).

Earlier in John’s Gospel, when Mary approaches Jesus at the wedding at Cana, Jesus responds by saying, “My hour has not yet come” (Jn 2:4). Later, when Jesus heals on the Sabbath, the people seek to arrest him, but “no one laid hands on him, because his hour had not yet come” (Jn 7:30). But now, the hour has come, and Jesus turns to the Father in prayer.

What does Jesus say to the Father at this crucial moment? He prays that we all may be one. “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.... The glory which you have given to me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (Jn 17:11; 22–23).

Christ’s prayer is a prayer for the Church—it is a prayer for you and me—so that we may all be regathered into one Mystical Body of Christ, founded on the apostles, sharing by Word and sacrament in that one love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

“About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter.”[i] These are the striking words of St. Joan of Arc, boldly spoken as she stood trial. “They’re just one thing” because Jesus himself described his relationship to the nascent Church as the relationship of vines united to a single branch (cf. Jn 15:1–5). In other words, while distinctions are not difficult to find between Christ and the Christians who make up the Church, at root (forgive my pun), they are one living thing.

We live in a time of heightened divisiveness and loneliness. Online social connections are, as we all know, meager substitutes for real connection and friendship. Perhaps you share with me the conviction that the Church is the needed antidote. The Church is—and at the same time is meant to become—a remarkable communion. The sacraments bring us into communion with the Blessed Trinity, and being in this communion means that we are also intimately united with everyone who is in this remarkable relationship with God: the angels, the saints, all those in Purgatory, and every baptized person on the planet. If Baptism makes us adopted sons and daughters of the Father, then it also makes us truly brother and sister to one another. This extraordinary truth arises out of what the sacraments accomplish.

Note

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Editor’s Introduction: The last one hundred years have seen significant developments in how the Church has understood the nature of her catechetical mission. There has been both a movement toward the past and a movement toward the future: a desire to recover the dynamism seen in the teaching of Christ and the catechesis of the early Church as well as an eagerness to help catechists meet new challenges by thoughtfully engaging contemporary insights. Three catechetical directories have been written, as well as summaries from numerous Study Weeks and official documents, through which we can trace a compelling description of how the catechetical mission might be best carried out. Monsignor John Pollard, a man who has served as a prominent catechetical thinker and leader as many of these developments have taken place, presents this helpful series detailing the trajectory of how the Church has articulated her catechetical mission to make disciples. We hope you enjoy this series.

Even before Pope John XXIII convoked the Second Vatican Council, the Church was wrestling with the challenge of remaining relevant in a rapidly secularizing world. This sense was felt among Church leaders, theologians, catechists, and the lay faithful in general. Within the fields of catechetics and liturgy, a renewal and reform movement began to surface that saw value in bringing catechetical and liturgical leaders from different parts of the world together to share their experiences of proclaiming the Gospel and celebrating the rites of the Church within the cultures of their respective countries.

In the history of the modern catechetical movement, the series of six International Catechetical Study Weeks that were held in Nijmegen, Holland (1959); Eichstätt, Germany (1960); Bangkok, Thailand (1962); Katigondo Seminary, Uganda (1964); Manila, Philippines (1967); and Medellin, Columbia (1968) appear now, over fifty years later, to have been significant directional moments in the renewal and reform of catechetics. When taken together, the resolutions, conclusions, and summaries of these six International Catechetical Study Weeks constitute an important element of the framework within which catechetics has evolved before, during, and after the Second Vatican Council. Especially in the days before Vatican II, there seemed to be heightened worldwide interest in global concerns, diversity within the Church, and the Church’s coexistence in the world with both other Christian and non-Christian religious traditions. The International Catechetical Study Weeks directly involved the participants with these concerns precisely because they were international in scope and missionary in focus.

A powerful narrative exists within the popular culture that the advancements of modern science pose an existential threat to religious belief. This narrative, popularized by many influential authors, argues that scientific discovery is gradually upending the stranglehold Christian “superstitions” have held over the popular imagination. Nowhere is this apparent conflict more evident than in the field of evolutionary biology. For example, Christians maintain that we are made in the image and likeness of the Creator, yet many advocates of evolutionary theory claim humans are a meaningless twig on the evolutionary tree of life.

This view holds such force that Pope Benedict XVI felt compelled to state in his inaugural Pontifical homily that “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”[i]

[i] Benedict XVI, “Homily of His Holiness Benedict XVI” (April 24, 2005).

There have been some very good books written in the past few years centered on helping parishes to become mission-focused.