Franciscan at Home

The Rosary is arguably the most widely prayed, most enduring devotion in Catholic history. Many have spoken about the power and beauty of the Rosary. Pope St. Pius X said, “Amidst all prayers, the Rosary is the most beautiful, the richest in graces, and the one that most pleases the Most Holy Virgin.”[1] October, the month of the Rosary, is the perfect time to introduce this beloved prayer to children and to encourage families to pray it together. The following are some recommendations for handing on this treasure of the Church.

1. Remind Your Learners That Mary Is Our Mother

Motherhood is associated with a gentle, approachable strength. Many children feel most comfortable going to their mothers first when they are distressed or in trouble. When Jesus commends his mother to St. John at the Cross (Jn 19:26–27) he is, by extension, offering her as mother to the whole Church. And indeed, she is—for the Church is the Body of Christ and Mary is his mother. As our mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary wishes to encourage us, to protect us, to nurture us, and to teach us by always pointing us to her Son. Jesus is a good Son who loves and listens to his mother, so we can be certain that he hears whatever questions, worries, and problems we place at her feet. As Pope Leo XIII wrote, “How unerringly right, then, are Christian souls when they turn to Mary for help as though impelled by an instinct of nature, confidently sharing with her their future hopes and past achievements, their sorrows and joys, commending themselves like children to the care of a bountiful mother.”[2]

St. Thomas Aquinas explained the imagination as “a storehouse of forms received through the senses” that are later called to mind.[1] St. Augustine considered it as a form of “spiritual vision,” distinct from our corporal and intellectual senses.[2] St. Theresa of Ávila described it as one of the most important powers of the soul.[3] Each of these Doctors of the Church spent ample time writing on the power of our imagination and its relationship to the life of faith. They understood that our imagination is part of our physical and spiritual nature. As such, it can affect our bodies and souls for good or for ill. Like all human faculties, our imagination must be trained and developed in order to be healthy, lest it become too weak or disordered—incapable of helping us enter into the reality of this life and the life to come. As catechists, we ought to consider how to form our imagination, and the imagination of those we teach, in the service of our call to holiness.

Jesus, as catechist par excellence, appealed to the imagination of his followers, painting elaborate scenarios. Most of his parables ask the listener to imagine a particular family, place, or circumstance that was common to life. We see him tell stories of disobedient sons (Mt 21:28–32), fiercely stubborn widows (Lk 18:1–8), harvesting wheat (Mt 13:24–30), and herding sheep (Lk 15:1–7). Some parables stretched the limits of the mind’s eye, appealing to circumstances less relatable but still within the grasp of a healthy imagination. Christ spoke of finding treasure (Mt 13:44–46), generous landowners (Mt 20:1–16), and extraordinarily compassionate fathers (Lk 15:11–32). Stories communicate truth and appeal to our imagination in ways that often transcend mere statements. The great southern Catholic author Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “a story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way . . . You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”[4]

Forming a Healthy Imagination

The imagination is above all an integrative power. It reassembles the information that we take in through our senses for the purpose of calling to mind an object or experience in its absence or imagining something new and not yet experienced. I have never seen a purple dog, but I can imagine one. Unlike our external senses that can only perceive the object when it’s acting upon our sense organs, the imagination produces the sense of the object even when these objects are absent. For example, I can imagine a sunset and have its impression affect me without actually seeing it with my eyes.

Forming a healthy imagination requires having as much good and true sensory data as possible. This means that our experience of the natural world is critical, as it serves as the primary foundation of our imagination. As Sr. Thomas More Stepnowski, OP, explains, “the imagination assists in forming an ‘interior landscape’ of the spiritual life which helps us navigate through the dark valleys to the restorative green pastures.” She continues, “For Catholics, the imagination is not an escape to a fantasy world. The imagination aids us in seeing the real world by integrating the natural world and the supernatural world, the visible and invisible.”[5]

As we know, the term “catechesis” derives from the Greek word katechein, which means “to echo.” Our work as catechists is to announce the Good News of Jesus Christ—to hand on to others what we have received, what we have heard, seen, and touched (1 Jn 1:1). For this reason, it might seem counterintuitive to write an article on the specific pedagogical need for silence during one’s catechetical instruction. However, the conundrum gives way when we understand the role of silence in fostering an authentic dialogue of salvation between God and the person receiving catechesis.[1] First, a personal story.

I have been a catechist for over 30 years and have taught “children” from three to 93  years of age. In my glory days as a junior high religion teacher, I had the reputation of having such a rigorous religion curriculum that my former eighth-grade students never took notes in religion class their entire freshman year of high school and still got all A’s. Many students would lovingly tease, “Sister, your quizzes are like tests; your tests are like exams; and your exams are like dissertations.” Yes, we were rigorous in our study of Catholic doctrine, but it took me many years (and a doctoral degree) to realize that I had failed to teach my students the one thing necessary: how to listen to God’s silent voice. More egregious, I had failed to let God speak.

An Education in the Faith

The various catechetical directories have consistently referred to the work of catechesis in educational terms. The 1971 Directory spoke of catechesis as “catechetical education” and the formation of the child’s heart as an “interior education.”[2] The 1997 Directory asked catechists to envision catechesis as a “school of faith” and to recognize that it serves “the simple objective of education in the faith.”[3] The 2020 Directory likewise recognizes that catechesis draws its inspiration from the “great educational work of God.”[4] We instinctively know that an education in the faith differs substantially from an education in other subjects.[5] Yet, for years, catechists have adopted a pedagogical approach that mirrors their counterpart teachers of math or science.

To be sure, the math teacher’s cycle of instruction, guided practice, student evaluation, and remedial instruction as needed has proven successful for many students seeking to master algebra. In catechesis, however, our aim is not to have students master knowledge but to have a knowledge of the Master. This is no clever play on words. The 2020 Directory exhorts catechists to “evangelize by educating and educate by evangelizing.”[6] This means that we must include in our unique educational pedagogy a way for the child to encounter the Lord—a way for her to hear God’s voice. We must provide a way for the child to contemplate—not master—God’s truth, beauty, and goodness.

I can remember distinct moments in my life when I have been wowed. In some way, all of them are connected to a sense of vastness that made me recognize my smallness, my earthly finitude—from the vistas of mountains in Switzerland to cathedrals with spires that reach toward heaven. These moments inspire a sense of wonder and awe within our souls, allowing us to recognize just how mighty, how powerful, how big God really is. It can give us a healthy respect for our Creator, helping us become humble in the way we see ourselves. 

Even in the eight short years I have been teaching, the culture has changed so much. I have noticed that there is a lot less that captivates my students. That gift of wonder appears to remain latent because we are trying to compete with a culture that tells our children that the latest and greatest is what people need in order to be happy. We can’t appreciate the iPhone we have because the next model is already out. And while technology is certainly a gift, having immediate answers to everything at our fingertips all the time can take away the process of wondering.  

Discovering answers requires minimal work, and so, nothing remains veiled or hidden—students don’t need to practice patience to learn what they want to know. I realize this struggle exists across disciplines, but it seems to have an even more pointed effect on catechesis. When the core of our very faith is a mystery—the mystery of the Triune God—cultivating a desire to dive deeper is essential. That dive takes effort and motivation and work beyond a Google search, and thus, we lose students’ interest. And growing in a relationship with God certainly requires effort. That gift of wonder and awe guides our souls in the desire to enter into that mystery, to make an effort to know God, and also to realize that some of him and his plan will always remain a mystery to us. 

All of the mysteries of our faith should naturally inspire wonder in us. But since this isn’t always the case for our students, we must find aspects of our faith that can help foster within them a sense of awe. The most effective of these that I have found are eucharistic miracles. 

Nearly forty years ago, my wife and I faced one of those moments that every parent dreads. Our curious three-year-old daughter reached up to the kitchen bench and put her finger into a cup of tea  that had just been poured and pulled it over onto herself. It scalded her arm and, within seconds, a blister the size of an egg appeared. Straight away, we put ice and Lourdes water onto the blister, and I took her immediately to the hospital, praying all the way. The nurses and doctors began their work immediately. One of the doctors took me aside gently to give me the diagnosis. He had seen many of these before. Our daughter would be in great pain and would have a very uncomfortable night. There would also be a disfiguring scar that would remain permanently.

The first strange thing about this, however, was that none of what he told us would happen ended up being true. Our daughter was not at all distressed and said that she was not feeling any pain. We returned daily to the hospital to change the dressing on the wound, but it seemed to be healing far more rapidly than expected. The doctors were baffled. Some weeks later, no discernible scar remained. We were witnessing a miracle, and I was forthright in my praise for the goodness of God to all who would listen. It was then that I discovered an unexpected phenomenon. Most of the people I told about this were able to recount stories of their own personal miracles. Could this be true? Were miracles far more common that I had thought? Does God really intervene in our lives continually? Apparently, he does. And I have experienced many more of these inexplicable events over my lifetime.

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As another Holy Day of obligation rolls by, the question arises once again about the wisdom and sustainability of current Mass provision in our Catholic schools in Scotland. In our Cathedral parish here in Motherwell, we have three Sunday Masses, but between us as clergy we normally celebrate eight Masses on Holy Days, mainly in school settings, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and participation on the part of pupils. What is the point? Are we (as is often argued) sacramentalizing pupils who have never been evangelized, never mind catechized? In addition, as Catholic schools worldwide also become increasingly multi-faith—with, for example, 20 percent of non-Catholic pupils in Catholic schools today in the U.S. compared with 5 percent in 1972—is compulsory Mass attendance responding to the spiritual needs of all pupils?[1] And how can we strike a balance between the school’s responsibility to celebrate liturgically and the freedom of individual members to either embrace or opt out of such celebrations?

[1] National Catholic Educational Association (2022) Data Brief: 2021-22 Catholic School Enrollment, 1. https://images.magnetmail.net/images/clients/NCEA1/attach/Data_Brief_22_...

Diego is eleven years old. For years he has received religious formation through the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd (CGS) in a carefully prepared environment for the religious life of children called an atrium. He is working with a material known as the “Unity and Vastness of the Kingdom of God,” a timeline that takes a long and essential view of the history of salvation. Diego ponders the moment in this history when God says, “Let us make humankind in our image and likeness” (Gen 1:26). The catechist asks: “What do you think that means?” Diego never answers immediately. After a few minutes, he says, “It means we are able to live the Maxims.” Then, he brings over the box of “The Maxims of Jesus.”[1] This material consists of twelve wooden tablets, each holding a scripture verse of Jesus’ moral announcements. Under the words of Genesis, he places some of these Maxims:

• “. . . be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Mt 5:48)
• “I give you a new commandment: love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 13:34) 
• “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mt 22:39)

While Diego has not yet studied the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he is living what it teaches: “Freedom is exercised in relationships between human beings. Every human person, created in the image of God, has the natural right to be recognized as a free and responsible being. All owe to each other this duty of respect. The right to the exercise of freedom, especially in moral and religious matters, is an inalienable requirement of the dignity of the human person” (CCC 1738).

In the atrium, Diego is “recognized as a free and responsible being” and is given the time and the space needed for him to exercise that freedom. It is his response to being called by name by his Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ, who “loves you; he gave his life to save you; and he is now living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.”[2]

Among the five essential tasks of catechesis, the 2020 Directory for Catechesis mentions “initiating into the celebrating of the mystery.”[1] This task includes teaching learners “to understand the liturgical year.”[2] In the simplest of terms, the liturgical year is the way in which the Church tells time. It unites the Western Catholic Church and provides a framework for us to connect with salvation history as we contemplate our own walk with God.

The themes we find as we experience and contemplate the liturgical year are familiar to us in many aspects of our lives. In Advent, we experience a period of darkness and a promise of light to come. Christmas is a time of joy and hope, an experience of promises fulfilled. Ordinary time is so named because of the ordinal numbering of weeks. Following the liturgical seasons of Advent and Christmas, we begin with the first Sunday of Ordinary time, then the second Sunday, and so on. So it is called ordinary because the weeks are ordered, not because this season is plain or boring. Ordinary time can connect us to those everyday moments of life. This time provides opportunities to find small joys and reflect on everyday things for which we are thankful. Lent is a time in which we might contemplate a crossroads in our lives. Here, we pause for self-examination and take stock of areas in our lives in need of reform. We do penance for those times in which we have fallen short. At Easter, we are aware of new beginnings as we celebrate the Resurrection. At Pentecost, we increase our awareness of the fire of the Holy Spirit as we open ourselves up to the movement of God in our lives.

All these themes are found in the story of salvation history that we explore through the liturgical year. They are also universal to each person in the course of daily life—we experience darkness and hope, death and new life, and look for joy in ordinary moments. What a wonderful gift we have in the liturgical year as a temporal context for our faith and a vehicle by which we can contemplate the essence of human existence. How can we pass this gift along to our youngest learners?