Franciscan at Home

In his Apostolic Letter, Porta Fidei, published in October last year, Pope Benedict XVI declared that a Year of Faith will start for Catholics on 11 October 2012, the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The Year will end on 24 November 2013, on the Feast of Christ the King. The Pope’s intention is that these months be used to deepen our understanding of the truth that the foundation of Christian faith is a continuing encounter with Jesus Christ, who ‘gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.’

The Year of Faith will also provide the faithful with an additional (and, perhaps, an unexpected) task, namely, to respond more effectively to the increasing attacks of secularist critics on religious liberty and freedom of conscience. This task calls for adequate preparation. What is neither known nor understood cannot be taught or defended. Seeking to bear faithful witness to the Catholic Faith, personally and unapologetically in public, is not easy, but today the Faith needs informed advocacy as never before. There will have to be determined efforts in schools and parishes to improve catechesis.

In his Apostolic Letter, Porta Fidei, published in October last year, Pope Benedict XVI declared that a Year of Faith will start for Catholics on 11 October 2012, the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The Year will end on 24 November 2013, on the Feast of Christ the King. The Pope’s intention is that these months be used to deepen our understanding of the truth that the foundation of Christian faith is a continuing encounter with Jesus Christ, who ‘gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.’

The Year of Faith will also provide the faithful with an additional (and, perhaps, an unexpected) task, namely, to respond more effectively to the increasing attacks of secularist critics on religious liberty and freedom of conscience. This task calls for adequate preparation. What is neither known nor understood cannot be taught or defended. Seeking to bear faithful witness to the Catholic Faith, personally and unapologetically in public, is not easy, but today the Faith needs informed advocacy as never before. There will have to be determined efforts in schools and parishes to improve catechesis.

One of the preoccupations of the catechetical movement since the Second Vatican Council has been for the Church’s faith to be seen as clearly ‘relevant’; catechesis must be seen to address our ‘real needs’. And one might think that the urgency with which the Church reiterates today the need for a ‘new evangelisation’ is a further reinforcement of such a message. The Church, it might be thought, is asking us to focus upon understanding what our culture and society today most need; and to do this she must seek ‘new methods’ and must do so with a new ardour and commitment.

There is, of course, a sense in which we can affirm this desire for ‘relevance’. And it is also of course true that catechesis must always seek to announce the Gospel in a manner that engages our deepest needs. Nonetheless, the call to ‘relevance’ can easily be misdirected as a request that the Church’s attention focus upon relevance for me. I want the Church to concentrate upon me - upon my wishes, my aspirations, my hopes and my desires. Let me put the point in a way that sounds less self-centred: we understand the renewal of catechesis to be a call to focus upon us – upon our community and its wishes, desires and aspirations. Translated in this way, then, the call to a ‘Catechesis of Relevance’ means, in effect, ‘I want the Catechism to be about me and about our community.’

If this is how we understand the task of catechesis today, then the Catechism of the Catholic Church will be found to be frustratingly disappointing. For the Catechism is primary about God. ‘God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself’ opens the first paragraph of the text and the closing paragraphs climax upon the glory of the God who will be ‘all in all’. God is the alpha and the omega of the Catechism. He is the beginning, the end, and the centre.

‘See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair is, hair of head numbered.’

So often I find I can turn for inspiration for my catechesis to Gerard Manley Hopkins! The wonderful words quoted above are taken from a much-loved catechet
ical poem entitled The Golden Echo. Here we see mirrored the words from the Gospel of St. Luke, with Jesus reminding us to trust in the Father’s providence, and reassuring us that the Father will never forget us:

‘Why every hair on your head has been counted. There is no need to be afraid; you are worth more than hundreds of sparrows.’ (Lk.12:6-7)

The psalms also we can draw upon as an inspiration for catechesis. The psalms embrace the whole of creation. To pray the psalms is not only to recall the saving events of the past, but also to reach out far into the future, even as far as the end of time (cf CCC 2586). The psalms reflect God’s great deeds and also human experience in both sickness and health. Through our study of the psalms, we can find resources for a catechesis on the relationship that God has with the sick and elderly.

Alan Schreck begins his exposition of John Paul’s great apostolic exhortation on catechesis.

It is humbling to write an article for The Sower, a foremost catechetical journal, on one of the central documents in this field: Pope John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation On Catechesis in Our Time (Catechesi Tradendae Oct. 16, 1979). It is valuable to catechists frequently to go back to the ‘sources’ the Church has provided that articulate the principles and guide the practice of this critical work of the Church. Catechesi Tradendae begins by reminding us that Jesus Christ himself entrusted the Church with this essential task of catechesis, which includes, first, making disciples (helping people to believe that Jesus is the Son of God) and secondly, educating and instructing them in Christ’s life (CT 1).

Even though this was one of the earliest of John Paul II’s papal documents, it is the fruit of an effort than spanned four pontificates: that of Bl. John XXIII who called Vatican II to express and teach the Faith to people of our time; Paul VI, who called the fourth synod of Bishops in Oct, 1977 on the topic of catechesis; John Paul I, a master catechist who was preparing to write this document before his death, and John Paul II, who was a participant in the Synod on catechesis. Pope John Paul II desired that this document ‘should strengthen the solidity of the faith and of Christian living’ (CT 4).

‘On the Spot’ aims to highlight some of the complex positions, questions and comments experienced by Catechists, teachers and parents. It tries to outline the knowledge necessary to be faithful to Church teaching and which will best help those we teach who call us to account for the hope that is in us. This time we look at how we convey a sense of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

What we do will usually leave a firmer, longer-lasting and deeper impression on our children than what we say. This is a universal and timeless fact. Children learn how to behave, how to speak, dress, relate to others, to drink, smoke and take drugs, or to be selfless workers for peace and justice, by observing other people, not always consciously.

Why would it be different in faith and worship? If children observe adults and older children keeping silence in church, as much as possible, genuflecting before the Tabernacle, kneeling at the Consecration, bowing or kneeling when the Blessed Sacrament is taken from the Church to the sick at the end of Mass, escorted by servers and candles, they will absorb an awe and respect for the Real Presence long before they have any understanding of it. Understanding doesn’t need to precede action; we love and trust our parents long before we understand who they are and why they love us.

If, on the other hand, children are allowed to run free in the church as if it were a village hall, if they hear adults and older children laughing and talking freely, paying no attention to the Presence of Christ, even attending concerts and other events in the church where the participants stand with their backs to the Blessed Sacrament, they are not simply learning disrespect. They are in simple ignorance of what they are failing to do - to give honour and recognition to the Presence among us of our Creator and Redeemer.

So our own actions around the Blessed Sacrament are of great importance.

'On the Spot' aims to highlight some of the complex positions, questions and comments experienced by Catechists, teachers and parents. It tries to outline the knowledge necessary to be faithful to Church teaching and which will best help those we teach who call us to account for the hope that is in us. [cf I Peter 3:15] Here we consider how we explain to those we teach what it means to be a human person and that this can only be built upon the understanding that we are made in the image and likeness of God.

‘Of all visible creatures only man is able to know and love his creator. He is the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake, and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life. It was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity.’ (CCC 356)

Catechising strongly, simply and clearly about the identity of the human person is crucial for the whole work of transmitting the faith. If this area of our teaching is shaky or insecure many areas of the faith are affected. And it is precisely in this area, of how we understand what it is to be a person, that we face some of the greatest challenges as catechists! Let me give an example. A friend, having successfully conceived a child through IVF, told me cheerfully that she had given permission for the remaining fertilised egg to be ‘used for research’. “After all,” she said, “it’s not a person.”

Our children are growing up in a world which feeds them a very inadequate notion of what it means to be human. At one level, they are certainly presented with a biological understanding of the human being; that which distinguishes us from other species and allows us to be categorised as human rather than canine, feline or bovine. It might appear that this should be our starting point for catechesis on the human person, for the physical, the biological, the visible is what we have most obviously in front of us to work with. Educational advice is to begin where the child (or adult learner) actually is, and so for learning to be experience-based.

In this new series Josephine Bredon looks at some of the key language we use in transmitting faith.

Command, Mandate, Precept, Authority

This is a new mini-series on words, words that have an often-forgotten richness of meaning, a richness which, once known, deepens and clarifies the meaning of the faith we thought we knew. Knowing the ‘language of faith’ is of very great benefit for catechists and is both important and fascinating for every Catholic.

The idea of the series sprang from a conversation about a phrase in the new translation of the missal. Just before the Lord’s prayer the priest says: ‘at the Saviour’s command …’. Someone asked me, ‘Why has the Church chosen the distasteful word ‘command’? Is it not out of love that Christ gave us the Lord’s prayer?’ ‘What a shame’, many say, ‘that the Church has reverted to the authoritarian word ‘command’.’

It is not common to catechize about our understanding of the human person as a microcosm of creation, but this is nevertheless what the Church teaches. The diagram opposite brings out, I hope, the main features of the Church’s teaching.

There are three clear ‘orders‘ in the created world: material beings, human beings and spiritual beings. Material beings are wholly material and spiritual beings are wholly spiritual. The material world is not the same as the spiritual world. Material beings have very different characteristics from spiritual beings. Material beings are measurable, whereas spiritual beings have no matter that can be measured. Spiritual beings are not bound by time and space as material beings are, though they do operate in time and space. People often forget that not only the material world, but the spiritual world of angels, also, is created; it is not divine. Angels and devils are created beings just as stars and cats are created. These, of course, are the ‘visible and invisible’ created by God that we speak of in the Creed.

These two ‘orders of reality’, the material and the spiritual, are easier to describe than human beings. Human beings are not half material and half spiritual; they are not matter and spirit mixed up, or stirred well together. ‘The human person, created in the image of God, is at once corporeal and material’ (CCC 362).

Study chart included with this article.

In this lead article, Sr Jane Dominic Laurel expounds the ways in which an anthropological and phenomenological approach to Catechesis can be found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Recently, when traveling in an English-speaking country, I encountered some graffiti on a department store wall: it was a rather accurate re-rendering of Edward Munch’s “The Scream” with the words “insignificant existence” scratched beside it. Later, at a lovely group dinner in an Italian restaurant, a president of an American Catholic college was describing a television commercial which he found incredibly arrogant. In the commercial, there was a sea of people. Emerging from the vast crowd, one man held up a sign that read, “I AM.” Another man did the same. Then another. The president remarked, “What audacity—to claim the name of God for themselves.”

But, all the while, Gaudium et Spes had already characterized the situation of modern man so well: “But what is man? He has put forward, and continues to put forward, many views about himself, views that are divergent and even contradictory. Often, he either sets himself up as the absolute measure of all things, or debases himself to the point of despair. Hence, his doubt and his anguish. The Church is keenly sensitive to these difficulties. Enlightened by divine revelation she can offer a solution to them by which the true state of man may be outlined, his weakness explained, in such a way that at the same time his dignity and his vocation may be perceived in their true light.”[i]

The spirit of this passage of the Conciliar document can be perceived in the Catechism of the Catholic Church as well as in its Compendium. It addresses the human person by appealing to that part of his experience that speaks of his transcendence and his utter mystery. It articulates for him his very thoughts, desires, and even emotions—and then provides the most convincing and coherent explanation for their existence. Hence, we can see that this approach is anthropological; it begins with the human person, the one for whom all catechesis exists. This approach is also phenomenological; it draws upon the human person’s experiences—experiences through which, as Augustine would say to the God who fashioned and planned those experiences, “You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness.”[ii] This catechesis invites every human person to see how God speaks and, indeed, has already been speaking through his or her experience.

As a catechist bringing the message of the God of Jesus Christ to others, perhaps it would occur to me to start with the Creed. The first words are “I believe in God.”

Following William Newton's article, in the last issue of The Sower, explaining Blessed John Paul II's encyclical, Familiaris Consortio, he now discusses the pope's understanding of the value of the person, presenting the central ideas in his theology of the body.

We begin with a simple and profound question: what is the purpose and meaning of human life? The answer that John Paul II gives to this question is remarkably simple. The goal of human life is to make a gift of oneself for the sake of communion. Gift and communion: these are the hermeneutical keys through which Blessed John Paul II viewed the world. In effect, he says, that at the end of your life, it will be judged to have been a success or a failure not on the basis of fame, wealth, or pleasure; but on the basis of whether you took the opportunity to make a gift of yourself to others and whether or not you achieved profound communion with others and with God.

If you are not acquainted with the thought of John Paul II, the phrase ‘gift of self’ might strike you as unusual; and even if you are, it can remain a bit nebulous. So let us look at this this.

In many ways, ‘gift of self’ is synonymous with ‘love’. Of course, the word ‘love’ is used analogously for a whole range of realities that come under the umbrella of ‘desiring the good for someone’. Here is not the place to draw all the distinctions, but in Love and Responsibility, Karol Wojtyla does just that and concludes that ‘a total gift of self’ or ‘betrothed love’ is the highest possible form of love.