Franciscan at Home

https://pixabay.com/photos/teacher-learning-school-teaching-4784916/The religious identity of students enrolled in Catholic schools is increasingly diverse. In most classrooms today, it is common to find students who identify themselves as Catholic, those who practice other religions, and some who are not religious. It goes without saying that a Catholic school would want all of its students, regardless of their religious orientation, to feel included in the school community. However, this goal must be achieved in a way that does not compromise the school’s ability to fulfill its distinct mission of educating, evangelizing, and catechizing its students. What, then, is the best approach for welcoming members of the school community who are not Catholic, while simultaneously catechizing those who are receptive to the faith?

Some schools, in an effort to welcome non-Catholic students, choose to “neutralize” the Catholic aspects of their school. They downplay the school’s Catholicity by reducing its visible signs on their website (e.g., removing overt references to its history). They also remove statues, crucifixes, and other religious art from public spaces and relocate them to private ones. Because requiring Catholic theology classes might appear to proselytize non-Catholic students, these schools adjust their curricula to be more flexible and open to individual differences. Participation in courses that address Catholic doctrine is made optional, or they adopt a “religious studies” approach that presents Catholicism within the broader context of world religions. In these schools the number of shared, faith-based events (e.g., Mass, Confession, and retreats) may be reduced or also made optional. 

Admittedly, these efforts are likely to minimize the discomfort a non-Catholic might feel from certain aspects of a Catholic school experience. It makes sense that such actions would reduce the times when a student might confront concepts she does not understand, be invited to consider traditions that are different than her own, and be required to attend rituals in which she is unable to fully participate. Although the intentions behind these “neutralizing” actions might be considered good, their effect is not neutral and can be harmful.

This article explores chapters 7-8 of the Directory for Catechesis.

Introduction and Context

It is now twenty-three years since I eagerly read the last General Directory for Catechesis and made efforts to implement its teachings within the catechetical programs in some of the Catholic schools in Australia. Much has changed in our world since 1997, and the new Directory for Catechesis has achieved an outstanding synthesis of what was sound and helpful in the earlier document, while taking us forward with new and profound insights for today. In this article, l will be addressing the essential contents of chapters seven and eight of the Directory, namely: “Methodology in Catechesis” and “Catechesis in the Lives of Persons.” Before doing so, however, I would like to frame my comments within the context of the Directory as a whole. Firstly, it is essential to understand that catechesis must now take place in a world overwhelmingly influenced by globalization and the digital culture. According to the Directory, there are advantages and disadvantages associated with both phenomena. The danger associated with globalization is the tendency towards international standardization, which puts pressure on local cultures. With regard to digital culture, there is an implicit tendency towards a “one size fits all” approach implicit in digital culture, which undermines an essential anthropological truth.[1] We must always keep in mind that every person is unique and unrepeatable.

It seems to me that there are three essential insights running through the document which could perhaps be summed up in three words: accompaniment, kerygma, and mystagogy. All of these themes appear multiple times in the document.

The emphasis on kerygma takes up a focus that began to appear strongly in Evangelii Gaudium, which had already taught that “all Christian formation consists of entering more deeply into the kerygma.”[2] It was also in this 2013 document that we were given a simple definition: “Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.”[3] The Directory is insistent that in the initial stages of evangelization the primary focus should be on making present and announcing Jesus Christ. Moreover, at every step of the way, there can be no true evangelization if the name and teaching of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” are not proclaimed.[4]

Mystagogy, the Directory reminds us, is a liturgical catechesis highlighting the way in which the liturgy makes present the mysteries revealed in the Scriptures. It introduces us to the living experience of the Christian community, the true setting of the life of faith. It is a progressive and dynamic process, rich in signs and expressions and beneficial for the integration of every dimension of the person (DC 2). The emphasis on mystagogy has been regarded as foundational for catechesis since the publication of the Apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis in 2007.

Finally, those familiar with the work of Pope Francis will not be surprised with the highlighting of accompaniment. This notion occurs in the Directory more than any other. It acknowledges the pastoral difficulties being experienced at this time by so many in our world. We are asked to emphasize the mercy and love of God, who seeks out the lost and the lonely in our world.

Methodology in Catechesis

I have now spent more than thirty years thinking about issues of catechetical methodology, making this a significant component of my doctoral, post-doctoral, and practical work. I wish to affirm that in this chapter the Directory has drawn together all of the best practices of which I am currently aware in this field. The document soundly affirms that there can be no single method in catechesis—one size certainly does not fit all. What is more, it is made clear that catechesis is an event of grace, brought about by the word of God within the experience of the person. At the same time, it is grounded in an authentic Christian anthropology and guided by the demands of the Gospel (see DC 195). The example of the teaching of Jesus in the parables is offered as the best example of catechesis in action. In the parables, the same concrete and human image is offered to everyone, but the meaning is left to unfold in accordance with the work of the Holy Spirit in each person in their own time.

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Excerpts from two testimonies.

“Let the Children Come to Me” (Mt 19:14)

I have not been a catechist for a very long time; however, I was recently privileged to see how the Word of God calls to little children. The week’s lesson was entitled “The Greatest Gift of All” and the subject was the Holy Eucharist. My student is my seven-year-old son, who is as busy as all seven-year-olds are. Most of what I teach seems to go in one ear and out the other because on any given day, when asked what he learned that day, my son inevitably replies with a very charming smile, “I forget,” and immediately launches into an in-depth explanation of whatever he is building out of Legos. I was worried about presenting this lesson to my son because this was his first formal encounter with the Holy Eucharist in our catechetical lessons. I did not want to understate this truly greatest gift of all, but I was unsure if he would understand the Holy Eucharist—or even pay attention.

....

Witness to Christ

I have often wondered whether what I am teaching to my students is getting through. As a training instructor for the Secret Service it was easy enough to tell: successful practical exercises, making the correct decisions, shoot or don’t shoot, pass or fail. But, in teaching the faith, there is no surety. Even if the students pass a test, has it deepened their relationship with Christ? However, occasionally God has provided a glimpse at how, through me, he has changed lives.

 I am in my second year as a religion teacher at John Paul the Great Catholic High School—still a “rookie” according to some of my associates. I have actually been in the classroom for over 10 years, though, training new recruits for the Secret Service. The difference: the recruits always wanted to be in my class.

Last year I learned a lesson that will stay with me for the rest of my high school teaching career....

Recently, I spoke with a graduate student in one of my courses on Catholic schools. Because she is not a religion teacher, she struggled to understand how she could carry out the mission of Catholic education. This faith-filled woman knew she was serving the Lord by fulfilling her duties conscientiously, but she did not recognize how her work could foster her students’ spiritual lives. She needed a vision for carrying out her educational activities in a way that leads her students to God. I illustrated for her how she could teach her subject area so that her students learned from it more about who God is and how He wants us to live. By teaching this way, I told her, they could not only prepare for the next grade level or their future job but they could also live in greater union with God and in preparation for Heaven. Her teaching, I explained, had the potential to impact students eternally. When she heard this she exclaimed, “You make me sound important!” We ended our call with her excited to tackle her upcoming tasks with this entirely new focus.

Unfortunately, this woman is not unique or even unusual among Catholic educators. Typically formed by secular educational programs that do not address the spiritual dimension of education, Catholic educators find themselves at a loss as to how they are to help students cultivate their relationship with God or recognize the eternal purpose to their studies. When teachers understand how to carry out their teaching duties with a “supernatural vision,” they experience excitement about enriching their students’ lives beyond just the next 70-odd years.[1] They begin to sense their value and importance to the Catholic educational endeavor. The result is a more effective mission implementation that bears fruit in time and eternity.

The Goal of a Catholic Education

Above all else, a Catholic education directs students to God. A Catholic education resembles a civic education by providing an integral formation for students, addressing not just the intellectual, but also the social, emotional, and (to some extent) physical growth of its students.[2] But unlike secular education, every Catholic educational effort should begin and end in Christ, with Gospel principles serving as educational norms.[3] This orientation directs students to their ultimate goal: eternal communion with God. In short, a Catholic education should help students get to heaven. It forms the student spiritually, teaching them to know God ever better, to have and develop a relationship with him, to recognize him in everything, to live so as to become closer to him and more like him—all so that they can spend eternity in a loving, blissful union with him.

A Catholic school can explicitly orient to God the myriad of activities that make up “school.” For this reason, it can be said that all teachers in Catholic schools are catechists. It can feel daunting to teachers who do not teach religion to hear that they are expected to be catechists because they believe they are expected to answer doctrinal questions that are beyond their capability. Certainly the better the teacher can accurately respond to doctrinal questions the greater the benefit to the students. But a teacher does not need a degree in theology to carry out teaching responsibilities with the intention that those activities form students to live as disciples of Jesus. The very activities that constitute the nature of a school, when imbued with a focus on the student’s eternal destiny, form and prepare the student for that destiny.

Evangelization is a primary function of Catholic schools. Although they provide quality education in a variety of subject areas, as agents of the Church, they share the larger mission of the Church: forming disciples of Jesus Christ. Catholic schools should and must be more than public schools that also happen to have religion classes. Speaking about the role of the Catholic school, the Vatican II Declaration on Christian Education, Gravissimum Educationis states, “But its proper function is to create for the school community a special atmosphere animated by the Gospel spirit of freedom and charity, to help youth grow according to the new creatures they were made through baptism as they develop their own personalities, and finally to order the whole of human culture to the news of salvation so that the knowledge the students gradually acquire of the world, life and man is illumined by faith” (8). A key role of the Catholic school, then, is as an agent of evangelization.

Schools can live out their mission to evangelize in a number of practical ways, including evangelizing students, evangelizing the family, and preparing students and families to evangelize the community.

Catholic Schools Evangelize the Student

Providing religious education is a key priority in the Catholic school, but religious education must be different than education in mathematics, science, history, or other subjects. If our objective is to form disciples, the Catholic Faith cannot be simply approached intellectually. Religious education in the Catholic school must be an immersive and formative experience that begins with an encounter with Jesus Christ through the proclamation of the kerygma.

Knowing Jesus is different from simply “knowing about” him. As we draw closer to Jesus, our lives are changed—we find the joy of becoming who we were made to be, we are challenged, and we are called to places we might have never gone before. A Christocentric catechesis—one that focuses on the person of Jesus Christ—facilitates an environment in which learners can get to know Jesus and draw closer to him.

Help learners become acquainted with the Gospels, particularly the Paschal Mystery: Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. Periodically choose a passage from the Gospels that is developmentally appropriate for your learners, both in length and content. Invite your learners to relax, close their eyes, and imagine themselves somewhere within the Gospel story. After meditating on the Gospel passage, invite learners to reflect on their experience. What did they hear Jesus saying to them, and how does it connect with their lives today?

In Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, we are taught that “all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity” (40). If wit and brevity are more your speed, perhaps Mother Angelica said it better: “if you’re breathing and you’ve got two legs, you’re called to holiness.”[1] This is an important thing for every catechist to remember, especially on days when students seem extra bitter, extra ornery, and extra closed-minded. God still loves each of them profoundly and intimately, and he wants to be in relationship with them.

One of the best ways to steer students in the right direction is to bring them to the Sacrament of Confession. After all, the whole power of this sacrament “consists in restoring us to God’s grace and joining us with him in an intimate friendship” (CCC 1468). However, those of us who are parents and teachers—especially of teenagers—know that this sacrament is not as frequently sought out as it ought to be. How can we change that? Here are three brief but hopefully effective strategies to integrating sacramental confession into the life of your high school.

Do You Believe in Me or Not?

When I was a student teacher of Grade 12 Philosophy Religion and Grade 11 World Religions classes, I felt inspired to have the students in both classes do an assignment that would involve them spending time before the Blessed Sacrament. The emphasis for the Philosophy class was more on whether or not they can know God exists, as we were covering St. Thomas Aquinas’ Five Proofs for the Existence of God at the time. For the World Religions class, the emphasis was more on communicating with God, as we were covering meditation. The students then had to journal everyday, indicating what they thought about the exercise and what their experiences were. I emphasized the fact that I wanted them to be honest with me and not just tell me what I wanted to hear.

I have to admit that I was reluctant at first to have the students do this assignment, because I was afraid that if nothing happened it would just confirm their doubts about God’s existence or that he is a personal God who cares about them. I suddenly felt God nudge me with this very gentle rebuke, “Do you really believe I am present in the Eucharist or not?”

At the beginning of my second year of teaching religion in a Catholic high school, I began prompting my students in each lesson with a question that helped them apply that lesson to their own life circumstances. One day, in the middle of a lesson on original sin, I asked the students to write a letter to Jesus telling him what the “forbidden fruit” was in their lives and asking his help to resist it. Because students knew I would be collecting and reading their responses, I did not anticipate anything very serious. I was surprised, therefore, when “Monica” wrote that her forbidden fruit was alcohol. I took her paper to the guidance counselor, who directed me to tell Monica that the counselor would meet with her to help her with this struggle. When I next saw Monica, I passed along this message, awkwardly adding that I thought she was a great girl, and I had spoken to the guidance counselor because I wanted her to be free to receive everything God had for her. “Ok,” she said, and left the room, leaving me convinced I had lost her trust and consequently all hope of bringing her to Jesus. To my astonishment, Monica later asked me to be her Confirmation sponsor. In the course of our sponsor-confirmand meetings, I learned that Monica’s mother was an alcoholic, and Monica was struggling to cope. Because of the school’s intervention, Monica developed the resolve to resist these and other temptations. She gradually became more serious about her faith, more committed to Jesus and to Mass attendance, more consistent in living out what she learned in the classroom.

Monica’s response to this prompt was not an isolated self-disclosure. Over the years, students responded to these kinds of prompts with stories of their alcohol or drug use, sexual activity, suicidal tendencies, self-harm, guilt over believing they caused the death of a schoolmate or friend, as well as more “typical” examples of fallen human selfishness. These and other challenging experiences, chosen or inadvertent, extraordinary or mundane, often hindered their ability to believe in God, trust him, follow him. They illustrated, for me, an important reason why “many…adolescents who have been baptized and been given a systematic catechesis and the sacraments still remain hesitant for a long time about committing their whole lives to Jesus Christ.”[1] Monica taught me that I could more effectively prompt my students to commit themselves to Jesus if I could help them recognize the place they needed him most, which often meant facing their own painful life situations in the light of truth. Day in and day out, the classroom presented me with wonderful opportunities to shine that light, for the sake of helping them begin and grow in intimacy with Jesus.

The Evangelistic Mission of the Catholic School

The Catholic Church views the Catholic school as a critically important place of evangelization. Consider the document The Catholic School, promulgated by the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education in 1977:

Evangelization is, therefore, the mission of the Church[2]…To carry out her saving mission…[the Church] establishes her own schools because she considers them as a privileged means of promoting the formation of the whole man.[3] The Catholic school forms part of the saving mission of the Church, especially for education in the faith.[4]

In three consecutive paragraphs, the Congregation makes it clear that the Catholic school exists primarily for the purpose of evangelizing, that is, for proclaiming the Gospel message to students and for training them to live according to that message.[5] This is not proselytizing or coercion, which would be contrary to the students’ intellectual development and free will.[6] Rather, it is fulfilling the very purpose of a school, which is to form the whole person: mind, body, heart, soul, and spirit.[7] The student is an embodied person who has been given intellect and free will to use to spend eternity with God; therefore, education is meant to offer formation of that intellect and will not just for the sake of getting a good job (though that is important), but for the sake of living this life in such a way as to get to heaven. The very nature of a school makes the Catholic school a genuine instrument of the Church to evangelize.[8]

By definition, Catholic schools are an extension of the Church’s saving mission of evangelization, with a special responsibility to provide “a privileged environment for the complete formation of her members” within that context.[1] That “complete formation” must have as its goal a lively and enlivening relationship with Christ specifically in the Eucharist, around which all apostolic work and even the other sacraments are centered (CCC 1324). Turning that belief into practice is one of the most critical activities in which a Catholic school must engage if it is to fulfill its own identity within the larger context of the Church’s mission.

Evangelization and the Eucharist
The Church understands evangelization and the Eucharist to be mutually coefficient. Evangelization is directed in a very real way towards the Eucharist, and the Eucharist is what unleashes the spiritual energies upon which the fullness of evangelization depends.[2] They support and feed each other, and where one is absent, the other will eventually struggle and fail, or at the least be a pale shadow of what it should be.

This means that the Eucharist must have a privileged role in the life, activity, and identity of every Catholic school. Spiritual formation should be centered on the Eucharist, spiritual programs should revolve around it, and catechesis specially devoted to it must have a priority; but, above all, evangelization should be specially directed toward it, and any activities centered around the Eucharist should be in some way linked with evangelization as well.