Franciscan at Home

In a 1978 Lenten catechesis given in Munich, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger spoke of the eucharistic mystery as an incomparable encapsulation of Christ’s transformative self-gift, whose meaning is best expressed in the act of washing his disciples’ feet: “He, who is Lord, comes down to us; he lays aside the gar

In 1947, Pope Pius XII launched (what we would call today) a “new evangelization” of the Catholic Church in his great encyclical letter Mediator Dei.[i] Seen as the Magna Carta of the modern liturgical movement, the Pope sought to use that movement as the principal means for the adaptation of the Church to a radically and rapidly changing world. After two catastrophic world wars, 1914–1918 and 1939–1945, the Church could not simply ignore the fact that the world had dramatically changed and that the Church needed to adjust accordingly.

Renewing the Liturgy

It was, therefore, necessary for the Church to ensure that its spiritual relevance continued to permeate all of modern social life. For the Holy Father, it was the Liturgy that would have the greatest transformative power upon the world in this time of great need because it is the Liturgy that bears the greatest public witness to the faith of the Church.

[i] Pius XII, Mediator Dei.

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_...

What do the films A Wrinkle in Time, Back to the Future, The Terminator, Interstellar, and Avengers: End Game have in common? They all tap into our innate fascination with time travel. If you could travel through time, where in history would you go? Who would you visit? What would you alter for the sake of the future?

These are strategic questions I use to open the lesson on the sanctification of time. With this exercise, students are first invited into the time machine of their own memory and imagination. After this discussion, I pre-teach some basic doctrinal points about time:

• Time is created by God with a beginning and an end.
• Chronos time is time that we can measure and keep track of with calendars and clocks.
• Kairos time is time from God’s point of view. It is all of time at once in one “eternal now.” Eternity.
• The Eastern concept of time is cyclical. This is how beliefs such as karma and reincarnation emerged.
• The Western concept of time is linear and it has a telos or an end. It is progressing toward the future.
• We can think of the liturgical year as a spiral that is simultaneously cyclical and linear or advancing toward an end.
• Jesus, the Eternal Word, is timeless. (CCC 525)
• The Paschal Mystery changes how we experience time.

The fourfold event of Jesus’ Suffering, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension was so impactful and powerful that it reverberates through time in every direction. It hit history so hard that it broke it in two; that which came before Christ (BC) and that which began with Christ (AD). In the Old Testament, the Paschal Mystery is prefigured through typology and prophecy. In the age of the Church, it is echoed forward in the liturgical calendar. In the sacraments, the Paschal Mystery transcends time. The sacraments are, in a way, the only known means of time travel. When we remember our story and enter into it in the sacraments, we are entering into a dimension of time that is not stuck in the past, present, or future, but envelopes all of it. This is because, unlike any other religious figure, Jesus is not just a person of history. He is alive and actively encountering his people with his life-giving, saving love.

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?

Foundational Doctrines Are the Key to Eucharistic Revival

Several years ago, a Protestant couple came to my parish RCIA to support friends who were becoming Catholic. They came every week for the entire process. After one of the sessions, they asked, very sincerely, “We believe the Catholic teaching on the Eucharist. You say those who do not profess the same belief in the Eucharist cannot receive to protect them from receiving unworthily. Since we believe, why can’t we receive?” I gently explained that to truly profess belief in the Eucharist is to believe all that is connected to the Eucharist. It is not possible to accept the Eucharist while at the same time rejecting the authority that makes the Eucharist possible. The Eucharist is a sacrament of unity.

The Church in the United States is focusing on a National Eucharistic Revival. In some sense, the RCIA process is always one of Eucharistic revival because receiving the Eucharist is the apex of the initiation process. What the couple in the opening story illustrates is that understanding, accepting, and living the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist requires full acceptance of the underlying, fundamental doctrines—not just believing Jesus is substantially present.

The premise of this article is that to convince people of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist without their acceptance of the underlying doctrines is leading them to an experience without substance. This article will briefly talk about the purpose of, problems involved with, and pathway to leading people to a full understanding of the Eucharist.

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has announced a three-year Eucharistic revival, to reawaken Catholics to the goodness, the beauty, and the truth of Jesus in the Eucharist. Each issue of the Catechetical Review, during the revival, will feature an article on the Eucharist, to empower our readers to make increasingly more meaningful contributions to the Eucharistic faith of those we teach. We hope you enjoy this article.

The great mystery of Christ’s sacrifice for us is at the heart of the Christian faith: “For Christ, our Paschal Lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor 5:7). As the Catechism explains, Jesus’ death manifests his sacrifice in two ways:

Christ’s death is both the Paschal sacrifice that accomplishes the definitive redemption of men, through “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” and the sacrifice of the New Covenant, which restores man to communion with God by reconciling him to God through the “blood of the covenant, which was poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” (CCC 613)

Thus, the two principal effects of Christ’s sacrifice are, first, to remove our sins, and, second, to restore communion with God. Transformed by this gift of divine love, we are called to imitate Jesus and “walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph 5:2). Indeed, the Church teaches that every baptized Christian participates in Christ’s sacrifice (CCC 618). We are especially joined to it in the sacrament of the Eucharist, which makes Christ’s sacrifice ever present to us (CCC 1364). The Eucharist is a sacrifice because “it re-presents (makes present) the sacrifice of the cross, because it is its memorial and because it applies its fruit” to our lives by taking away our sins and restoring communion with God (CCC 1366).

The problem is that for most people today, the biblical notion of sacrifice seems obscure. What does sacrifice in general, and Christ’s sacrifice in particular, really mean? And how do the sacraments—especially Reconciliation and the Eucharist—manifest the Lord’s sacrifice?

The best way to gain insight into these questions is to consider the symbolism of the sacrifices in the Old Testament.

For Christians, the celebration of the mystery of Christ is, on the one hand, formative and, on the other, an opportunity to offer praise and thanksgiving. This is especially true for Catholics because the events of our salvation in Christ are recalled daily, weekly, seasonally, and annually. The awareness of the liturgical cycle may not be immediately evident to the average churchgoer. Even the topic of the “liturgical year” may well evoke a range of responses. Some will shrug shoulders in indifference; others will give a blank stare of confusion; still others may light up with enthusiasm. For catechists and religious educators, the organization of the Church’s liturgical seasons offers a fruitful way of contemplating the mysteries of our salvation and a powerful means of forming Christians in the fundamental values of our faith.

An Initial Principle and the Liturgical Calendar

A few principal ideas can help bring into focus what might otherwise seem a daunting task. The first is this: If you want to know what the Church believes, pay attention to what she says when she prays. In other words, the Church herself provides the key that allows access to the meaning of the liturgical year. This occurs concretely in a liturgical ritual celebrated on the Feast of the Epiphany. Sometimes called the Epiphany Proclamation, it is known officially as “The Announcement of Easter and the Moveable Feasts.” The texts and music for it can be found in Appendix I of the Roman Missal. Without reproducing the entire text here, a summary will suffice.

On the day of Epiphany, during which Christians celebrate the manifestation of Christ to the nations as the world’s redeemer (the liturgical context is significant), the liturgy makes an explicit link between Christmas and Easter: “As we have rejoiced at the Nativity of the Lord, so we also announce the joy of the Resurrection.” These are the two pivotal events of the liturgical year. The Announcement goes on to note the most significant celebrations, the dates of which change from year to year: Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten season, the date of Easter, the Ascension, Pentecost, Corpus Christi, and the First Sunday of Advent. A previous edition of the Missal provides additional commentary:

Through the rhythms of times and seasons let us celebrate the mysteries of salvation. Let us recall the year’s culmination, the Easter Triduum of the Lord: his last supper, his crucifixion, his burial and his rising.... Each Easter, as on each Sunday, the Holy Church makes present the great and saving deed by which Christ has forever conquered sin and death.... Likewise, the pilgrim Church proclaims the Passover of Christ in the feasts of the holy Mother of God, in the feasts of the Apostles and Saints, and in the commemoration of the faithful departed. To Jesus Christ, who was, who is, and who is to come, Lord of time and history, be endless praise, for ever and ever.[1]

The Church celebrates in time the great mysteries of human redemption. Careful attention to the rhythms of the liturgical calendar can help us to honor the sacrality of time and notice how God works our salvation through the different seasons.

A first point that emerges from this liturgical proclamation can be seen in the structure of the calendar. The Paschal Mystery (Easter) is central to everything Christians do, central to the way we live. That conviction is made visible, sensible, in the unfolding of the liturgical year with each season’s emphasis on one aspect or other of the mystery of salvation. A second, no less important, point is that every Sunday is a remembrance of the Lord’s Day, the Resurrection. The richness of Sunday is beautifully developed by Pope St. John Paul II’s 1998 Apostolic Letter Dies Domini (On Keeping the Lord’s Day Holy), in which he reflects on five aspects of the first day of the week.[2] A familiarity with these can be a tremendous source for an educator’s reflection on the liturgy.

Most Catholic parents are so far removed from a rich Catholic culture that living a liturgical season—let alone the liturgical year—can seem impossible.

“The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everyone was asleep his enemy came and sowed weeds all through the wheat, and then went off” (Mt 13:24–25).<