Franciscan at Home

If you walked into your local grocery store and asked the average person in America, “What does the Catholic Church stand for?” what would be the response? Many would focus on the moral issues: “The Catholic Church is against abortion, against contraception, and against ‘gay marriage.’” Almost no one would say: “The Catholic Church stands for God who is love and who created us out of love; who invites us to share in his love; who sent his Son to die for us out of love; and who wants to forgive us no matter what we’ve done and heal us so that we can be happy in this life and with him forever in heaven.” God’s love and mercy are at the very heart of the Gospel; yet, most people, even many Catholics, don’t know this central point of our faith. This is one reason that Pope Francis has called for the extraordinary Jubilee called “The Year of Mercy.” The Priority of Mercy Pope Francis is driven by a pressing desire to bring God’s mercy to “the outermost fringes of society.”[1] Like Christ, whose public ministry was marked by his constant search for the weak, suffering, and lost souls in his day, Pope Francis says that the Church should be continually going out to touch as many people as possible with God’s mercy. “How much I desire that the year to come will be steeped in mercy, so that we can go out to every man and woman, bringing the goodness and tenderness of God! May the balm of mercy reach everyone, both believers and those far away, as a sign that the Kingdom of God is already present in our midst!”[2] How effective are we as witnesses to God’s mercy? We might hold to the right doctrines, right liturgical practices, and right moral principles, but how much do people encounter God’s loving mercy in us and in our parishes, apostolates, or individual lives?

When it comes to the media, most of us sense a problem, but what is it? Is media itself the problem? Or is the problem limited to the sometimes objectionable content it can convey, such as gratuitous violence and unchastity? Or is media use in moderation fine and only a lack of moderation that causes a problem? Also, how do we, as Christians, discern the best ways to engage media technology? How are we forming ourselves, our loved ones, and those we influence in the everyday application and consumption of new media? In this article we will examine some core principles to apply in our stewardship of these “gifts of God.”

El número sorprendente de Bautismos, Primeras Comuniones y Confirmaciones entre los hispanos / latinos en las parroquias católicas a lo largo y ancho de los Estados Unidos es quizás la declaración más elocuente acerca de su emergencia como población mayoritaria dentro de la Iglesia Católica de los Estados Unidos. De hecho, según el Centro para la Investigación Aplicada al Apostolado (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate - CARA), el 54% de los católicos que nacieron después de 1982 son hispanos / latinos. Otro número sorprendente es que solo el 3% de los niños hispanos / latinos asisten a escuelas católicas. Puesto que las escuelas católicas puedan ser el medio más efectivo para generar una identidad y liderazgo católicos, este bajo porcentaje nos conduce a la pregunta: ¿Hoy en día, la Iglesia en los Estados Unidos, ¿cómo transmite la fe al segmento más grande de su población?

La respuesta corta a esta pregunta reside en los ministerios catequéticos que se efectúan en las más de cinco mil parroquias donde se celebra la Liturgia dominical en español. En su gran mayoría, éstas son las parroquias donde los hispanos / latinos más se sienten en casa y donde los niños reciben su Bautismo, Primera Comunión y Confirmación. La organización de los ministerios catequéticos varía en estas parroquias. Algunas de las diferencias incluyen los requisitos del programa, los libros que se utilizan, los costos y la duración del programa - variaciones que pueden influenciar la decisión de las familias en elegir el programa catequético parroquial en el cual inscribir a sus hijos.

Culture exercises immense influence in how we live. Culture shapes our relationships, work, leisure, and ultimately our convictions about what is most important to us. Catechizing for cultural impact involves the extensive effort, as Pope Francis explains, of “translating the gift of God into [one’s] own life.”[i] Catechesis aims at concretizing a person’s faith convictions into a way of life, without which these convictions will remain incomplete. As Pope St. John Paul II made clear: “The synthesis between culture and faith is not only a demand of culture, but also of faith… A faith that does not become culture is not fully accepted, not entirely thought out, not faithfully lived.”[ii] Drawing upon the need for this synthesis of faith and culture, I would like to suggest four ways in which catechesis can help form a Christian way of life. This can happen by: 1) inviting a response or choice to live differently, 2) forming patterns of prayer, 3) helping those being catechized to develop virtuous habits to live out the faith, and 4) looking to the saints and members of our own communities for inspiration and direction. In the catechumenal model, we can see the impetus for Christians to form a new way of life in the redditio, which follows the imparting of the Creed (the traditio) in the catechumenal process. The General Directory for Catechesis (GDC) recognizes that the redditio consists not only in the memorization and recitation of the Creed, but overflows into “the response of the subject during the catechetical journey and subsequently in life.”[iii] In response to the gift of faith, one must render one’s entire life back to God, ordering all things to him.

Geek culture is a true culture. “Geeks”—as I am applying the term—are not simply a group of people who love sci-fi, fantasy, or horror genre media; rather geek culture represents a social grouping of those who make that love a major part of their identity and community formation.

Some members of geek culture are not open to the Gospel because they perceive a hostility and rejection by the Christian community. Yet this culture expresses aesthetic and psychological needs that can only be fulfilled in the Catholic faith. Geeks not only belong in the Church, as all belong in the Church, but the Church itself can be seen as the apotheosis of geek culture.

Some geeks feel alienated because they may be socially awkward and different, and are drawn to genre media because it often expresses profound alienation and loneliness. Another reason geeks can feel isolated is that their genre media reinforce their social isolation by making it into a common identity-point. To remedy this sense of isolation, they will look for a community of people with similar speculative media-passion and a similar sense of alienation. If geeks see the Church as a manifestation of that exclusionary mainstream culture, they will be very difficult to evangelize.

The remarkable number of Baptisms, First Communions, and Confirmations among Hispanics/Latinos in Catholic parishes across the nation is perhaps the most eloquent statement about their emergence as a majority population within the Catholic Church in the United States.

The idea that “cultural capital,” in the sense of cultivated dispositions of mind and body, might play a role in catechesis is often resisted from two extreme positions. First, there are those who argue that faith formation is merely propositional. We simply need to teach people the Catechism. This we might call the opposition from the right. Second, there are those who instinctively tie the concept of “cultural capital” to the class-war and are aggressively hostile to the idea that some cultures and what we call “cultural formation” might be superior to others. This we might call the opposition from the left. It is often found in liberation theology circles where, for example, knowledge of more than one language or an ability to play a musical instrument, is associated with having had a bourgeois education.
In my first book Culture and the Thomist Tradition,[i] I was critical of the opposition from the right and did not really address the opposition from the left because I thought that battle had been won by Josef Ratzinger in the 1980s. The central principle of my book, which might be called a synthesis of the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre with the theology of Josef Ratzinger, is that if you want to catechize people, you need to give them an experience of a fully functional Catholic culture and not merely present them with doctrinal propositions (though these are important and have their place) and certainly not try to market the Catholic faith to them by transposing it into the idioms and practices of contemporary popular culture. Ratzinger described the latter practice, which was hugely popular in the 1960s and 70s and has been making a come-back among liberation theologians, as treating the Church as if it were a haberdashery shop with its windows needing to be re-dressed and decorated with each passing fashion season. What MacIntyre and Ratzinger have both argued, in different ways, is that the ethos of Christian institutions needs to be governed by practices that embody a Christian logic or meaning. If you feed people doctrine but the whole realm of praxis is running on a different logic (for example, a utilitarian logic or an economic rationalist logic), then the Holy Spirit can’t breathe, grace is suffocated, because there is a logical disjunction between the theory and the practice. God created us in such a way that even a five-year-old can sense that something is not quite adding up, even if the five-year-old is unable to explain the problem in terms of the relationship between logos and ethos. In theological language distinctions are often made between the “logos of love” (which is inherently Christian) and the logos of the machine (which is inherently atheistic). So, a preliminary MacIntyrean point is that if you want to catechize people it helps to expose them to a milieu where the set of social practices are running on the logos of love.

Angelo Cardinal Scola wrote of conversion to Christ and conversion to reality.[1] Just as conversion opens our eyes to the ugliness of sin and the beauty of grace, so it overflows in opening our hearts to the many and various splendours of creation.

The significance of place, geography and archaeology were subjects, I have to confess, that I accepted in principle—but, you might say, without enthusiasm and insight. In this brief reflection on a recent visit to the Holy Land, I want to consider the catechesis of place. The Holy Land is a testimony to the living interrelationship of archaeology, geography and the incarnation of the history of salvation. Just as God “in his wisdom … brought it about that the New should be hidden in the Old and that the Old should be made manifest in the New,”[2] so, simple as it might seem, there is an interplay between the events of Christ’s life and the historical locations in which they took place.

Briefly, then, I want to touch on three categories of place: first, those graced by the presence of the Holy Family, Christ and His disciples; second, the place of the Transfiguration, Mount Tabor; and, third, Jerusalem, the City of King David and the place of the Paschal Mystery of Christ.

I know what they are thinking. Most of the seminarians and lay students that follow my course “Catholic Social Teaching” in our seminary/school of theology begin with the assumption that this is the “social justice” course. Some like this reduction of “Catholic Social Teaching” to “social justice.” Others dread it. Few question it. I savor the guilty pleasure of playing off of this supposition, building it up in crescendo-like fashion, until at last it is obliterated by the logic of the Church’s social documents themselves. I do enjoy this, but I also do this for pedagogical reasons: I want the assumption that Catholic social teaching reduces to social justice so utterly razed in the minds of my students that when it falls it can never rise from the ashes of its ruin. No resurrection here, please.

Social justice is a part of Catholic social teaching, and an important part. However, it is only a part and it cannot be equated with the entirety of Catholic social teaching without doing serious harm to both. Social justice is that form of justice that regulates one’s relationships according to the standards of law. Typically, it is taken to be about society’s larger institutions like business corporations, political structures, and forms of the market. Catholic social teaching, on the other hand, includes social justice and much, much more. Catholic social teaching covers each of our relationships and socializations in general and, most importantly, does so in a manner where the demand of justice (what is due to another) is not the sole focus. This also means the Church’s social teaching can reach to those forms of relationships that in whole or part elude the categories of justice and law, such as the relationship of friendship. The social teaching of the Church is capable of this wide perspective because, first and foremost, it begins not from law, but from God’s Trinitarian love as manifest in Jesus Christ.

And so, this clarification is an important one. Catholic social teaching is not first about the state of one’s nation, and then somehow extended to other realms of life in a secondary, derivative manner. Catholic social teaching is as much about the living room as it about the halls of Congress.