Franciscan at Home

An old pastor sits in the front corner of his small country church one autumn evening. The lamps are coming on outside, the children are hurrying home for supper, and each chime of the bells above brings the priest a moment closer to the time when he must deliver his Sunday sermon. But he is at a loss for words. He has drilled into his parishioners the proofs for God’s existence, the reasons for the immorality of abortion, and the importance of prayer. Time and again he preached about the need to live a life of stewardship, the significance of the confessional, and the wrongs of gossip. And the fruits of his work are visible. The children recite the catechism with diligence, the women’s guild prays the rosary with devotion, and the young men can reason through disputes over the saints and Blessed Mother with their protestant co-workers. Yes, his flock has been given a toolbox. What more then is there? What further work can he do?

Suddenly he hears the creaking of the door to the church open behind him. “Somebody has got to oil that one,” he thinks to himself, making a mental note of this task for the custodian. The quiet patter of feet passes him and then stops. As the priest lifts up his head, he is taken aback at the site of the scene before him. A little child is there, kneeling before the crucifix. Father recognizes the lad from Sunday school, a quiet fellow from a good family. His hat in his hands and his eyes fixed upon the mangled body of Christ hanging limply on the tree, the child’s lips move slowly, reverently. The priest leans in, trying to hear what soft sounds are exuding from the boy’s mouth. He is quietly uttering the Anima Christi, each powerful word taking on new meaning in this child’s sweet voice. With that, the priest falls to his knees. And then the answer comes…
In order to reconcile his people to himself, God became seeable, hearable, touchable, and reachable, taking on true human flesh. “By nature incomprehensible and inaccessible, [God] was invisible and unthinkable, but now he wished to be understood, to be seen and thought of,” writes St. Bernard of Clairvaux.[1] In a sense, he became concrete and graspable, yet at the same time mysterious and unknowable, bridging the imminent and the transcendent. Preface I for Christmas so beautifully reads, “By the wonder of the Incarnation, your Eternal Word has brought the eyes of faith a new and radiant image of your glory. In him we see our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see.”

It is poetry that most fully takes on these characteristics, creating images that rouse our senses and help us to understand reality, yet always leaving a sense of the unknown, an aura of mystery. It is poetry, that theology (as St. Anselm defined it, “Faith seeking understanding”) so desperately needs, else it turn into the mechanical “study of God.” It is poetry for which the faithful long in order to come to know Christ, the Divine Poet himself. It is poetry, which this priest’s preaching is lacking.

A source of great hope to the very young can be fairy tales. For this reason they should really be part of the essential reading for pre-school children and beginning readers. For any who need convincing of their value in offering solid moral formation and encouraging the necessary values and help essential for enabling children to find ‘reasons for living and hoping’ I would recommend an excellent book by Bruno Bettleheim: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.[i] What I write here owes much to the wisdom contained in that book.

Fairytales offer hope first because they are realistic about evil

Because of this they enable children to face the things that can destroy hope. Despite popular identification of the term ‘Fairy tale’ with make believe and the avoidance of reality, the very opposite is true - fairy tales are full of ogres, giants, witches, wicked stepmothers, indifferent fathers, spiteful brothers and jealous sisters. They are filled with death, grief, danger and struggle. The pages teem with characters who are prone to all the basic human vices and weaknesses - fear, cruelty, hard-heartedness, greed, stupidity, disobedience, anger, thoughtlessness, cruelty, cunning and deception - all of these are found in the basic repertoire of stories. Fairy tales, then, do not shield a child from all that he knows about the world and about himself - including the basic facts of ugliness, evil, sin and death.

Alan Schreck concludes his summary of the vital teaching document of Blessed John Paul II on family life and family catechesis.

As we approach the thirteenth anniversary of Familiaris Consortio (Nov. 22, 1981), Blessed John Paul II’s concerns and direction for the family appear even more relevant and urgent today. As he taught in 2001 (NMI, 47), ‘At a time in history like the present, special attention must also be given to the pastoral care of the family, particularly when this fundamental institution is experiencing a radical and widespread crisis.’ In FC, John Paul presented four major tasks for the family in the modern world:

1. forming a community of persons;
2. serving life;
3. participating in the development of society;
4. sharing in the life and mission of the Church (no. 17).

In the last Sower, we discussed the first task, so now we must ask: ‘How does the family serve life?’ This is ‘the fundamental task of the family’ (no. 28). Echoing Pope Paul VI’s encyclical letter Humanae Vitae, FC teaches ‘that love between husband and wife must be fully human, exclusive, and open to new life’ (no. 29).

Fr. Peter Conley highlights the importance of saints in catechesis and calls on us not to overlook some of their more unexpected sides.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, in his Fragment of a Life of St Philip, has left us an unexpected (and often overlooked) hermeneutic key to unlock the nature of holiness in both canonised saints and those in the making.

‘…a saint’s life may often have in it things not directly and immediately spiritual. To find a saint sitting down to cards, or reading a heathen author, or listening to music or taking snuff, is often a relief and an encouragement to the reader, as convincing him that grace does not supersede nature, and that as he is reading of a child of Adam and his own brother, and he is drawn up to his pattern and guide while he sees that pattern can descend to him; whereas that shadowy paper-Saint, as I may call it, bloodless, ideality which may be set up in the mind from the exclusive perusal of a roll of unconnected details, may, from the weakness of our hearts, chill us unduly, lead (us) to shrink from the Saints and to despond about ourselves. The lights and shades of the saintly character are necessary for understanding what a Saint is.’1

Blessed John Henry challenges us to admit that we can become susceptible to a diet of bland, lifeless accounts of holiness which emphasise the ‘sublime’ without ever delighting in the ‘ridiculous’ or, at least, the quirkiness about a saintly character. The passage pulsates in its appeal to search for a person’s humanity because it is in and through this that we encounter the kindly light of Christ’s divinity shining out from them.

Fr Peter Conley reminds us of the catechetical qualities of the Pope who had the shortest Pontificate in history.

I feel sure John Paul I would have incorporated the title of pop singer Taja Seville’s hit, ‘Love is Contagious’, in one of his Addresses. After all, he did suggest that we should ‘inject others with a goodness imbued with meekness and love taught by Christ’.1

His successor, John Paul II, spoke of him unleashing a ‘torrent of love’2 during his brief reign. The ‘Smiling Pope’ or ‘God’s Candidate’ to use Cardinal Basil Hume’s phrase, implored his audience to ‘throw me a safety belt with your prayers’3 and in imitation of his humble master admitted that Christ’s Yoke of Papal Office was laid on ‘fragile shoulders’.4 He literally, had an astronomic impact. Consider the Vatican preface to the collection of his homilies and addresses:

‘John Paul I passed in the Church and in the world like a whirling comet which casts a jet of inextinguishable light, like a flash of hope that leaves hearts ablaze, like a marvellous rainbow charged with promise for a poor, weary, divided and restless humanity.’5

His teaching was communicated with a brilliantly gifted catechist’s amalgam of compressed style, humour, honesty and humility. Seasoned with topical references, often from popular culture, John Paul I spoke passionately using simple yet profoundly-crafted observations on life, the universe and everything. This was a man who likened life’s journey to God to Jules Verne’s adventure stories and had the creative imagination to write letters to Pinocchio, Charles Darwin and even St Romedio’s bear! In his book Illustrissimi (the illustrious ones), he numbered Tom Sawyer’s creator Mark Twain and Sir Walter Scott of Ivanhoe fame amongst his favourite authors.

In Christ, God’s plan for our lives is made present. Catechizing on this is provides the answer to the pervasive sense of meaningless afflicting so many in our society.

The term ‘plan’ is used at least a hundred times in the Catechism, and that is no accident! We live in a time when the providential care of God is often doubted, when various ideologies suggest everything in the universe is meaningless or the product of a random series of accidents. With this worldview, we can begin to think of ourselves as accidents. The Catechism wants to stress that the exact opposite is true.

In his letter to the Ephesians (1:9-10), St. Paul says that God ‘has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.’ We should first note from this that Christ is the expression of the Father’s ‘plan,’ and that plan is in accord with his ‘will’ and ‘purpose.’

Second, the purpose of that plan is to ‘unite all things in [Christ].’

The Sower profiles the catechetical work of one of the key catechetical charities working in the Church today.

In his motu proprio Ubiqumque et semper Pope Benedict XVI stresses that “[i]t is the duty of the Church to proclaim always and everywhere the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” The Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need has always supported the work of evangelisation and catechesis in a number of countries. Its mission helping Christians who are suffering, persecuted or in serious pastoral need has always included a spiritual dimension alongside the practical. Fr Werenfried van Straaten founded the charity more than 60 years ago when he responded to the needs of those who had entered West Germany fleeing the advance of communism. Among the help he provided for the people was rucksack priests, who visited the refugee camps to celebrate the Sacraments. More than 60 years on, support for people’s spiritual needs, including catechesis, remains a key part of the charity’s work.

ACN’s help for catechetical work is broad and diverse. In Iraq, many Christians have fled from the south of the country as Islamists target them. The bombing of Baghdad’s Our Lady of Salvation Syriac Catholic Cathedral in October 2010, which left at least 52 people dead, and a series of attacks that followed, added to the haemorrhaging of Christians from the south. Now most of the Christians remaining in the country have settled in the north. The Church is seeking to help those in the north lay down roots there and among the projects are two catechetical centres in Aqra and Zebur diocese, which ACN is helping with. The charity is supporting other projects around the world: in Malawi the charity recently provided 69 bicycles to help catechists travel to far flung parishes, bringing with them the knowledge of the Faith; in Tanzania ACN supported a five-day Christian education workshop for more than 300 catechists and teachers; and in Eastern Europe, where the charity started its work, it continues to help out, and is supporting the Basilian Fathers’ catechetical work.

There is a shocking reality concerning the demographics of worshiping Catholics in the United States. If one would like to identify the largest community of Catholics it would seem logical to look at the largest Catholic parish in any diocese. However, in most cases that is not true. The largest group of Catholics will be found worshipping at the local ‘mega’ non-denominational church. If your country or diocese does not have a mega-church culture then the picture may be even blacker, the Catholics who no longer attend Mass may not be worshipping at all.

The reasons that Catholics leave the Church are many and complicated. Some drift away, some are driven away, many are in irregular marriage situations, many misunderstand what the Church teaches on moral issues and others know very well what the Church teaches and simply do not believe. There is enough blame to go around for all of us who remain and all of those who are gone! Although the particulars of each situation matter and need to be discerned and dealt with the problem for all of us goes much deeper. Through our baptism, we have been adopted into a filial relationship with Jesus Christ. His life is our inheritance and we share this inheritance with those who share our baptism. Our estranged companions are not a problem to be solved. We must seek out our brothers and sisters who have forgotten, misplaced, squandered, lost or rejected their inheritance.

A Year of Faith. A period of focus and of new evangelisation. A Synod, later this year, devoted to the question of the transmission of the Faith. Many initiatives are already beginning to emerge in response to this call from the Holy Father to prepare for a new springtime in the Church. What are some of the important things that the Church wants us to remember as we enter this time?