Franciscan at Home

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?

Seven years ago a young guest surprised me by suddenly asking, “Mrs Flynn, what is Natural Family Planning?” Our guest was a young woman called Asel Ibraeva, whose family had befriended one of our daughters when she was travelling in Central Asia a few years earlier. Asel was living in Karakol, a town in the east of Kyrgyzstan, near the splendid lake Issyk-Kul. In the summer of 2003, after six months studying English in London, and before returning home, she spent a fortnight with us in Oxfordshire.

I gave Asel a short summary of how NFP works, but realised that this brief explanation could not do justice to the subject, so I telephoned Colleen Norman, who is a very experienced Natural Family Planning teacher, and asked her if she would be willing to run a training course in Kyrgyzstan. To my surprise and delight, not only did she accept, but she immediately sent us a copy of the Russian translation of her own NFP manual, which had just been published. She followed this up by meeting us at Heathrow Airport a few days later, when Asel was about to return home. By the time Asel went through the departure gate, it had been agreed that she would try and interest as many people as possible in NFP, and see if she could gather enough support to make a course the following year feasible.

When she arrived home in Karakol, armed with the NFP manual in Russian, she boldly approached a doctor who was responsible for the training of local GPs. This doctor proved to be very responsive to learning about a method of family planning that does not involve the contraceptive pill, which is not only expensive but also increases the risk of anaemia among women whose poor diet already puts them at risk. She willingly agreed to help Asel organise a course. Asel advertised in the local press and on television, and soon there were over twenty enquirers, nearly all doctors and nurses; premises were then booked at a local lakeside resort. An important factor in their ready acceptance of this course is a Kyrgyz Government policy, established in 1997, that the health care of the new nation should be based on the promotion of healthy family life. A project to teach and encourage the use of NFP would quite clearly meet this aim.

This project is one which emphasises and promotes fundamental human values which are too often rejected in western society. In this way it plays an important part in spreading the good news of the Kingdom.

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).

G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy[i] contains a chapter entitled ‘The Suicide of Thought.’ There are ways of thinking that stop thought itself! Among these different ways Chesterton includes materialism, false theories of progress, and pragmatism. However, his main emphasis is on the problem of the modern skeptic: ‘the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation…so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.’[ii]

Skepticism claims to be rational, but is actually an attack on reason. Chesterton recognizes that when man begins to wildly question, reason will be the first thing to be questioned. In his humorous way he says, ‘The mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it’,[iii] and ‘With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.’[iv]

Skepticism is part of the cultural soil we must take account of in catechesis. How does it impact catechesis?

What is urgently needed for the New Evangelisation, wrote Blessed John Paul II in Christifidelis laici, is a ‘mending of the Christian fabric of society’. And then: ‘for this to come about what is needed is to first remake the Christian fabric of the ecclesial community itself present in these countries and nations.’ Pope Benedict XVI echoes this call in Ubicumque et semper, the Apostolic Letter establishing the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelisation.