Franciscan at Home

Experience in the garden teaches us that the strongest of plants cannot flourish if the soil is poor. The wise gardener tends to his soil carefully, in order to prepare the necessary environment in which plants can thrive and bear fruit.

By analogy, the same is true in evangelization. When a Catholic organization—be it a diocese, parish, movement, or other apostolic entity—has issues located in its “soil” such as isolated or overwhelmed leaders, divisions, system-wide confusion, or little joy, then its “plants” (programs, plans, and people) cannot flourish. Efforts that might otherwise have produced missionary disciples get frustrated; and good, devout, and talented people can be left puzzled and deflated.

While reflecting upon Pope Francis’ visit to the United States last fall, I continue to be struck by how Francis, though he never attended the Second Vatican Council, embodies it in many ways. The council was a singular ecclesial event of the 20th century—referred to by every pope since its inception as the guiding light for the Church’s present mission. That mission, interestingly enough, was not mainly one of doctrinal clarity but of pastoral duty. The council wanted to address how to bring the faith of the Church more powerfully and effectively to the modern world. Thus, when John XXIII convoked the council, he claimed that its success would be measured both by the extent it revivified the faith of Catholics and by its ability to speak to all people of goodwill. The faith was, he claimed, not only a treasure for Catholics but “the common heritage of mankind.” It is because of this mission that the council stands as the source of the New Evangelization. Yet, from the very start, in its effort to engage the modern world with the Catholic faith, Vatican II has prompted contrary reactions, which claim that either the Church should preserve herself from the impurity of the world, or that she should, rather, embrace the world unreservedly. Both reactions attempt to resolve the inherent tension between the faith and the world, though by different means: one by utter separation and the other by absolute equation. Pope Francis’ desire to bring the faith to the peripheries has prompted the very same reactions. One gets the impression that the Church’s stance toward the world is either all truth and no love or all love and no truth. However, the Church’s mission always proclaims both truth and love. In Francis’ words, the Church must form joy-filled evangelizers who are “able to step into the night without being overcome by the darkness … able to listen to people’s dreams without being seduced and … able to sympathize with the brokenness of others without losing their own strength and identity.” We must, in other words, form messengers of the Gospel who bring the Faith to the very heart of the world without becoming assimilated by it. With this goal in mind, this article will look more closely at one of Francis’ reflections on the Church’s mission to the world. This reflection first took the form of a 1989 lecture in Argentina (antedating his pontificate), which he gave on the occasion of the Spanish publication of Luigi Giussani’s The Religious Sense. In it, he draws from the rich teaching of John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio and signals a way in which the Church can speak to the desire for God that exists in every human heart. His thoughts offer a method the Church can use in order to address those who live in the world without conflating itself with the world.

The Catechism is an outstanding teaching tool that can provide excellent guidance for our lesson and session planning. The crucial element in any planning is first to become clear about the aim and then about the intended outcomes of a lesson. This is the subject of the current article. Focus on the Center The overall goal of all catechetical activity—and therefore of every resource, every program, and each individual catechetical encounter—has been famously described in Catechesi Tradendae, St. John Paul II’s seminal teaching on catechesis: the definitive aim of catechesis is to put people not only in touch but in communion, in intimacy, with Jesus Christ.[i] This articulation that Christ is the central aim of catechesis is a rich and inclusive one, which points in several directions. As we ponder the meaning of this teaching, we can call to mind all the nuances of the term “Christ-centered,” as it is unfolded in the General Directory for Catechesis.[ii] Thus, in our catechetical work, we are helping others to find Christ; and finding Christ includes finding him in all of his relationships. When we find Christ, we find, at the same time, those whom he loves. He would not have it otherwise. He does not allow us to find him alone, isolated, as some barren sola Christi. His names and titles reveal as much: he is Jesus, “God saves”—a name pointing us simultaneously upwards towards the Persons of the Trinity and downwards to those whom he redeems and lifts from the misery of their sin; he is “Son,” a name that identifies a relationship, and reminds us of his heavenly Father, who is his source; he is also “Christ,” that is, the one anointed by the eternal Spirit. To speak of the aim of our catechetical work as putting people “in communion, in intimacy, with Jesus Christ” therefore entails, as St. John Paul II put it, leading others “to the love of the Father in the Spirit” in order to “make us share in the life of the Holy Trinity.”[iii] A christocentric aim, furthermore, necessarily implies a Trinitarian christocentricity.[iv] Christocentricity is also to be understood in terms of what the Tradition has called the “whole Christ,” Christus totus. The Church uses this phase to remind us that Christ is Head and members together, forming one Body. Jesus is not found apart from those whom he disciples; or, according to a parallel image, Christ is inseparable from his Bride, for whom he gave himself up and to whom he united himself in everlasting love. The Scriptures speak of the bride’s longing for her groom, which is a longing for that union that marks the end of earthly time, when Christ finally unites to himself, in the embrace of love, all whom the Father, throughout history, has drawn to himself through the Son in the Holy Spirit.[v] Christ is the living heart of the Father’s plan for creation and redemption. The Catechism provides catechists with this rich christocentric account at the heart of its annunciation of the faith. Every part, and each chapter and section, has been written in order to lead us to this center, revealing “in the Person of Christ the whole of God's eternal design reaching fulfillment in that Person.”[vi] When planning lessons, then, we can turn to the Catechism in confident trust that we will find there a Christ-centered presentation of material.

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.

Pope Francis has declared an Extraordinary Jubilee, a Holy Year of Mercy (December 8, 2015–November 20, 2016) that “the Church might make clear its mission of being a witness to mercy” by living the Lord’s words, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”[i] This is no surprise: Francis i

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.

In the previous issue, we explored St. John Paul II’s theology of the body as a theological and doctrinal work rather than a treatise primarily on sexual morality. In fact, these 133 Wednesday catecheses could be summed up in one word: identity. John Paul II explores two of the most fundamental questions of reality: “Who is God?” and “Who is the human person?” For John Paul II, humanity’s dramatic encounter with Jesus Christ, the Word Incarnate, is the medium for answering these two questions. This means that faith has a sacramental flare—it is communicated through the concrete, tangible, and personal. As a result, the new evangelization must awaken in Catholics of the third millennium an encounter with the living Christ, and more! This is where the theology of the body is indispensable, especially as it pertains to four central aspects of the faith: the Trinity, gift, the body, and sacramentality. Building on the image of the traditional skate vs. the in-line skate introduced in Part 1, the Trinity, gift, the body, and sacramentality can be thought of as the four wheels of the traditional skate realigned in a new way for the new evangelization. The first and most visible “wheel” is the Trinity. Jesus’ mission is always to lead us to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. While we are indeed Christians, we must also be good Trinitarians. The Catechism of the Catholic Church declares: “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of the Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them.” John Paul II’s goal is to present not just a Christocentric understanding of the human person (anthropology), but a Christocentric-Trinitarian anthropology. If “the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of the Christian faith” and if we are made in God’s image and likeness (cf. Genesis 1:27), then who we understand God to be determines our understanding of the human person. Therefore, one of the most critical tasks of the new evangelization is to help all people have a proper, dynamic, and even intimate image of a Trinitarian God.

On October 11, 1992, Pope St. John Paul II declared the Catechism of the Catholic Church “a sure norm for teaching the faith and thus a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion.”[i] Let us examine the key terms in this statement. They help us to understand the character of the Catechism. In the previous article I wrote of the Catechism as an instrument that would help us to reconnect the fragments of the faith back into a living whole.[ii] In other words, it is an instrument fitted for bringing about ecclesial communion. In the situation of the new evangelization, many whom we catechize live without a strong awareness of the organic wholeness of the Catholic faith, its beauty, symmetry, and coherence. They have even less recognition that this organic wholeness of the faith flows from the living Body of Christ, having God the Son as its Head. Many of the baptized and confirmed members of the Body of Christ, therefore, have only a partial understanding that the life of Christ, as Head of the Body, is available to them—his strengths, his virtues, his faculties. As St. Gregory the Great put it, “Our redeemer has shown himself to be one person with the holy Church whom he has taken to himself.”[iii] We long for the Holy Spirit to lead those whom we catechize into a lively consciousness of this loving union that God has established with them in his Church. This union is the “marvelous exchange” that we celebrate in the Christmas season when the Creator of all became man, born of the Ever-Virgin, making us “sharers in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share our humanity.”[iv] Only in this way, we know, through living in the light of these truths, can the lives of those we catechize be more perfectly formed into the likeness of Christ. We long for the Holy Spirit to “indoctrinate”[v] those whom we teach—to imbue them with the teachings, the doctrines, of Christ. The Catechism is given to us precisely for the sake of enabling such an indoctrination to make the teachings of the Church accessible and available to every member of Christ’s Body so that each can become “fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself.”[vi] We saw in the previous article how the Catechism has been carefully designed specifically to reach out to bring the saving doctrine of the faith to the “edges” and “peripheries” of the Church. This happens when we attend to those still holding to “fragments” of faith in order to gather and bring them into communion with the living whole.