Franciscan at Home

A lo largo de los siguientes números de la Catechetical Review, presentaré tres artículos que tratan del papel del catequista: desde las perspectivas de padre de familia, de docente en una escuela católica, y de voluntario parroquial. He desempeñado personalmente los tres papeles, y quiero aclarar desde el principio que ninguno tuvo la misma importancia personal para mí que aquél que se me confirió a través de mi vocación al matrimonio - la de ser esposo y papá, con responsabilidad por mi familia. Es en este punto que comenzaré.

Over the next few issues of The Catechetical Review, I will be presenting three articles on the role of the catechist: from the perspectives of a parent, a teacher in a Catholic school, and a parish volunteer. I have fulfilled all of these roles myself, but may I say at the outset that none of them has been as personally important to me as the one conferred by the vocation of marriage—that of husband and father, with responsibility for my family. This is where I will begin.

In 1981, Pope John Paul II issued Familiaris Consortio. I remember this event as clearly as if it were yesterday because it spoke directly into our circumstances. My wife, Anne, and I were anticipating the birth of our first child. One sentence stood out and its impact has never left me: “Their [the parents’] role as educators is so decisive that scarcely anything can compensate for their failure in it” (36). A few years earlier, the same pope had also pointed out that “… parents themselves profit from the effort that this demands of them, for in a catechetical dialogue of this sort each individual both receives and gives.”[i] He was telling us that if we put our efforts into this task, we would gain as much as our children.
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John Paul II’s emphasis on “the church of the home” picked up on a theme from VaticanII. The success of the Church’s educational efforts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had obscured the role of parents as catechists. Yet the family’s role in passing on the knowledge of God was as ancient as humanity itself. This pattern is so consistent through the Old Testament that I will not multiply examples—a few will suffice. The covenant God offered to Abraham implied an ongoing relationship with his family through the generations; his household had to be a place of instruction, prayer, and worship for the continuation of the covenant. This was reiterated in the Law of Moses: “and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise (Deut 6:7). When the new covenant was offered through Christ, the importance of the family was in no way diminished. From the earliest days of Christianity, the family was seen as the gathering place for worship and prayer, and the favored place for catechetical instruction. In Christ, spouses participate in the plan of God, imaging in their marriage Christ’s union with his bride, the Church.

The human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral pillars of formation are used to guide the formation of Catholic priests and deacons throughout the world. The United States Bishops’ document Coworkers in the Vineyard[i] applies these four principles to lay ecclesial ministers, including catechists. In this article, we extend the application to children and families. The terms “religious education,” “catechesis,” and “faith formation” are practically interchangeable in the way parishes use them today. No matter what terms we prefer, it makes sense to concern ourselves with the whole person, who is, by nature, in relationship with other persons. ...As we form children in the faith, it is essential that we incorporate their families. Children’s human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral formation is inseparable from the families in which they live. Our role as catechists can never replace that of their parents. We have a duty to support family life, even as we model appropriate behavior for our students and insist they practice compassion, kindness, and all the human and theological virtues.

Is there such a thing as Catholic culture in America anymore? And if there is, is it capable of producing religiously committed Catholics across generations? Or would we have to consider it simply a fading vestige of ethnic or familial identity? From John Paul II to Benedict XVI to Francis, the renewal of Catholic culture in Western societies has been considered an intrinsic dimension of the New Evangelization. With regard to a so-called “Catholic culture,” however, the movement from ideal to real—from exhortations to concrete renewal—is sobering and presents many practical questions. Are there any social mechanisms by which new generations of Catholics can acquire a strong sense of Catholic identity, an entire worldview animated by Christian intuitions regarding humanity and society, and the will to remain committed to these principles over the long term? Can such reinvigoration occur anywhere at an appreciable scale?

If Dr. Christian Smith, a prominent sociologist of religion at Notre Dame, is correct, any reply to these questions must take special account of one institution: the household, with its deep interpersonal bonds, its wealth of practices, and its highly compelling power to impart identity. In his landmark National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), Smith studied the specific religiosity and spirituality of millennials, observing the widespread drift of these young people from any substantial notion of religious identity or practice. However, he also realized that the religious outcomes of these young people were not at all a generational anomaly. Rather, the single greatest predictor of emerging adults’ eventual level of religious commitment was the religiosity of their parents.

Consider that, of the most religious quartile of NSYR young adults ages 24-29 (individuals whose religious attitudes Smith had been tracking since high school) an impressive 82% had parents who reported each of the following: that their family regularly talked about religious topics in the home, that faith was “very important” to them, and that they themselves regularly were involved in religious activities. By comparison, only 1% of the least religious quartile of Smith’s young adults had parents who reported this combination of religious attitudes and practices. Thus, according to the NSYR, the single most decisive difference between Millennials who remained religiously committed into adulthood and those who didn’t was the degree of religiousness exhibited by their parents.

One evening when I came home from the office, my 12-year-old daughter was busily attending to her homework. Working on a lesson in suffixes, she asked me about the word “revitalize.”

I don’t claim to know much about grammar, but I do remember an insight on the suffix “-ize” from Dr. David Fagerberg, then a professor of liturgical theology at Mundelein’s Liturgical Institute. His lesson was short and to the point: “Whenever you see ‘ize’ at the end of a word,” he suggested, “it means ‘to make.’” For example, “trivialize” means “to make trivial.” “Familiarize” means “to make familiar.” “Minimize” means “to make minimal or small.”

It wasn’t grammar studied for its own sake in Dr. Fagerberg’s class, but the application of this “rule” to liturgical studies. If “ize” means “to make,” how ought we to understand liturgical words such as “symbolize,” “sacramentalize,” and “ritualize”? Applying the principle to these words, we see that the realities of faith—grace, salvation, redemption, the Mystical Body, the Paschal Mystery, and even Jesus himself—are “made” available to us via symbols, sacraments, and rituals.

The Sacrament of Matrimony is one such timely example. The unseen reality of marriage is ritualized and sacramentalized, thus made present to us here and now so that we can participate in it and conform ourselves to it. So if we wish to understand the newly promulgated Second edition of the Order of Celebrating Matrimony and participate in it fruitfully, we need to familiarize (make familiar) ourselves with its reality, substance, and mystery.

The Church, while appreciating the situations of conflict that are part of marriage, cannot fail to speak out on behalf of those who are most vulnerable: the children who often suffer in silence. (Amoris Laetitia)

In his new apostolic exhortation on The Joy of Love, Pope Francis has called the world’s parishes to reach out and minister to families going through divorce.[i] While this support is long overdue, there’s a danger in running groups specifically for the children. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that “Parents have the first responsibility for the education of the children…”[ii] The best ministry, thus, is one where we accompany parents and help them minister to their children’s needs.

The family has a privileged place in catechesis. The Catechism states that “parents receive the responsibility of evangelizing their children” and calls them the “first heralds” of the faith.[i] The family is also called “domestic church”—the church of the home.[ii] Catechesis in the parish can give structure and support to faith formation in the home. Parish catechesis is systematic and comprehensive, while the formation that parents provide is more organic and focused on particular occasions in the life of the family. Parents play an indispensable role in helping the faith come alive for their children. The family is the first place where each of us is called to live the faith that we have received. Despite the important role of family in catechesis, many catechists and catechetical leaders find it a challenge to involve parents in parish faith formation programs. Here are six keys to engaging parents and families in catechesis[....]

John Paul II was convinced that the wellbeing of both society and the Church depends on the health and strength of the family. Anticipating the coming crisis, he wrote, “The future of humanity passes by way of the family.” By 1981, John Paul II could see that “the family is the object of numerous forces that seek to destroy it or in some way to deform it.” Thirty-five years later, the attacks on the family have dramatically intensified to the point where its nature (the complimentary unity of man and woman) and its purpose (indissoluble union and procreativity) have been fundamentally rejected in the West and a false vision of reality substituted for God’s created order. We are slowly awakening to the truth that, as a society, we have truly lost the Judeo-Christian vision of what a family is. This rejection of God’s truth about the family has been costly: familial life is deeply fractured and people are profoundly wounded. The good news is that God desires to heal us. For this to take place, it is critical that we address five key needs.

The true essence of marriage lies in the marital bond. Since the sacramentality of marriage consists principally in the indissoluble bond, the indissolubility does not come into being exclusively or principally by the mutual obligation that is undertaken with the consent of the two, but by the action of God…That which God gives remains forever; he does not repent of his gifts…The matrimony of two of the baptized…is in real, essential and intrinsic relationship with the mystery of the union of Christ with the Church…and therefore it participates in its nature…[i] These words from Italian Cardinal Carlo Caffarra contain truths that are rarely present in the hearts and minds of young Catholic couples today. These truths are basic to a Catholic understanding of marriage and yet are surprising to couples who have come to believe that marriage is only about them. Culturally, couples in the Western world have little or no conception of the supernatural reality that is Catholic marriage. To the average couple, marriage is about falling in love and then choosing to affirm that love with vows that they speak to one another. At best, for the nominally Catholic couple, the Church’s minister is at the wedding to “bless” their consent. They rarely discern a greater and deeper supernatural Presence who wants to enter their shared love precisely because it is his love that they are entering. This presence of course is Jesus Christ. The Bridegroom of the Church wishes to bless this couple by taking up their “yes” to one another into his eternal “yes” to his Bride, the Church. Catholic marriage will make a cultural impact in the West only when it is thoroughly bathed in this supernatural reality; otherwise it remains imagined as a secular affair surrounded by religious symbols.

A couple of years ago, when I celebrated Confirmation at a large, working-class Hispanic parish in our Archdiocese, I was quite edified by two of the young confirmandi, who shared reflections on what their Confirmation meant to them.