Becoming a Channel of Grace in Catechesis

The OCIA class I was leading was about to enter the period of the catechumenate, and it was time for a talk on human sexuality and Christian anthropology. This talk had been looming in my mind for weeks prior, causing me no small amount of anxiety. I felt reasonably confident in my ability to communicate the Church’s teaching on these controversial topics, but it is always somewhat daunting for me to get up in front of a group of people and talk about sex, gender, and other “theology of the body” topics. As my audience was composed of adults who were seeking to become Catholic, I knew there was a good chance that many of them were still in need of conversion on these topics. They had all made some concrete step toward becoming Catholic, but nevertheless, the Church’s teaching on human sexuality can be a moment for some to walk away. In my mind, the stakes were high.

My first instinct when preparing a talk has always been to go to the Catechism or some other authoritative resource. For this particular topic, I turned to the great St. John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. While I was well acquainted with the Church’s teaching on human sexuality, I had never actually taken the time to read John Paul II’s catecheses on these topics. I was immediately struck by how thoroughly driven by Scripture each catechesis was. While Man and Woman He Created Them is by no means light reading, to me it read like an extremely well-done Bible study. The doctrinal conclusions that John Paul II arrived at seemed almost obvious because of the way in which he used Scripture to drive his arguments. Reading through his teachings was like being led by a highly skilled guide through a treacherous mountain range. And while John Paul II was the guide, the path was laid out by God himself. Reading Theology of the Body was like being in conversation with God. It was prayerful. I was so captivated by the book that I tore through it far quicker than I ever imagined I could.

C. S. Lewis’s devil Screwtape advises junior tempter Wormwood, “The parochial organization should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people . . . together in the kind of unity the Enemy desires.”[1] Christian community makes tangibly present communion with Christ. It is often the first place people begin to encounter him and believe in the possibility of his love, which is manifested through the love of the Church’s members. Even in its veiled, earthly form, the Communion of Saints has the power to radiate Christ to the world. This article will briefly examine the nature of this communion and its power to bear witness to Christ, as well as offer some ideas for fostering a deeper and more intentional living of this communion within our communities.

The Communion of Saints

The Communion of Saints on earth is quite simple: Its source is Christ; its soul is charity. Christ himself, on the evening before his Passion, prayed, “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, . . . that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me” (Jn 17:21, 23). The members of the Church are “a holy people united with the unity of the Trinity.”[2] The Holy Spirit unites the Church in a single bond of love. Moreover, in the Eucharist, Christ binds each person together so that they are members of this same whole.

Being enriched by Christ’s gift and made one in him opens our horizons. In the midst of its treatment of the Our Father, the Catechism has this stunning line: “Finally, if we pray the Our Father sincerely, we leave individualism behind, because the love that we receive frees us from it” (2792). God’s love frees us. We no longer need to protect ourselves. Transformed by the renewal of our minds (Rom 12:2), grace allows us to see the love God has bestowed on us. It opens our eyes to the fact that my brother or sister in the Lord is in some way part of me.[3] And it moves us to “leave individualism behind,” embracing this communion. We are able to live heroic charity, loving as we have been loved.

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God” (1 Jn 4:7). God takes our ordinary nature and, through grace, elevates it to share in his life. This means that simple, everyday gestures of love and care take on extraordinary depth. They are the “stuff” sanctity is made of. I can remember gathering with a group to pray for a friend who was dying. I knew her as my mentor and a gifted catechetical leader, but as others shared how they knew her, I began to realize there was so much more to her life of sanctity than just what she did for the Church in her role as catechist. One friend shared how my mentor had helped her with laundry during her prolonged recovery from surgery. Another spoke of how she had come to understand authentic family life when my mentor had opened her home to her and helped her. These simple, human gestures of love and self-sacrifice provided the deepest and most authentic witness to Christ that my mentor offered in her very full life. This is the kind of love Tertullian said caused the pagans to exclaim, “See how these Christians love one another!”[4] Sometimes it is the humblest gestures that speak the most loudly of Christ’s presence and love.

The modern ethos regarding sin is a perplexing one. On the one hand, it seems that everything is morally okay, so long as it does not hurt anyone else. Yet, on the other hand, there are very strange and strict social sins that are virtually forbidden unless one wants to end up ostracized by the modern (and oftentimes online) community. Sin today is treated with an increasingly permissive attitude. What stands out as the overarching theme of this new morality, however, is a law of radical individualism regarding sin. Everything is acceptable if it feels good for the individual, as long as social norms are not violated.

Our Communal Lord and Savior

This strange and ambiguous moral philosophy espoused by our modern world stands in sharp contrast to the revelation of Scripture and the teaching of the Church. Particularly, the law of radical individualism stands in opposition to our belief in the “Communion of Saints,” professed in the Creed. The Catechism is beautifully succinct in its identification of this entity: “The communion of saints is the Church” (946).

The Second Vatican Council emphasized the Church as the “People of God,” a descriptor that is very fitting in our age.[1] The Communion of Saints, therefore, must be seen in light of this community of persons around Christ, their head. This Communion of Saints is a true communion—a sharing among persons of what is held in common. The Catechism proceeds to express that what is shared in common are spiritual goods, which are shared among the People of God both on earth and in heaven. The antiphon of the Eastern liturgies captures this: “God’s holy gifts for God’s holy people” (CCC 948).

What emerges from this basic structure is the antithesis of radical individualism. As members of the People of God and of the Communion of Saints, we do not merely have a personal Lord and Savior but a God who, in gathering us into a community, acts within this communion. Jesus Christ saves us personally, but not alone; his work is mediated by the action of the entire Church, of which he is the head. Lumen Gentium, Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, expresses this beautifully: “God, however, does not make men holy and save them merely as individuals, without bond or link between one another. Rather has it pleased Him to bring men together as one people” (no. 9).

What do you think when you read the word “saint”? Do you imagine an icon of a placid martyr, like Ignatius of Antioch crawling with lions? Perhaps you think of a saint from your own living memory, like Pope St. John Paul II or St. Teresa of Calcutta. Or maybe you think of a living person you know who embodies sanctity and who might even one day have a place in the Roman canon. Words like “sin,” “failure,” and “redemption,” however, are probably not the first to come to mind when most of us think of the saints.

This is understandable, and it has been affected by historical circumstances that have shaped our writing about the saints through the centuries. We need and want good examples, and the stories of saints we have grown accustomed to are mostly positive tales of their virtue and accomplishments.

Let’s say your child has aspirations of becoming a great soccer player. What do you do? You go on YouTube and find highlight videos of Lionel Messi dribbling and shooting and say, “Look, if you practice, you could do that.” I know because I have done this. We generally don’t watch highlight reels of mistakes (lowlights?) or long, slow videos of improvement.

For a long time, this is what we have done with the majority of our presentations of the saints, as well. We love to talk about their incredible sanctity (“St. John Vianney only slept two hours a night because he heard so many confessions!”) or we focus on the saints who don’t have very visible stories of sin or conversion.[1] I have a deep love for saints such as Thérèse of Lisieux and John Paul the Great, but I sometimes find treatments of their lives difficult to relate to, as these stories give the impression that they never struggled with sin in the way that I do.

St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine of Hippo, is a good example of this treatment. As a scholar of the early Church who has read St. Augustine’s Confessions numerous times, I have slowly become aware of the flat and incomplete treatment we often give to St. Monica by focusing only on the one great aspect of sanctity for which she is most famous: intercession for her wayward son. It is understandable that we focus on this, particularly when there are people in our families who are far from God. Intercession for Augustine is St. Monica’s most prominent activity in the Confessions itself, as Augustine wanted to clearly depict the means that God used to bring him to conversion.

However, Monica is a more complex figure than simply the “Mother of Tears” who prayed her son into the Church. Long before the blessed death of his mother related by Augustine in book 9 of the Confessions, he gives us several glimpses into parts of Monica’s life that needed redemption. By examining three of these and seeing how God’s grace was operative in each situation, my hope is to demonstrate how saints like Monica can be examples to us of the redemptive power of God in normal circumstances and not just examples of truly exceptional sanctity.[2] I will examine them in the order in which Augustine describes them in the Confessions, which is not chronological.

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The renowned italian painter Caravaggio (1571–1610) was active in Rome for most of his artistic career. He was widely known for his dramatic use of lighting, a technique that had a profound influence on the Baroque period of art history. He was a master of chiaroscuro, the use of strong contrasts between light and dark. He used this technique to create a sense of depth and realism that made his paintings deeply moving.

The dramatic intensity of Caravaggio’s work mirrored the intensity of his personal life. We know about much of Caravaggio’s life through the extensive police records that documented his disorderly conduct. He was notorious for his brawling and arguments with not only his peers but also those in authority. His volatile temper culminated in the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni over a bet on a game of tennis. Caravaggio knew very well the effects and darkness of sin. He was a man who struggled between darkness and light in his personal life. We see that same tension vividly portrayed in his paintings.

One of Caravaggio’s most striking works, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602), visually captures the Gospel of John’s account of Thomas’s doubt and growth in faith. According to the Gospel of John, Thomas was not present when Jesus first appeared to the other disciples after the Resurrection. Unwilling to believe their testimony, Thomas declared, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (Jn 20:25). Caravaggio captures the transformative moment of Thomas encountering the risen Christ.

When I had been a mother for about 20 years and was leading a women’s Bible study at church, I asked a group of mothers with young children to give me one word that would complete this sentence: Motherhood is a time of . . . “exhilaration,” “chaos,” “frustration” and “creativity” were some of the answers they called out to me. Then I shared with them a conclusion about motherhood that I had been coming to in those years. It was an idea I wish I had known when I first began having children, so I wanted to see if perhaps it could make a difference for them. I suggested that, above everything else, motherhood is preeminently a time of conversion. Why?

We looked at a passage in St. Matthew’s Gospel to understand what conversion means, why it is necessary, and why motherhood offers women deep and abiding opportunities to experience it. In that passage, the disciples asked Jesus, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” (18:1). In reply, he made it clear that the more important question is: Who will get in? He said that those who seek to enter heaven must “turn [be converted] and become like children” (18:3). Even the disciples needed to understand that it was not enough to be an admirer of Jesus. They needed to consciously turn away from a life of self-reliance and become like children, with simple trust in and obedience to Jesus. Thus, he established the necessity of conversion. He illustrated the point when he called a child out of the crowd to come to him. The child obeyed, putting himself (literally) in Jesus’ hands, who then set the boy in their midst. Jesus told the disciples, “Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (18:4). So, what does all this have to do with motherhood? Jesus said it best: “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me” (18:5). What did he mean?

To receive a child in the name of Jesus is what we do when we have our children baptized. A child who has been baptized into Jesus and his Church has been made part of his Mystical Body. In a very real way, Jesus himself has taken up residence in our homes through our children. He is there to save them—and us. Throughout our lives with them, we will hear Jesus call to us, always beckoning us to turn from the small, cramped, ill-fitting life of the self and become what we truly are: children of God. In other words, he will use our lives with our children to turn us from self-love to self-donation, making us ready for union with God. How will we, as mothers of children from infancy to adult life, hear his voice?

When you think of what it means to “pray like the saints,” what image comes to mind? In our Catholic faith, we have been blessed with a rich heritage of spiritual practices and prayer techniques to help us grow closer to our Lord. In this article, we’ll be looking at a specific prayer method that many might consider odd or morbid at first. It is, however, a meditative method that is filled with many graces and engages both the mind as well as the heart. I am speaking of the practice of meditating upon death, or memento mori.

It may surprise us to learn that this practice is one that has found strong advocates in some of the greatest spiritual masters of Catholic spirituality. In his Rule, St. Benedict of Nursia urged his monks to remind themselves daily of the fact that they would one day die.[1] St. Francis of Assisi referred to death in familial terms in his famous “Canticle of the Sun,” giving her the title “Sister Death.” And in the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius recommended using reflection upon death as a method for discernment.[2]

Recently in one of my religion classes, my ninth graders and I were thinking about how important the virtue of faith is in the Gospels. Faith usually seems to be a free-will assent that Jesus waits for in order to act in and through a person. But there is also the woman with the hemorrhage, whose faith draws healing power out of Jesus on its own (see Mk 5:30). Then there is the healing of the paralytic, which expanded our discussion to the Communion of Saints and the power of intercessory prayer: “when he saw their faith” (Lk 5:20), Jesus proceeded to heal the paralytic. One student pointed out that we don’t actually know whether the paralytic believed Jesus could do this. The man’s cure was provoked by the faith of his friends. What is this mystery? How are we united in Christ and with one another?

The ordinary means of this identification with Jesus is the Sacrament of Baptism. The sanctifying grace we receive is the very life of God in us; through baptism, we “come to share in the divine nature” (2 Pt 1:4). United to Christ, we are by that very fact united to God and so to one another. Jesus said, “I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me” (Jn 17:20–21). This is the reality of the Communion of Saints. Our personal sanctity is not the exclusive goal of our union with Christ; its ultimate purpose is the building up of the Body of Christ, the Church, the whole Christ. As CCC 1267 states: “Baptism makes us members of the Body of Christ: ‘Therefore . . . we are members one of another’ [Eph 4:25]. Baptism incorporates us into the Church. From the baptismal fonts is born the one People of God of the New Covenant, which transcends all the natural or human limits of nations, cultures, races, and sexes: ‘For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body’ [1 Cor 12:13].”

Bl. Fr. Marie-Eugene of the Child Jesus, OCD, emphasizes that this union is the work of the Holy Spirit in and through each one of us: “We know that it is the Spirit of Love who carries out the eternal design of God. He placed the foundations for it by bringing to pass the mystery of the Incarnation in the womb of Mary. Since then, He continues His work by pouring into our souls a filial charity that identifies us with the Incarnate Word, Christ Jesus. This grace makes us one with Christ, that we may form with Him the whole Christ.”[1] In The Reed Of God, Caryll Houselander points out that this identification takes place slowly and, as its fruit, gives us God’s power to live his life here and now: “What we are asked to do is to be made one with Christ, to allow Him to abide in us, to make His home in us, and gradually, through the oneness that results from living one life, and through the miracles of His love, consummated again and again in Communion with Him, to become Christs, to live in Him as Our Lady did. When we are changed into Him as the bread into the Host, then with His power we can follow His example.”[2]

This past semester, I had the joy of bringing my family to Franciscan University of Steubenville’s Austrian campus, where I taught for the spring.

This past semester, I had the joy of bringing my family to Franciscan University of Steubenville’s Austrian campus, where I taught for the spring. One of the most compelling facets of this experience was our immersion in the lives of many saints as they may be met in various places around the European continent. That, of course, is the extraordinary thing about the saints—they may be encountered in the most tangible of ways by visiting their cities, their graves, and even (in the case of Pope St. John Paul II) their favorite ice cream shops. Their homes are sometimes preserved, as are occasionally their actual bodies in a miraculous way. Over the course of this semester in Austria, I was deeply stirred in my own encounters with the Church Triumphant in these holy places. Allow me to offer three examples.

First, I had quite an astonishing run-in with divine providence in Rome. I had recently read about a remarkable recently beatified woman: Bl. Elisabetta Canori Mora. Born in the 18th century, Elisabetta had fallen in love with a young lawyer and joyfully married him. Then, almost immediately, her husband chose to be serially unfaithful to her. He soon gambled away the young family’s living in a life of self-absorbed debauchery. Hoping for a beautiful marriage and family life, Elisabetta instead found herself unloved and disrespected and very much alone. Her reaction to this terrible situation was profound. The book I had been reading described her response in this way:

Drawing strength from intense prayer and from the conviction that the sacrament of matrimony had truly bound them together in a precious and indissoluble way, Elisabetta resolved on total fidelity to her husband and their two daughters, whom she supported laboriously by her own work. She honored the sacrament she had received, although she was forced to do so alone, venturing onto a “mystical” terrain made of inexhaustible charity, aid for other families in difficulty, the attentive upbringing of her own daughters, and getting to know Jesus her Bridegroom, who assisted her with miracles of love.[1]

When I was walking the streets of Rome, I suddenly remembered her, wondering where in Italy she had lived. A moment’s research relayed to me the astonishing fact that she had actually lived in Rome and her body was buried not a mile away from where I stood. She was here! In amazement, I walked to her church and knelt at her grave, asking her intercession for my own marriage and those of my loved ones. Being in that church was a way to draw close to her. It was an experience both consoling and inspiring.

I’ll never forget my first day on the job as a parish youth minister. The parish business manager kindly escorted me to my office, opened the door, and then simply said: “Welcome! Now go and do youth ministry!” When she left, I felt like the kids in Jurassic Park when the adult in their Jeep abandons them to hide from a T-Rex: “He left us!” Sitting in silence, the weight of my new job overwhelmed me as a crushing confusion set in: How does one simply “go and do” youth ministry? What does that even mean? Where do I start?

Even though I studied and prepared in college for youth ministry, I had a lot to learn. I still do, even after 10 years of full-time parish youth ministry. Over the years, I’ve accumulated some valuable insight about how to help teens grow as disciples that I’d love to share with you.

One mistake I made early on as a youth minister was rushing teens into peer leadership roles. I learned this lesson the hard way after taking a group of teens from my parish to a weeklong Catholic summer camp. That week of camp was awesome; people were encountering Jesus left and right and truly connecting with each other. I was witnessing something beautiful. Young people were sharing, asking meaningful questions, praying with one another, worshiping Jesus with their whole heart, and showing real signs of deeper conversion. When we got back home, the first thing I did was assign many of those teens to help lead small groups during our Sunday youth nights. I thought it was time for them to “go, therefore”! (Mt 28:19). I was excited to see them on mission.

The mistake here is that I was prioritizing their influence over their interior formation. It didn’t take long before this group started to drift apart. Not only did I separate them from each other by assigning them to lead separate groups, I neglected to provide them with deeper formation while “their hearts were burning” (cf. Lk 24:32). Furthermore, I did not offer them more opportunities to continue growing together in community.