Franciscan at Home

Do You Believe in Me or Not?

When I was a student teacher of Grade 12 Philosophy Religion and Grade 11 World Religions classes, I felt inspired to have the students in both classes do an assignment that would involve them spending time before the Blessed Sacrament. The emphasis for the Philosophy class was more on whether or not they can know God exists, as we were covering St. Thomas Aquinas’ Five Proofs for the Existence of God at the time. For the World Religions class, the emphasis was more on communicating with God, as we were covering meditation. The students then had to journal everyday, indicating what they thought about the exercise and what their experiences were. I emphasized the fact that I wanted them to be honest with me and not just tell me what I wanted to hear.

I have to admit that I was reluctant at first to have the students do this assignment, because I was afraid that if nothing happened it would just confirm their doubts about God’s existence or that he is a personal God who cares about them. I suddenly felt God nudge me with this very gentle rebuke, “Do you really believe I am present in the Eucharist or not?”

At the beginning of my second year of teaching religion in a Catholic high school, I began prompting my students in each lesson with a question that helped them apply that lesson to their own life circumstances. One day, in the middle of a lesson on original sin, I asked the students to write a letter to Jesus telling him what the “forbidden fruit” was in their lives and asking his help to resist it. Because students knew I would be collecting and reading their responses, I did not anticipate anything very serious. I was surprised, therefore, when “Monica” wrote that her forbidden fruit was alcohol. I took her paper to the guidance counselor, who directed me to tell Monica that the counselor would meet with her to help her with this struggle. When I next saw Monica, I passed along this message, awkwardly adding that I thought she was a great girl, and I had spoken to the guidance counselor because I wanted her to be free to receive everything God had for her. “Ok,” she said, and left the room, leaving me convinced I had lost her trust and consequently all hope of bringing her to Jesus. To my astonishment, Monica later asked me to be her Confirmation sponsor. In the course of our sponsor-confirmand meetings, I learned that Monica’s mother was an alcoholic, and Monica was struggling to cope. Because of the school’s intervention, Monica developed the resolve to resist these and other temptations. She gradually became more serious about her faith, more committed to Jesus and to Mass attendance, more consistent in living out what she learned in the classroom.

Monica’s response to this prompt was not an isolated self-disclosure. Over the years, students responded to these kinds of prompts with stories of their alcohol or drug use, sexual activity, suicidal tendencies, self-harm, guilt over believing they caused the death of a schoolmate or friend, as well as more “typical” examples of fallen human selfishness. These and other challenging experiences, chosen or inadvertent, extraordinary or mundane, often hindered their ability to believe in God, trust him, follow him. They illustrated, for me, an important reason why “many…adolescents who have been baptized and been given a systematic catechesis and the sacraments still remain hesitant for a long time about committing their whole lives to Jesus Christ.”[1] Monica taught me that I could more effectively prompt my students to commit themselves to Jesus if I could help them recognize the place they needed him most, which often meant facing their own painful life situations in the light of truth. Day in and day out, the classroom presented me with wonderful opportunities to shine that light, for the sake of helping them begin and grow in intimacy with Jesus.

The Evangelistic Mission of the Catholic School

The Catholic Church views the Catholic school as a critically important place of evangelization. Consider the document The Catholic School, promulgated by the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education in 1977:

Evangelization is, therefore, the mission of the Church[2]…To carry out her saving mission…[the Church] establishes her own schools because she considers them as a privileged means of promoting the formation of the whole man.[3] The Catholic school forms part of the saving mission of the Church, especially for education in the faith.[4]

In three consecutive paragraphs, the Congregation makes it clear that the Catholic school exists primarily for the purpose of evangelizing, that is, for proclaiming the Gospel message to students and for training them to live according to that message.[5] This is not proselytizing or coercion, which would be contrary to the students’ intellectual development and free will.[6] Rather, it is fulfilling the very purpose of a school, which is to form the whole person: mind, body, heart, soul, and spirit.[7] The student is an embodied person who has been given intellect and free will to use to spend eternity with God; therefore, education is meant to offer formation of that intellect and will not just for the sake of getting a good job (though that is important), but for the sake of living this life in such a way as to get to heaven. The very nature of a school makes the Catholic school a genuine instrument of the Church to evangelize.[8]

By definition, Catholic schools are an extension of the Church’s saving mission of evangelization, with a special responsibility to provide “a privileged environment for the complete formation of her members” within that context.[1] That “complete formation” must have as its goal a lively and enlivening relationship with Christ specifically in the Eucharist, around which all apostolic work and even the other sacraments are centered (CCC 1324). Turning that belief into practice is one of the most critical activities in which a Catholic school must engage if it is to fulfill its own identity within the larger context of the Church’s mission.

Evangelization and the Eucharist
The Church understands evangelization and the Eucharist to be mutually coefficient. Evangelization is directed in a very real way towards the Eucharist, and the Eucharist is what unleashes the spiritual energies upon which the fullness of evangelization depends.[2] They support and feed each other, and where one is absent, the other will eventually struggle and fail, or at the least be a pale shadow of what it should be.

This means that the Eucharist must have a privileged role in the life, activity, and identity of every Catholic school. Spiritual formation should be centered on the Eucharist, spiritual programs should revolve around it, and catechesis specially devoted to it must have a priority; but, above all, evangelization should be specially directed toward it, and any activities centered around the Eucharist should be in some way linked with evangelization as well.

This is a paid advertisement in the October-December 2019 issue.

I never thought that I was going to work with middle school students. All throughout college, I fully expected that I would spend my years in ministry with ninth through twelfth graders. But the Lord had other plans, and post-college I found myself tasked with building a new middle school youth ministry program. I was young, I was inexperienced, and I had no idea what I was doing. So, I did what any typical type-A, nerdy, recent college graduate would do in the midst of feeling overwhelmed; I reread my notes, where I found this:

“Step One: build a team of adult volunteers.”
Thus, I began. Now, after four years of practice in forming adult leaders, I can honestly say that it has become the most life-giving aspect of my job. There is truly nothing I enjoy more than working alongside the amazing team of adult volunteers I get to serve with, but it didn’t start out that way. It took years of combating and conquering my belief in a number of myths about how to build a healthy leadership team.

And so, in the spirit of learning from the many mistakes I made along the way, I present to you, “Five Myths of Finding and Forming Leaders.”

Maybe it’s too much of a stretch to say that an unmarried tailor who lived with his mother is the reason communism fell in the west. Then again, maybe it’s not.

Venerable Jan Tyranowski was, in many respects, an ordinary working class bachelor. But when he was 35, a homily changed his life. “It is not difficult to become a saint,” the priest said, and Tyranowski believed him. He began reading the Carmelite mystics and praying up to four hours a day. When many of Poland’s priests were sent to death camps in 1940, one of those left behind asked Tyranowski to become more involved in youth ministry.

That’s where he met Karol Woytyla. The young man who would become pope was just a 20-year-old in youth group, but his relationship with Tyranowski changed everything. Karol had become unsure about the wisdom of putting so much emphasis on the Blessed Mother, but Tyranowski pointed him to St. Louis de Montfort, thus shaping the life and papacy of the man who would be the most Marian Pope since St. Peter. Perhaps more importantly, Tyranowski’s work with the young Woytyla (especially after Karol lost his father in 1941) greatly influenced Wotyla’s vocational discernment. A friend of St. John Paul’s from that same youth group insists that John Paul owed his priestly vocation to the single tailor.

Tyranowski died only a few months after Fr. Woytyla was ordained. He didn’t live to see his young friend consecrated bishop or elected pope. He didn’t see the work of the Polish pope break the stranglehold of communism on Poland and her neighbors. Through it all, though, St. John Paul kept a picture of his youth minister on his desk, a single man whose life changed the world.

Remember Your Death

I have a pretty realistic looking human skull on my desk, positioned to face my high school students. It’s constantly “looking” at them. I acquired the skull years ago from an old classroom closet and placed it on my desk. Students immediately started to notice the skull and asked, “Mr. Bitting, why do you have a skull on your desk?” I responded with Sirach 7:36, “In whatever you do, remember your last days, and you will never sin.” I also tell them about the Latin phrase memento mori (remember your death) and show them images of saints depicted with skulls on their desks as a reminder of death and motivation to avoid sin. Even students who are not in my class stop by to ask me about it.

One feature that I like is the removable top portion of the skull. I placed a sticky note with ‘Sirach 7:36’ on the inside of the skull top so I could remove the top and show the verse to inquiring students. The skull has the accurate dimensions of an adult human skull but was bleached and had markings on it from previous teachers. The unnatural color bothered one student in particular, who I’ll call Alex.

Prior to having Alex in my class for his junior year, I had been warned about him. He had spent most of his freshman and sophomore years trying to shock as many students and faculty as possible with his love of heavy metal, violence, satanic images, and affinity for atheism. Our Lord brought Alex to the front of my mind often, and each time I would intentionally pray for him. Shortly after Alex became one of my students, I found out that he had a hobby of creating masks, the kind one typically sees in horror movies or worn by heavy metal bands. One day Alex asked me if he could paint the skull. I said yes but under two conditions: 1) I wanted it to look as realistic as possible, as if it had just been exhumed, not scary like a Halloween decoration and 2) he had to paint the verse Sirach 7:36 on the inside of the skull top. He agreed and took the skull home over Christmas break. When we returned from break in January, he brought me the skull. It looked amazing! Even more students now noticed the skull and asked about it, giving me the opportunity to catechize them about death, sin, and our hope of resurrection in Christ. I praised Alex for the good use of his talents and drew positive attention to him, as I told others that he did the painting, including the Scripture verse. He was proud of his work and seemed to appreciate the compliments he received from other students, even more than the typical shock he normally evoked from them.

On March 25th, Pope Francis released Christus Vivit, “Christ is alive!” This post-synodal exhortation is addressed both to young people (16 to 30 year-olds) and the entire Church. Rich with inspirational quotes and practical suggestions, the document contains many insights about youth, for youth, and for those who minister to youth, while raising many important questions that need to be addressed.

About Youth
A young person stands on two feet as adults do, but unlike adults, whose feet are parallel, he always has one foot forward, ready to set out, to spring ahead. Always racing onward. (140)

Pope Francis begins the document by highlighting young people in the Bible as well as in Church history, figures such as Joseph (son of Jacob), Ruth, and David to St. Sebastian, St. Francis of Assisi and St.

Thérèse of Liseiux. Young people have always played an important role in salvation history. Particular attention is given to Mary, who as a young woman said “yes” to Gabriel, and to Jesus himself: “It is important to recognize that Jesus was a young person. He gave his life when he was, in today’s terms, a young adult” (23).

“Youth is more than simply a period of time; it is a state of mind” (34). This is why the Church, over two thousand years old, can be considered “young”—and needs the help of young people to keep her that way. Francis compares the shallow and superficial ways culture can manipulate youth to the true happiness that only Christ can offer. “Dear young friends, do not let them exploit your youth to promote a shallow life that confuses beauty with appearances” (183). Young people are in danger of being isolated and exploited which makes relationships with older people a great benefit. The young generation needs older generations, and the older generations need them. “When young and old alike are open to the Holy Spirit, they make a wonderful combination” (192).

Annual St.

Head buried in her screen, she was more concerned with live-tweeting the event than listening to the speaker. She was so busy scrolling through social media, she didn’t realize she had walked past a friend she hadn’t seen in years.