Towards An Effective Catechesis

    One of the most fascinating aspects of art is found in its ability to teach or reveal truth. Art, though, speaks its own language and ignorance of the language leaves the depth of the art, its true beauty, ignored and overlooked. The faith of the Catholic Church can be viewed similarly. Without knowing the language in which the Church expresses God's revelation of Himself, then what should be a vibrant, life-altering faith is reduced to a shopping list of doctrines and dogmas viewed once and quickly forgotten.

    As with art, education is the key to understanding the language in which the Church speaks and the Church's worldview. In the Church, this education is known as catechesis. In the United States, catechesis started as the memorization of specific answers to specific questions, which served Catholics well within their Catholic neighborhoods and their Catholic parishes, but failed them once they got out into the larger world and they began to face issues never addressed by the questions and answers they had learned. Following two world wars and in the midst of the chaos of the 1960's and 1970's, the Church in the United States rightly desired to revamp its catechesis. Rather than strengthening the connection between the Catholic faith and its application in daily life, the Church chose to focus on the historical-critical method and its theoretical (and imagined) suppositions, assumptions, and theories by following the lead of Catholic theologians caught up in the zeitgeist of the Protestant German theologians who had come to prominence during the Enlightenment. Since then, the untrained, trusting, and naive laity have heard that the Bible is nothing more than a collection of edited, redacted, and embellished myths, fables, legends, and faulty recollections, only parts of which must be taken seriously due to their bearing on the Catholic faith.

    After more than sixty years of listening to how irrational the Catholic faith is, the laity arrived at two realizations. First, the lists of questions and answers memorized over years of Catholic religious education were not found to be very helpful in either eliciting deeper engagement with the faith after completion of their formal education and had done very little in guiding them through the very difficult times they encountered in the world as adults. Second, the Holy Bible is no more and no less than the myths of the Greeks or the Norse or the fables of Aesop or the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. From these realizations, the laity reasoned to the only logical conclusion they could have reached: the Catholic faith has nothing to offer them. In ever increasing numbers, the laity have exchanged their Catholic faith for a personalized mix of the various cynical ideologies, practices, and addictions presented to them by the culture. After all, if it's all just fantasies, it's better to pick the one, which rationalizes their lusts and reduces their pangs of conscience. The Catholic Church in the United States, in the midst of its own death throes and devoid of any productive thinking on the issue, finds itself as detritus in a growing neo-pagan society. Is there a way out of this?

    If biblical prophecy is anything to go by, no. The world is winding down to a specific end ordained by God from the beginning, an end preceded by the near eradication of the organizational Church in the world, but culminating in the glorious second coming of Christ. What God's Providence has set in motion is to be accepted. The Church, however, has the time to return to its mission of saving souls through evangelization and catechesis, a mission she largely abandoned decades ago. The Church must return to its core competencies, so to speak, and recommit herself to her Founder's Mission. To achieve the most good in the time remaining to her, the Church must begin catechizing those, who are active in the Church now in order to form a cadre of educated, informed, and faithful Catholics, who then can actively evangelize within their parishes' boundaries. To be effective evangelists, however, the catechesis provided to Catholics must focus on the reality of the faith and the ways in which it carries individuals through life's trials, tragedies, and tribulations and abandon the mythologizing of Sacred Scripture and the faith. Catechesis must confirm the reality and the veracity of the contents of Sacred Scripture rather than expounding on the virtues and merits of failed and abandoned methods of exegesis adopted from non-Catholics drowning in Enlightenment hubris. Catechesis today must instill in the faithful the confidence to live courageously as Catholics in an increasing hostile and vindictive society.

    Ultimately, Catholic catechesis must teach Catholics more than lists of doctrines and dogmas. Catechesis must move Catholics to see the world from the Church's perspective, that is Christ's perspective. A Catholic should live in and from a specific world view, a world view which is substantially different from and, in many cases, in opposition to all other world views. From this world view a Catholic lives and breathes and changes his corner of the world for Christ. This world view places all Catholics on the same team working from the same plan towards the same goal, because through the Catholic world view, the Catholic abandons his own will and accepts the Will of God.

Photo credit: John Cafazza on Unsplash