2015-05-12T10:18:15-05:00

Last updated on: May 12, 2015 at 10:18 am   By

The responses to the first Listen to Me survey have been astounding so far.  If you are charged with the care of souls, could I recommend you do this?  It takes about twenty minutes to whip together a Google form, and then you have a free, confidential way to ask open-ended questions that let people tell you what they are really thinking.  Even the shy people.  Even the people you think you have pegged, but really you don’t.

Do this, guys.  You’ll be stunned at what you learn.

FYI, survey stays open indefinitely, so go participate any time.  Non-Moms, other versions are coming soon (and there’s a non-Mom option on this one).   Intro and FAQ’s are here.

***

Meanwhile, let’s listen to what a few moms had to say in response to the question, “Is there anything the parish could do to make it easier for you and your family to learn about the Catholic faith?”  I’m quoting only those who indicated I could share their responses.  The content isn’t edited or pared down in any way.  I’ve copied and pasted all the answers to that particular question, or if the person indicated they answered it elsewhere on the survey, I grabbed the answer as-directed.  

These answers are in no particular order, just served out as they came in, though I did pull a really positive one to stick at the end, so that we could finish happy. 

Our parish does a really good job offering Bible studies, etc. We have several–dozens–of intentional followers of Jesus longing to learn more about Him and His Church.

 

CCD is Wednesday nights at 7. This is an improvement over 9 am Sunday morning (because I’m not a morning person, and don’t want to try to get up there at nine when Mass is at ten). The result of CCD at that time, though is — when I’m working until five o’clock (in yet another town — thirty miles west of where we live) I have to get home, get my children fed, get them rounded up and ready, and drive another twenty minutes north to get to CCD. We have one hour. We don’t start classes until the last Wednesday of September (although school otherwise usually starts around August 15th), and ends the last week of April (with a picnic). May is out of the question, because every small town high school has graduation in May, and families cannot manage it.

So — more CCD classes (which answers the next question). Maybe a strictly Catholic VBS (instead of the community VBS which can only give our kids a Catholic experience stripped of everything that might make our Lutheran and Methodist neighbors uncomfortable). Maybe having a mid-week mass at a time other than 8:30 am (or at any time other than during the work day).

Maybe, given the cyber-nature of our lives, more of an online presence, period. 

 

No. I think they try hard. I am a reader though and learn best by reading on my own.

 

Having other faithful Catholic families around, to grow up with, to make it their “norm.” Their cousins on my side are of course Protestant, and my husband’s siblings don’t have kids yet (and they’re mostly Catholic in name only anyway, not practicing).

 

I wish I knew the answer. My husband is very tolerant of my attending the faith formation activities in the parish (40 hours, Advent or Lent series, Bible studies) but he has no interest in attending any of them. He attends Mass and except for helping at the parish fair, that is it for him. I wish I knew the ‘thing’ that would encourage him to learn more about the Catholic faith.

 

Offer inter-generational programs.

 

I don’t know. Except that I generally feel my child will receive better education in the faith if I teach it myself than if I entrust him or her to the religious education system at churches. I know there are many good teachers but there are many who do not truly teach the catechism and warp our beliefs and I don’t see how I can be certain what kind of teacher my child is getting. So I just steer clear and do it at home. I suppose more faith that only well trained, orthodox teachers would be in charge of RE would help.

 

I wish there were a more serious catechesis offered for children in our area. Not a watered-down Sunday-School “God Loves You” lesson offered once a week while my husband and I stay in the pew, but actual training in the catechism.

 

Childcare during faith-building events. My parish is large and hosts frequent Bible studies, speakers, and other events, but parents usually can’t attend because hiring a babysitter for three kids at $50 a night for a 24-week Bible study course would cost $1,200.

 

Adult ed! Bible study! Small groups!

 

Hold events for parents at the SAME TIME as those for children, so the times overlap and everyone has a place to go.

 

Bulletin inserts are always helpful to me.

Maybe a “Did you know ____?” at the time of the announcements.

 

I’m more educated in the faith than most of the priests I’ve ever had.

 

I always thought an ongoing family catechesis program could be great. Not sure how the logistics would work, but the idea is appealing to me. Or just any kind of family oriented prayer experience or night?

A QUALITY WEBSITE with good links to good Catholic resources would be wonderful. None of the parish websites in our diocese are very helpful.

 

Teach it from the ambo. People don’t need to hear about how damn special they are, one more time in a sermon. They need to understand why the sign of the cross matters and opens our prayer and mass; what the Eucharist is; why we DO the things we do. They need to see the connection of it all to scripture. I’ve noticed in church that people pay attention when the sermon actually teaches something — whether it is something historical about biblical culture, or about the whys and wherefores of the faith — they DO NOT pay attention to, “you’re special; be kind to yourself; God is special; Mass is special.”

 

More programs offered on-line. There are programs from Ascension Press that allow people to go through programs on-line on their own. The cost is minimal – like $10 a month to the Parish after they have purchased a Starter Pack for a program. Study programs can then be setup online and promoted to the Parish and people can sign up on their own to learn more about the Mass or Prayer. Parishes resist doing things this way as they want the people coming to a class where they can meet – This is totally understandable and of course this is the optimal way to learn. But on-line learning can just be another option, especially for college age students.  

 

No, they’re pretty helpful here about this.

 

Mother-baby friendly events, as well as child-friendly/family-friendly events.  

 

One or two more time options for Communion prep would be nice. A family class time, so I wouldn’t need a sitter when I took a class, would be awesome.

 

Our parish is struggling to find a good way to implement an adult RCICA (RCIA for Catholic adults). Probably our best catechesis program for adults has been Theology on Tap which is generally targeted to young adults, but in our parish is well attended by adults of all ages. 

 

I don’t know. I’m not really looking for that so much.

 

Family events where babies are welcome and room is made for them. We attended a retreat once that was during the day with a separate, but connected room with a changing table, crib and rocking chair.

Events in the morning or afternoon, evenings don’t work for us – ever.

 

More studies. Retreats. etc. The parish/Archdiocese is doing the Why Catholic program but I chose to do the Catholic Scripture Study instead. One night a week was hard enough for me.

 

This is the area I want to help improve as I mentioned above. My inquiries about an inquiry group and points my husband wanted to expand on our website has led to our parish beginning to look into providing more information on a lot of fronts (bulletin, social media, website, person-to-person, etc.) Our pastor views it as religious education and we’re beginning to push it beyond the typical groups to the whole parish and beyond…

 

 

I wish the Life Teen/PSR classes were less dumbed-down and more in-depth. I have a ton of Catholic resource books and my kids really know their catechism and Catholic history by the time they leave homeschool and enter the high school. So I don’t send them to those classes.

But, to be fair, we’re sending our 7-yo to the local Catholic school next year for her 2nd grade year so that she’ll get the first communion stuff without us having to go to the PSR classes and to satisfy the parish requirements for that. We’ll supplement at home.

 

Maybe more babysitting offered? They’re pretty on top of that too, though.

 

No. 

 

Take more time during homilies and other moments when appropriate to educate those in attendance on what is happening in the Mass. Help us to become more informed and engaged. Help those of us with non-Catholic family members (and automatic mode Catholics) feel curious about and proud of our faith. 

 

More programs geared towards families as far as when they are offered (time of day) or programs that actually have childcare available. There are programs currently that look great, but without childcare we cannot attend. 

 

I would love to get the Magnificat regularly through our Parish

 

Make inquiries into RCIA and baptismal preparation a little more accessible. Bureaucracy difficulties are amazingly frustrating, and don’t give a good impression on those looking tentatively, at the sacraments and the church. Having baptismal preparation in the evening when most soldiers (we’re a military family, and go to the chapel on post) are off duty would make life significantly easier too, rather than an early afternoon meeting time.

 

My husband started teaching the Baltimore Catechism at our church before Mass and I have started a women’s group and we read papal encyclicals. We are learning about our faith in these ways.  

 

Having classes/Bible studies/etc. after Mass on Sundays or on mornings during the week. Better times for PRE classes. Not everyone has a 9-5/M-F job.

 

Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Husband & I have boatloads of theological knowledge, but I’m deeply impressed by the way that CGS encourages the child’s own life of faith.

 

Make the military not work our husbands so much and we could learn as a family. 

 

We teach and learn at home.  

 

Encourage teachers and Priests to talk about the controversial stuff that most do not address. So many do not understand or know the faith because parish staff is afraid it will hurt people’s feelings to discuss theology behind why we believe certain things and need the Sacraments. We are teaching a watered down faith to teenagers about to be confirmed because I’ve been personally told by staff that I was not to discuss divorce, birth control, etc. or explain our stance because it might hurt the kids’ feelings if their parents are not practicing Catholics, do these things and still take Eucharist. I have also been told that these 15/16 year old are not smart enough to understand theology of the body or apologetics when it comes to our faith. How are we supposed to raise the next generation of Catholics to carry on our faith if they do not believe or understand?

 

Have more Faith Formation nights. Like sermons/teachings on a Tuesday night with childcare provided.

 

I would like an evening Adult Faith Formation Class.

 

We need more staff, a youth minister, and an adult faith formation leader. We are so limited in what is offered because of limited staff.

 

I probably would have had a long list of suggestions before I started working with CCD and eventually becoming the DRE. Once I really was in the trenches, I started to realize teaching the faith is so much harder than people think. Everyone thinks they have an answer. I see so many blogs on the subject, but most of them are completely unrealistic. Until you’ve really gotten involved in catechetical ministry you just don’t know what it’s like. I guess what I would answer now would be more family centered activities directly related to the faith and short answers, bullet points, etc about different topics in the bulletin.

 

Catechesis of the Good Shepherd would be nice.

 

Our parish is actually great with offering continued learning classes and seminars.

 

I wish the church did more to connect families and groups. I think both my husband and I could benefit from meeting other families that face the same challenges. We definitely feel very isolated from the larger parish community.

 

Adult faith formation classes? I don’t know what a good format is for adults. 

 

More seminars offered on weekends versus weekdays. It’s hard to work full time then find childcare for weeknight seminars. Also, options for childcare during seminars if children are not allowed. As my child becomes school age, I think a separate children’s liturgy would be awesome. Maybe do an activity based on the readings and homily then rejoin their parents before the Eucharistic prayer starts.

 

 

Homilies with some meat instead of generic “love everybody” themes would be nice.

 

Our Parish is actually giving away the Lighthouse Catholic Media CDs instead of selling them and our whole Parish is addicted to them. Our neighboring Parish has an “Ask Father” event where people submit questions anonymously and Father answers them. I love that idea! I’d even offer to host it.

 

How about an online course like a MOOC but for the parish / deanery? At an adult level, but not too theological as that could well put people off. But many of us have a child’s knowledge of the faith and we should have a chance to update it.

 

I wish the homily was more challenging and talked more about concrete ways to live our faith. We have whole family catechism which is really nice, separate classes for little kids, big kids, and adults. 

 

I’d love to have an ongoing couples group.  

 

Rather than CCD, why not have more Parish missions? I’ve learned so much about my faith by attending those sessions but they only happen during Lent.

 

I think more retreats would be nice since our parish is the greatest distance from our diocese.

 

Good homilies with invitations to Q and As. Cd and book recommendations. Authors and speakers to visit.

 

Better support for homeschoolers. 

 

Nope. That’s my responsibility. I don’t need to be spoonfed. 

 

More classes and groups, even casual ones, would be wonderful. I’m very, very shy and this would be a wonderful way to meet others and learn more. 

 

“Bang for your buck” homilies that are instructive and well thought out. 

 

Adult Education post confirmation. We tried the “Why Catholic” program with our church and it was painfully pedantic. There is nothing for Catholics who already know their faith besides taking masters degree level theology classes, and no one has time for that with families. The church has a hard enough time finding people to teach first communion prep to 14 year olds. The parish is (understandably) trying to save people from drowning. There will never be anything for those of us who can tread water. 

 

In truth, we seem to do all right learning about the faith. My husband is of an intellectual, philosophical bent, and leaning more about our faith is one of our common loves. 

 

I wish we had more homilies about the harder teachings of the Church. Even lay leaders in my parish lead publicly scandalous lives and are ignorant of church teaching. 

 

Make RE a FAMILY-centered experience, instead of a “drop-your-kid-off-and-we’ll-teach-him-more-than-you-could-ever-possibly-know-about-the-Catholic-Church” situation. My husband and I have taught RCIA in our parish for 3 years (after having taught Baptism for 4 years) and we have learned SO MUCH from teaching it! We both grew up Catholic in Catholic schools, but there is so much more to know than what went in one ear and out the other for 12 years in parochial schools!  

 

We have a good offering of adult education – offered by lay people who are permitted to do this without interference provided the priest trusts them and they have the right educational formation themselves. These lay people are on the whole able to provide a more generous interpretation of the faith and one more attuned to lay realities.

The missing element is training and educating people to be confident in the church’s broad liturgical tradition so that we could have a flourishing life of prayer and worship as a community outside of the Mass and rosary.

 

We belong to a fairly large parish with an elementary school and high school. There are A LOT of young families with children. Every year there is a Mother’s Retreat that is one overnight. Babies are not welcome. This goes against so much of my instinct about being Catholic and open to life. I tried to fight it a few years ago but got nowhere. It still makes my blood boil just thinking of it.

I also recently emailed our director of adult formation, twice, about starting a Bible study that would be friendly to moms with young children attending with them. No response. 🙁

 

Our parish is awesome. People drive an hour to come to our parish (little rural parish in sticks; looks like public storage on the outside) for the quality of the liturgy and the Faith Formation program.

And there you go.  There were many more responses from parents who didn’t want their answers shared publicly, some of them absolutely heartbreaking.  Do this in your own parish. You need to hear the whole story, and I’m not at liberty to publish it all.

File:Christ and the adultress.jpg

Artwork: Attributed to Orazio de Ferrari [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

2015-05-10T15:20:07-05:00

Last updated on: May 10, 2015 at 3:20 pm   By

Father Longenecker* writes about his frustration as a homilist here, and he raises a good question: Does good preaching matter?  And if so, what kinds of homilies (or lectures) are effective, and what effect do they have?

I’m going to answer as someone who teaches the Catholic faith outside the pulpit, who’s been subject to the very best and very worst of Christian preaching and teaching, and who spends an awful lot of time with Catholic lay people who say the things they don’t say around priests.  This is what I know:

1. Of course you want to be a good speaker.

It goes without saying, but since not everyone who speaks does it well, and not everyone who can speak well speaks well all the time (guilty as charged), we’ll just tuck that reminder away.

A quick tip for the mediocre: If speaking isn’t your gift, go short, go organized, and stay tight to a well-written script (and it’s okay to borrow from better script writers, no problem).  If you do those three, as long as you can be physically understood, you’ll be fine.  I’ve seen piles of dubious speakers produce perfectly good, useful, helpful, inspiring talks just by following those rules.

Most of us (that’s me, and I don’t want to talk about how I know and I wish you wouldn’t either) can’t afford to break those rules.

UPDATED: Here’s a link to the Sound Cloud account of Fr. Renaurd West.  A friend shared his Epiphany sermon with me, and it’s a great example of just a normal sermon by a normal guy.  You can do this.  Anyone can do this.  Teach the Catholic faith, clean, simple, sincere, done.

2. Of course you’ll stick to telling the truth.

If you lie from the pulpit, that’s like a super serious mortal sin.  Just sayin’. So stick to the Catholic faith.   Don’t make stuff up** that isn’t actually the truth. Thanks.

3. When evaluating feedback, consider the source.

There is something to be learned from each comment you receive, and from every silence as well.  The trick is in knowing what you should learn.  Since you aren’t omniscient you’ll screw this up sometimes, but it’s a skill you can hone.   Here’s Father L. talking about one of the frustrating kinds of feedback he gets:

Let’s say I preach about the need to be more generous to the Lord’s work. Invariably I’ll have some rich businessman come out the door and say, “Great homily Father!” I happen to know this guy is a millionaire and that he himself gives very little to the church, but he makes a big show of it when he does actually cough up and write a check for a hundred bucks. He hasn’t heard the homily on sacrificial giving at all because he thinks he IS a sacrificial giver and thinks everybody else are the tightwads.

What does this feedback from Mr. Delusional tell us?  It tells us that a) the sermon was for someone else, not this guy and b) this guy needs some remedial work in a few other areas.  Mr. D’s just tipped you off on where you need to go with your preaching next.  It’s the double-whammy sermon: AND you gave an important message to who knows how many people who needed to hear what you said and took the message home to ponder in privacy, AND you baited your other congregants into showing their hand.  Can’t ask for more than that.

4. Yes, sermons do change lives.

The thing about being a priest, speaker, teacher, or ordinary person who just says stuff to people, is that you never really know the impact you have.  People do listen.  People do take to heart what you have to say.  People do go home and act upon your message.  You won’t hear about it much.  The kind of people who listen and act are not usually the kind of people who hog piles of your time with a play-by-play on their personal lives.

If you don’t say it, no one can act on it.  If you do say it, you might literally be the reason someone is alive today, someone returns to the Church, someone accepts the Gospel, someone responds to a religious vocation . . . there’s no end to the good that is secretly wrought by the work of tireless preachers.

5. The pews are not full of Catholics.

If you’re a priest, you don’t get to know people as well as we layfolk do.  People put on their clergy-face when they talk to the clergy.  But you can read polls, and that’s a start.  The pews are full of people who come to church on Sundays, but those people may or may not know the Catholic faith.  Most of us do not know our faith, and nearly all of us don’t know our faith as well as we should.   I recently heard a priest lament that he can’t offer adult faith formation because he hasn’t got anyone to teach it — there simply aren’t knowledgeable adults in his parish who are capable of teaching the faith to other adults.

When you step to the pulpit, podium, or blackboard, assume your audience knows nothing.  Nothing.  This is hard to do, because when you’ve mastered a topic it seems self-evident to you, and so you worry you’re going to bore your listeners rehashing the same old tired facts.  Never mind that.  Suck it up, tell that joke about the two dogs who met at the corner if you must, and then explain the Catholic faith.  People don’t know it and they need to learn it.

Anyone who is already perfectly evangelized and catechized will politely say a rosary for you while you speak, and they won’t mind it one bit.

6. We are swimming in lies.  We need not just the truth, but the whole truth.

If you’re preaching fire and brimstone, you’d better be preaching eternal blessedness alongside.  You might could keep someone from committing a mortal sin by instilling in them a sound fear of Hell, but you won’t produce martyrs and saints without a sure hope of Heaven.  (You know who does this well?  Msgr. Pope.)

To get more practical, here’s what people seem to respond to well: Hearing the basics of the truth over and over again.  You have to be “foundational” about this, as one of my favorite preachers is fond of saying.  We’re living in a world where people have no ethical sense whatsoever.  They’ve been steeped in utilitarianism since the moment they were conceived.

So you have to daily, yes daily, preach basic things like, “You have inherent worth as a human being simply because you are you,” and “People are not products meant to fulfill the desire of others.”  You have to say things like, “You can’t do something evil that good might come of it,” and “Every child longs to be raised in a stable, loving family with his own mother and father, and we need to do what we can to make that happen, and never choose to intentionally undermine that basic need of the human person.”

People don’t know this stuff.  They can’t understand the teaching against IVF unless they first understand that children aren’t a product to be manufactured and sold, and that we can’t do evil that good might come of it, and that sometimes we must forgo something very, very good (the joy of family life, in this case) in order to have something better (the joy of treating other people as they deserve, rather than as objects of our own gratification).  It’s only after the foundations have been laid that you can build the structure.

You can reasonably assume that nearly every person sitting in the pews isn’t just a house built upon sand, but a shack that’s built upon a sinkhole.  You’ve got to fill it all in with solid rock.  That’s a lot of rock.

 

7. The troops need to be encouraged.

There are a few well-informed, sane, sober, eager Catholic souls residing at your parish.   People who could probably preach your sermon for you, and might even do a better job delivering it than you do.  (But they can’t, because they aren’t clergy: God put you in the pulpit because He knew you needed to suffer more.  You’re welcome.)  These people are not therefore invincible.

Your dream parishioner is not a superhero.  Your stalwart troops aren’t uncrushable, like Wile E. Coyote.  They show up at Mass because they know they desperately need all the divine assistance they can get.  They need to hear the truth over and over again, because life in the world sucks the spirit dry.  (And we all live in the world, even those of us who live alone in our hermit caves.) If your homily were superfluous, it wouldn’t be part of the liturgy.  We’d skip it and go straight to doughnut hour ten minutes earlier.

We need to hear the truth.   We need to be reminded of what we already know.   We need to be put back on course when we inevitably start to drift off a bit.

Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself. We need to hear today the thing that when we heard it a year ago, we weren’t in a position to act on it in quite the same way we can now.  We need to hear today the thing that just didn’t apply to us a year ago, so we weren’t listening so closely then.  We need to hear today the thing that we’ve been fighting against for a decade, and if we aren’t reminded, again, that the fight is worth it, we’re this close to giving up and going home.

***

Conclusion: Yes, Father Longenecker, there is a Santa Claus.  Um, that is, thank you Fathers and Deacons for your willingness to preach, even though you have to preach it to us slobs in your parishes, instead of the people in Heaven who finally have their act together.  Don’t give up now, you’re not dead yet.

 

File:El Astillero - graffiti 1.JPG

 

*Note to readers: Father Longenecker is a great speaker.  Totally worth booking for your next event.  If you like his blog, you’ll love his talks.

**Not only is making up junk for your sermon a mortal sin, my kids will mock you for the rest of their lives.  They have finely-tuned BS detectors and a penchant for satire they got from . . . um, I don’t know where.  We’re maybe a touch more Jerome than Therese around here.  So don’t stay stupid stuff.  Small children will be amused at your expense, and you don’t want that.
Artwork by Zarateman (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

2015-05-01T10:38:24-05:00

Last updated on: May 1, 2015 at 10:38 am   By

I’m reminded by Ruth at Wheelie Catholic that May 1 is Blogging Against Disablism Day.  My message this year is real simple: Don’t kill innocent people.  Specifically we’ll talk this year about the people in your family. Do not kill them.

1. Don’t kill your children.  Even the disabled ones.

If you are hoping to have a child, do not make plans to kill that child if he or she isn’t good enough for you.  That’s fake parenting.  There are plenty of real parents out there who understand that when you conceive (or adopt) you are making the decision to accept the child who comes your way, no matter what.

It’s not “parenting” if it’s about your fulfillment and your perfect life.  Parenting is a sacrificial act.  It’s about deciding to love and care for someone no matter how difficult it gets, no matter how unpleasant, embarrassing, terrifying, mortifying . . . that’s parenting.  It won’t always be idyllic.  It may involve tough decisions that don’t look like Mayberry.  But it never, ever, involves directly killing your innocent child.  If you have to murder somebody, you’re doing it wrong.

–> To review: Aborting children with disabilities does not “prevent” disabilities.  It kills children with disabilities.  Don’t do that.

2. Don’t kill your other relatives.  Even the sick or injured ones.

Sooner or later everyone dies, and it’s not always a quick, easy process.  The human body can be woefully stubborn.  The in-between phase between perfect health and final breath can be long and painful.  It can be extremely difficult to care for a family member who is seriously ill or disabled.  There is no obligation to resort to extraordinary measures in order to prolong life.  But we don’t therefore directly kill someone who is difficult to care for.

There may come a time at the end of life when the body no longer tolerates food or drink; but so long as it is possible, we provide food and drink.  There are times when the best available medical treatment has side effects that might shorten life; but we don’t intentionally give a lethal dose of a medication for the purpose of ending that life.  Killing your family members isn’t kind or caring, it’s murder.  Don’t do it.

[See below in the links for some more reading on this topic.]

3. Don’t discriminate against yourself, either.

Murder is the worst sort of disablism, and self-murder is not valorous, it’s cowardice.  If you don’t want to be a burden to other people, cultivate a kind and caring personality.  Learn how to be happy in difficult circumstances. Get your financial affairs in order.  Keep your house clean.   If you’ve lived a life of generosity and selflessness, should the day should come that someone needs to care for you, it will be that person’s privilege to do so.

Don’t deny them that privilege.  Don’t deny yourself the growth and maturity that comes from a time of suffering well-practiced.  As you reach the end of your life, don’t deny yourself and your family the chance you’ve been given to prepare for death and bereavement by cutting that time short.  Don’t be afraid.  Be brave.

Disablism is about cowardice.  It’s about not being man enough to hack it in the real world.  You’ve only got this one life.  Don’t live it like a sniveling weenie, hiding from every little problem that comes your way.  Don’t be some fainting parlour-pansy, unable to deal with the stinky, tiring, unpleasant facts of living in this fallen world.

You don’t need a new car, a big house, or the right beer in order to be bold and courageous.  Start by not murdering people, and the rest will follow.

 

Blogging Against Disablism Day, May 1st 2015
Click through to read other contributions to BADD 2015

 

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2015-04-19T16:23:57-05:00

Last updated on: April 19, 2015 at 4:23 pm   By

In a private conversation I found myself writing, “This is why I despise, and I do mean despise, age-bracketed sacramental prep.”  I’m referring to the practice, nearly universal, of giving all the Catholic seven-year-olds First Reconciliation and First Holy Communion, and then setting another age — could be seven, or nine, or fourteen, or seventeen — when we round them up again and give out Confirmation.  RCIA is more of the same, if we count “age” in terms of “months spent attending our program.”

It’s a convenient method: If child is of the proper age, then sign up for classes.  (Or if the adult has the proper attendance record, then put on white garment at Easter Vigil.)  I hate it not because it hasn’t worked for my family — it’s been just fine, thank you.  I hate this practice because it’s contrary to the Christian faith.

Graduation not Evangelization

You can’t measure another person’s relationship with Christ.  There are, of course, plenty of indicators that someone is in love with Jesus and prepared for the sacraments, but the Ask-and-You-Shall-Receive method (which is the Christian method) is bureaucratically terrifying: How can we possibly trust someone who claims to want to receive Our Lord?  Isn’t it better to make sure all comers sit through a certain number of hours of classes, and are carefully trained to give us the right answers, so that we can cover our spiritual liability?

Age-based or time-based systems allow us to create a curriculum, walk the student through it, and check a series of boxes.  Human souls aren’t check boxes, but by a cleverly designed system of rewards and punishments, we can motivate the student to say the right things at the right time, so that we are neatly checked off.

Of course this creates drama of gut-wrenching magnitude if the student fails to comply: Relatives are standing by, demanding a sacramental performance.  There’s no room for cold feet.  Luckily the student is under sufficient pressure that most behave as requested: The alternative to being “ready” when the appointed day comes around is to go through the blasted classes for another whole year some time in the future, and nobody wants that.

Numbers not Persons

The good news is that many people who present themselves for the sacraments are adequately disposed to receive them.  We as a Church may be guilty of dereliction of duty, but that dereliction isn’t 100%.  So let’s imagine a course full of age-qualified students who are in fact of the proper disposition.  This is a catechist’s dream, and here’s what we catechists do when we’re living that dream: We say, “Okay, I’ve got a room full of people aged _____, and about six months to cover the necessary course work. What is a typical person this age like? What do they typically need to know? What are their typical questions and concerns?” And then we make a class.  Sometimes we make a pretty good class.

Here’s the trouble: Even if every single student in the room has a sincere desire to know, love, and serve God, not a single one of them is “typical.”  Spend half an hour actually listening to a group of seven- or fifteen- or forty-year-olds, and you quickly realize that each person is utterly different.  It is as if each one were handcrafted by the Creator, unique and unrepeatable.

This doesn’t mean that there’s no value to group class work.  But we fool ourselves if we say, “Well, that person took the class for people her age, so she’s prepared.”  Really? You managed to answer her particular doubts? Help her understand her personal vocation and mission for the next few years?  Meet her needs intellectually and spiritually, and leave her in a position to pursue wholehearted love of God until the next bureaucratic encounter?

Yeah, no.   You didn’t.  No way.  You can’t.  There’s no putting twenty kids in a room for an hour a week, and managing to provide them each with the course they need and the spiritual guidance they need.

Culture not Christ

When we provide industrial-scale catechesis, and that’s what our present system does, we turn out culturally-prepared sacramental widgets.  This doesn’t mean you can’t use the system for good.  When my son determined he was ready for confirmation, we availed ourselves of the system, got the good out of it (and there was much good), and he was confirmed.

But by age-bracketing, even the sacramental language tends to get overgrown with the weeds of cultural norms: “You’ve taken a big step today.”  “This is our rite of passage.”  “This is your decision to become an adult member of the Church.” “This is an important day for you and your family.”

These are things that slip out of the mouths of even we who regard the sacraments as divinely-ordained, intimate encounters with Christ.  First Communion isn’t about not being a baby anymore, and Confirmation isn’t about the journey into adulthood.  But age-bracketed programs are indeed about these things, and thus we say what we see: Sure enough, here’s a group of fifty teenagers dressed up in their Sunday best, standing in front of the bishop declaring their arrival at spiritual adulthood.  That’s not what Confirmation is, but that is in fact what confirmation-class creates.  It isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not the sacrament.

And this is the thorny part: There’s nothing wrong with a line of little girls in white dresses excited about their big day.  Nothing wrong with the party and the cake and relatives reminiscing about their turn through the sacrament mill in years past.  If age-bracketed sacraments were effective at creating lifelong disciples, we could say that it’s okay to have the good lumped in with the best.

But the reality is that this system doesn’t work at the thing it is supposed to do.  It works at creating culturally significant social moments.  It doesn’t work for Christian discipleship, because discipleship is not about rites of passage.

The Beautiful Mess that is the Christian Life

The call for the “New Evangelization” refers to the evangelization of our post-Christian societies.  We’re post-Christian specifically because the culturally-bound, age-driven system didn’t work at churning out Christians.  What works is individual encounters with Christ.  One person at a time, one soul at a time.  It’s demanding. Hard work.  It takes years of prayer and guidance and support to grow a mature Christian, whether you start with a newborn baby or a newly-reborn adult.

The model for Christian discipleship is the family, and that tells you everything about how “inefficient” the divinely-ordained system is: Here we have two adults, and they spend all their time and energy, day and night for decades, just getting that little handful of people entrusted to them guided towards spiritual maturity.

So what do we do, if not the sacrament mill?  We evangelize and disicple parents.  Physical parents and spiritual parents, whatever kind happen across our way.  This takes time and energy, and while you can do some of it via large-scale programs, much of it has to be done one-on-one.  Hours and hours spent just helping a few people grow in their faith.  And then they in turn help their children (physical or spiritual) to grow in their faith via the same long, slow, aggravating method.

The sacraments, meanwhile, are kicked out of the classroom and relegated to the altar, where they act not as cultural touchpoints, but as — get this — God’s chosen manner of pouring out His grace upon us.

You can’t check-box this method.  It feels good to have a graduation.  Shiny faces who completed the course and reached the high point?  We like that.  We feel successful.  Real human souls never give us that faux-satisfaction.  One day they delight, the next you have to sit on your hands and resist the urge to shake a little sense into that shiny face.   The only graduation is Heaven, and until then, everyone’s still in holiness school.

But since God came up with that method, perhaps it’s worth trying.

File:Kakerdaja raba talvine maastik.jpg

Artwork by Abrget47j (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

2015-04-01T12:29:59-05:00

Last updated on: April 1, 2015 at 12:29 pm   By

Dear Pope Francis,

Other people have shared their ideas with you on how to bring more people back to the faith or into the fold. Their ideas vary from the predictable (evangelization) to the ludicrous (changing Church teaching).  Today my son and I would like to urge you to implement two reforms that are nearly guaranteed to work, and which hardly cost anything at all.

1. Add More Sacraments

I understand that we’re or more less stuck with the seven we’ve got, but you are a Jesuit, so I feel certain you can find a way to work around that little obstacle.  Here’s the situation: Everyone knows that Catholics really just want their sacraments and that’s it.  Thus, whenever the topic of the New Evangelization comes up, the conversation invariably devolves into a debate about which confirmation age is best suited for snaring as many unsuspecting young people as possible into participating in the life of the Church.

This won’t do.  It’s no fair to expect the Big Five to do all the work.  (No one’s exactly weeping at the pastor’s door about being denied the chance to go to Confession, and though people make noise about opening up Holy Orders to more comers, generally if the prospect of celibacy doesn’t quash tepid vocations, the prospect of a lifetime spent trying to fund major construction projects by holding fish fries separates the wheat from the chaff.) What we need are more easy sacraments.  Sacraments heavy on photo opportunities and reasons to go shopping.

Naturally we’ll frame them in a way that lets people feel like they’ve accomplished a major milestone, but without demanding any particular sacrifice or commitment. Do tone down the bit about how actually God wants everyone in the Church, and thus the fact that you have an immortal soul redeemed by the personal sacrifice of God Himself makes you just like everyone else.  In these modern times, we need sacraments of specialness.   We suggest you space the sacraments of specialness evenly throughout the normal course of human life, perhaps with a new s.o.s. every two to five years.  You might get some ideas on what sells by visiting the mall.

2. Give Things Out at Mass More Often

It’s well known that people come to Mass in order to get stuff, and frankly we’re not very choosy.  As my son observes, on one of our best-attended days of the year, we’re giving out dirt.  And not even a teaspoonful per person.  Ashes, leaves . . . these things don’t cost much.  Surely a little walk around the grounds will reveal other ideas for cheap things to give away. Perhaps we can hand out bits of gravel on the feast of the Chair of St. Peter, or pinecones for St. John the Baptist.  (I don’t know what the connection would be on that one, it just seems like it would work.)  Sand? Tiny pieces of beach glass?  Shredded newspaper?  The possibilities are endless.

While we’re at it, have you noticed that people will stick around and stand in long lines in order to get their throats blessed after Mass once a year?  Why aren’t we blessing cell phones on the feast of St. Clare, and bus passes on the feast of Pope St. Urban?  This strategy could both improve attendance and discourage people from leaving immediately after receiving Communion.

***

Holy Father, we realize you are busy with reforming the curia and confounding the journalists, and that’s why we’ve chosen suggested reforms that will be easy for your  men on the ground to implement.  All we need to do is drop a few hints that the Church has a new sacrament coming out, or that we’re giving away free stuff next Sunday, and the parish phones will be ringing off the hooks with people calling to get the details.  It’ll be like Good Friday and Easter wrapped up into one.  How could you say no to that?

Wishing you all the best,

Your Faithful Friends.

File:Pope Urban I.jpg

Artwork: Artaud de Montor (1772–1849) (http://archive.org/details/livesofpopes01artauoft) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

2015-03-17T17:57:28-05:00

Last updated on: March 17, 2015 at 5:57 pm   By

Ninth grade is when our parish does confirmation, and my son indicated last summer that yes, he’d like to be confirmed.  Would it be possible, I inquired with Father E., for the boy to prepare for the sacrament outside the bounds of the usual parish program?  For various reasons Father said no, he really needed the kid to go through the youth group just like everyone else.

I happen to like our youth minister, and because her gifts are so different than mine, I was happy for the boy to spend a year being mentored by her.  We balance each other out.  What I did not understand was how impossible her job is.

Our diocese sets out standards for what students are supposed to learn each year in religious education. The confirmation class is mostly spent covering first through fifth grades.  I’ve been the kid who showed up to confirmation prep knowing nothing at all about the faith, and I’ve been the catechist who has to put down the book and do a 101 on the most basic elements of the Christian faith.  I don’t for a moment second guess the need for a massive pre-sacramental review.

But I am deeply concerned that at my parish and many others, we regard this need as normal.

Kidnapped and Sent to the Spiritual Orphanage

In the helping professions, there’s a tendency to want to sweep in and “rescue” children by making them wards of an institution.  We look at the saintly orphanage workers in certain impoverished countries, and forget that the “orphans” aren’t orphans — they have living family members who would take care of them if only they could.  The solution to the “orphan crisis” in such situations isn’t to build bigger, better orphanages, but to work towards economic, political, and social reforms that will make it possible for families to raise their own children.

In our parishes, we have just such an orphan crisis.

Life in a Disciple-Free Diocese

I was browsing another set of diocesan catechetical guidelines today, and happened on this snippet about parents providing faith formation at home:

In this option, parents take on the role of the catechist in the formal sense. By virtue of their parental role, parents certainly have the right to teach their children at home. At the same time, the parish has the right to direct and moderate the process. Even though catechesis is happening within the home setting, it is part of a larger parish catechetical program, which must conform to diocesan guidelines.

Home-based catechesis is a difficult option, because it involves a time commitment on the part of the parent in preparation and in structuring the time for formal catechesis. It also involves an additional time commitment on the part of the parish catechetical leader in preparing the parent(s) and monitoring the family’s progress.

(Guidelines for Parish Catechetical Leaders 2014, p. 50)

The goal of the document, of course, is to make sure that pastors are fulfilling their responsibilities — a good goal.  But in the process, note what happens: It becomes inconceivable to imagine the existence of parents who are capable of instructing their children in the faith.

We aren’t speaking here of cautions set forth when pastors note red flags.  We are speaking of norms.  The norm is to assume that Catholic parents simply cannot be trusted to teach their children the Catholic faith.

If you spend much time around Catholics, you know this fear has its basis in sordid reality.

The Solution that Is No Solution

So what do you do when the parents in your parish are not living up to their responsibilities?  Our current solution is to swoop up all the children and put them in a classroom an hour a week with a spiritual orphanage worker.  Since the parents are unable to teach, we’ll teach for them.

There’s fallout, of course.  It’s exhausting trying to parent twenty children, many of whom have been spiritually neglected for years.  It’s difficult finding qualified volunteers, because the work is frustrating and so many adults in the parish don’t know their faith.  Because new families are constantly trickling in with their never-catechized children, we end up having to re-teach the same basic facts year after year.  We’re nowhere near hitting diocesan standards —  if our ninth graders have never opened a Bible, they certainly haven’t read whole books of it.

The staff and the parish resources are stretched so thin there simply isn’t room for adult faith formation. We’re too busy taking care of the orphans — whose parents are sitting in the parking lot waiting for class to get out.

Meanwhile, the kids age out of our programs and leave the faith, because they lack the the factor that has the most bearing on whether an adult continues to practice the faith: Having been raised in a home where the parents were disciples.

Parents Have Immortal Souls, Too

When you monkey around with Church teaching, bad things happen.   We’ve identified a problem — kids whose parents aren’t disciples — and we’re so busy “solving” the crisis by heroically stepping in to replace the parents, that we’ve overlooked a small detail: Doing so is contrary to the Catholic faith.

Parents, not catechists, are the people ordained by God to pass on the faith to their children.  The mission of the Church is to make disciples of those parents, and equip them to teach their children.  If we have to choose between programs for adults and programs for children, adults are the priority.  Not because we don’t care about kids, but because we want what is best for kids.

What is best for kids is what is best for adults and what is best for the Catholic faith: Adult disciples passing on the faith within their families.

File:Церковь Иоанна Предтечи (Керчь) 01.jpg

Artwork: Anatoly Shcherbak (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

2015-02-19T22:51:03-05:00

Last updated on: February 19, 2015 at 10:51 pm   By

Good news: If your Lent needs some improvement, there’s no law that you can’t adjust your personal penance mid-stream. Here are a few things I’ve found helpful for ordinary Catholics to consider when figuring out whether a chosen penance is realistic or not:

1.  Is it consistent with my state in life?

A lot of spiritual writing is done by people who aren’t, say, on call 24/7 caring for young children.  While it is good to examine your responsibilities and ask whether you need to adjust your priorities, it is quite possible that your God-given mission doesn’t give you the luxury of randomly tossing in an extra hour of prayer, or skipping meals your family needs you to eat so you don’t faint on the way to soccer practice.  A good penance supports your vocation, never undermines it.

2. How much room for additional penance do I have?

If you are a yes-person, you may already be living a fairly maxed-out Christian life.  Or perhaps you’ve had perpetual Lenten-living inflicted on you by the mysterious combination of the Will of God and blowback from original sin.  Ask yourself:

  • Do I regularly put large amounts of time and energy into personal pursuits solely for my own pleasure?
  • Am I wallowing in leisure time?
  • Is it pretty easy for me to get through my day and do my job?

If that’s you, pile on the rigor.  But if you are barely making it from minute to minute, don’t be the pharisee laying undue burdens on yourself.

3. Will this penance cause me to forgo a genuine need?

This is where we can start to have fun with fine-tuning.  If you pick a penance like, say, taking cold showers every morning, that works great as long as you are actually physically capable of enduring such a thing.

But imagine if immersing yourself in cold water causes you to become more vulnerable to every passing cold, or makes your back spasm such that you can’t get the snow shoveled like you are supposed to?  In that case, it’s a no-go.  A solution is to look for a penance that allows you to deprive yourself of a comfort, but leaves you absolutely no wiggle room to argue your way out of it by claiming necessity.

So, for example, if you want to give up your Starbucks habit for Lent, but know you’ll end up convinced that zero caffeine = messed up sleep schedule and poor focus at work, then what you do is forgo the Starbucks, but allow yourself some physically-sufficient alternative, like that nasty office coffee or a cup of strong tea.

Here are some examples of penance-with-compensation plans to give you a feel for how it works:

Penance = 20 Push-ups a day, supposing that both you have the shoulders to pull it off and in fact you hate push-ups.  Compensation: You’re allowed to shorten some other (enjoyable) part of your daily workout if you begin to fear you are over-training.  If your shoulders start to bug you, you are allowed to sub out a similarly-hated exercise that uses a different muscle group.

Penance = Giving up sweets. Compensation: If you start to talk yourself into, ‘but I really have a physical need for shortbread right now’ you are allowed to eat some concoction that has the right nutrient fix, but that you don’t actually like to eat.

Penance = Staying off social media.  Compensation: If you begin to worry you are isolated and lacking necessary social support, you’re allowed 30-minutes a day of phone call time to actual friends, even though it means letting the kids watch that horrible saccharine PBS show so you can talk uninterrupted.

Penance = Following the instructions in Sarah Reinhard’s excellent all-purpose Lenten devotional. Compensation: If the day’s penance is truly unsuited, you’re allowed to pick something from one of the other pages.

Rather than Piling, Leave Room for Spur-of-the-Moment Sacrifices

I think that for many people (but NOT ALL people) it is good to have some kind of Lenten sacrifice that is a true penance — a denying yourself of some legitimate good, or taking on of some additional rigor.  This is just spiritual discipline 101, and since I’ve been in 101 for an awful lot of years now, it’s my experience that this is a good way to make a happy Lent.

But what I’d challenge you to do, if you discern that yes, you have room for such a penance, is to limit yourself to just one Lent-long penance.

What you’ll be tempted to do, in a fit of ash-induced piety, is give up sweets, exercise an hour a day, pray the divine office, and care for widows and orphans in your spare time.  What works better for most of us is to pick one thing to be mandatory, and then allow yourself the luxury of making small additional penances as the opportunity arises.

–> If you’re already doing short, lukewarm showers as your penance, then you can allow yourself to skip dessert for just this meal. If you end up having the opportunity to skip again another day, or every single day, hey, that’s great.  But if you only give up one dessert all Lent long as a bonus-sacrifice, it wasn’t nothing.  It still had spiritual benefit.

Only the Lent Demon Demands Perfection

It’s tempting to feel that if we don’t have a perfectly-perfect Lent, beginning at 12:00 AM Ash Wednesday, and complete with a properly sober disposition Holy Saturday and homemade bunny muffins on Easter Sunday, we’re failed Christians.  Nah.  Just not.

If you started Lent too lax, you can up your game mid-way.  If you realize you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, you can thank God for such a relatively gentle lesson in humility, then dial back the penances accordingly.  If you screw it up for three days straight, but overall you think your penance was on target, you can repent and get back on the wagon on day four.

So relax, be as penitential as your state in life permits or inflicts, don’t agonize, and have a good rest of your Lent.

 

File:Francken-simon-Rennes.jpg

 

Artwork: Frans Francken the Younger [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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