Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelisation, talks to women religious gathered in Chicago in September 2017 about the church’s need for “a profound renewal of our catechesis.” Photo: CNS/Simone Orendain.
By Simone Orendain
The head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelisation said Catholics “need a profound renewal of our catechesis.”
Archbishop Rino Fisichella told dozens of religious sisters, mostly teachers of the faith, gathered in Northwest Chicago in September 2017, that there is wrong thinking among the faithful that once they receive the sacraments, they no longer have to learn their catechism.
“By its nature, catechesis is to support believers to understand every day more the mystery of faith,” he said.
Archbishop Fisichella said Catholics could learn this with the help of catechists who are “witnesses” and said that “witness is the sign of a genuine work of evangelisation.”
Referring to Pope Paul VI’s 1975 Apostolic Exhortation on evangelisation, Evangelii Nuntiandi, the prelate emphasised what he called a “very important” section of the document that said people nowadays are more apt to listen to someone who lives out the faith and speaks of it than to teachers of it and that if they do listen to teachers, it’s because the teachers are themselves witnesses of the faith.
“The world of today needs witnesses,” he said.
“And we have got to be there. But don’t misunderstand the word ‘witness.’ It is true that witness, it makes, first of all, our life. But to be a witness, it means also to be a preacher of the word of the Lord.”
Archbishop Fisichella pointed out that being a witness means using one’s mouth to tell others about one’s encounter with Jesus Christ and share what Jesus told them.
However, he also noted the challenge of doing this in a secular age when people are constantly on their mobile devices and, he said, becoming more isolated from one another.
“Everybody in the profound (depths) of his heart feels the desire for God,” the Archbishop told Catholic News Service, after the talk hosted by the Washington-based Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious.
“And for this reason, the mission of the church is the new evangelisation. New evangelisation doesn’t mean a new way to oblige people to believe in God, absolutely not.
“It means only a new step in the world of today, to announce Jesus Christ in the world of today.”
He said, “(It) means to be aware of the changes that we have, the new culture that we have, for instance the digital culture. The internet is creating a new language, a new way of thinking. It has created new behaviours and, paradoxically speaking, is creating new pathologies. And so we need to understand all of that and the new culture how to support believers and how to announce and to challenge people without God to think about him.”
Archbishop Fisichella also told the sisters one of the problems of “our big crisis of faith of today” is that people do not have an answer when they are asked why they are believers.”
“We cannot be afraid in our catechesis to say the choice of faith makes you free because it allows you to enter in the deepest (parts) of your life,” he said.
“Open your mind. Open your heart and you become able to love. You become able to understand your life and future, where you are going.”