Quo Vadis? Whither goest thou—do you know?
Many of us don’t, though we are constantly on the move. We are a pilgrim people, and “Companions on the Journey” (shudder) is our song. (How many words rhyme with “care and share”? You really don’t want to know.)
As a volunteer catechist who has served in many capacities and parishes over the decades, I have grown weary of the pedagogical model emphasising the “journey” and “lived experience”, rather than the Three D’s: dogma, doctrine, and the final destination.
The JLE model, which still dominates in North America, highlights feelings and relationships, which—make no mistake—are good, but it seems to eschew (sometimes with abhorrence) rote memorisation and knowledge of basic catechetical truths. In fact, you can’t have one without the other.
Thus you arrive at the point where you are asked to teach Grade 8 catechism to church-going teens, some of whom (I kid you not) cannot name the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity.
This dilemma has been decades in the making. As Cardinal Donald Wuerl stated recently to his brother bishops: “Entire generations have become disassociated from the support systems that facilitated the transmission of faith” (Synod on the New Evangelisation October, 2012).
The Church is in trouble when even Grandma doesn’t know her catechism.
Then again, one must occasionally question the quality of the ‘transmitters’. I recall attending an adult faith program where the Director of Religious Education for the diocese vehemently insisted that the newly published Catechism of the Catholic Church was not a “definitive” document, but merely a “springboard for further discussion”.
Sure, Sister, in much the same way that Moses delivered the Ten Commandments in a pan of fruit-flavoured gelatin.
In his book, A Crisis of Truth, evangelist Ralph Martin has called this attitude the “idolatry of the journey” in that “the very notion of finding truth that is clear, authoritative, and binding is consciously or unconsciously rejected or avoided” (pp. 29-31). As far back as 1979, Blessed John Paul II addressed this in his apostolic exhortation Catechesi Tradendae:
“It is… useless to campaign for the abandonment of serious and orderly study of the message of Christ in the name of a method concentrating on life experience.” […] “Nor is any opposition to be set up between a catechesis taking life as its point of departure and a traditional doctrinal and systematic catechesis.” (#22)
Three decades on, life experience has, for some, become the alpha and the omega.
They evaluate everything in terms of their own ‘reality’ and wait for the Church to ‘meet them where they’re at.’ Indeed, Christ does this, but then he calls us onward and upward: “Come, follow me… Go and sin no more.”
Truly, the only living faith is a lived faith, but how can you live what you do not know? People who believe only what they have personally experienced necessarily suffer a stunted and flawed understanding of faith.
My journey soon becomes a series of inwardly-spiralling circles, with, as Pope Benedict puts it, “my proud, all-knowing self” at the centre. Rather than finding God, the ‘searcher’ only sinks further into sin, and becomes very dizzy in the process.
There is a remedy. In his address to the priests of Rome last February, Pope Benedict issued a call and a challenge, not only to those with whom he was meeting, but to us all:
“The Year of Faith”, the Year of Catechism… are linked inseparably. We shall renew the Council only by renewing the content — later summed up again — of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. A serious problem for the Church today is the lack of knowledge of the faith, “religious illiteracy”, as the Cardinals described this situation last Friday.
“Religious illiteracy” and with this illiteracy we are unable to grow, unity is unable to grow. We ourselves must therefore recover this content, as a wealth of unity, not a packet of dogmas and orders but a unique reality which is revealed in its depths and beauty.
“We must do our utmost for a catechetical renewal, so that the faith may be known and in this way God may be known, Christ may be known, the truth may be known, so that unity may develop in truth.”
Quo vadis? The next step in my ‘faith journey’ will be over to the bookshelf where sits my too-often neglected copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Springboard not required.