By Anthony Barich
A NEW movement in the Church focused on renewing and strengthening Christian family life is waging a spiritual battle against the secular forces attacking marriage and family – which the Church has long taught are the cornerstones of society.
Couples For Christ, started in 1981 in Manila, is a family-based ministry that is growing exponentially by getting back to the basics of Christianity. Ultimately, it aims to raise up from Catholic families more priestly and Religious vocations.
It is focused not on converting non-Catholic Christians to the Church or even non-Christians, but evangelising Catholics who have either stopped practising their faith or need their faith strengthened – and they do it through the medium that the Church has long taught must be the primary educator of children: the family.
Reaching those outside parishes has proved a conundrum for Bishops, priests and lay people alike.
Like many Catholic ministries before it, CFC’s method came about through trial and error.
“We certainly know what doesn’t work,” jokes John McMahon, CFC’s Adelaide-based mission director – or “chief evangeliser”.
“The focus, therefore, must be put back to how it was in the beginning – people relating to each other, eating together and celebrating the Eucharist. That’s what caused the Church to escalate exponentially, as they were able to have a loving relationship in a hostile world,” John said.
“We have a hostile world now, and if we can create an environment where loving relationships can be experienced, then we believe the faith will come to life.”
The gravity of the difficulty of such a task was highlighted for John recently when an enthusiastic new priest in Bulleen in Melbourne’s north-eastern suburbs welcomed CFC into his parish and personally visited over 60 local Catholic households, inviting them to a parish retreat. None came.
This shows that “there is a hardness of heart; therefore, this is a spiritual battle that cannot be won by human efforts alone: prayer and fasting is also required,” and the power of the Holy Spirit, John said.
“This is the greatest area of difficulty we’re encountering,” he said. “Going into parishes and running parish retreats is not that hard.
“You can have people come as they want to experience transformation or learn more about their faith, but the people who are first and second-generation non-practising Catholics, it is very, very difficult to get them interested.”
Catholic education would theoretically be a treasure-trove for the ministry to mine, but experience has shown that after 12 years of Catholic education, up to 97 per cent are non-practising Catholics, which John says is “an indictment, really, on our Catholic education system”.
He admits, however, that most parents of children in Catholic schools handball the responsibility for passing on the faith to their children onto their grandparents, “who are the ones praying for the kids and who are looking for solutions to the problems”.
CFC’s battle started in 1981 in Manila, when a local Christian community tried a new approach to evangelise married couples by bringing together a small group of prospective couples in a private home. There, they were brought to a living relationship with Jesus Christ and to renewal in the power of the Holy Spirit through a series of weekly informal discussions of the Gospel in a social environment.
A Christian family life renewal programme was developed from this and made available to parishes and groups of married couples who wished to live out their Christian life in an active, supportive relationship with one another.
It spread to Australia in 1988 and on 9-11 June, Trinity College hosted CFC’s 12th Australia Pacific Mission Conference with participants from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Fiji, Vietnam, South America and the Philippines.
Both Archbishop Barry Hickey and his Auxiliary Bishop Donald Sproxton celebrated the closing and opening Masses of the conferences respectively, which Archbishop Hickey said highlighted how critical the prelates believe the ministry is.
In Australia, CFC is present in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Townsville and Melbourne, and with established programmes running in Perth parishes Bentley, Kwinana, Queens Park, Mundaring and Nedlands. CFC will spread again with another parish retreat planned for Geraldton in August.
CFC’s Perth area head Tony Haber said Geraldton Bishop Justin Bianchini, like Archbishop Hickey, recognises the need to address the “serious breakdown in marriage and family life.”
CFC has a holistic approach with programmes for primary school, high school, married couples and singles, be they never married, divorced or widowed.
Though Couples for Christ is the banner ministry, other demographics are covered with Singles for Christ, Youth for Christ, Kids for Christ, Handmaid of the Lord and Servant of the Lord.
“We’re trying to put at the disposal of the Church the resources of people who are really committed to spreading the Catholic Faith, and we will go wherever the door is open,” John said. “It’s not so much about targeting certain areas; it’s more responding to opportunities that open up to us.”
A major area of concern for Bishops around Australia is rural areas where a solo priest often services a number of parishes hundreds of kilometres apart and can therefore only celebrate Mass once a month in some places.
A recent case is Kangaroo Island off South Australia’s coast which only has a Mass on the third Sunday of every month, so CFC runs a programme on the weekends they have Communion services.
For country and city parishes, therefore, CFC’s aims are four-fold:
lTo bring renewal to the parish
lTo bring non-practising Catholics back to full communion with the parish,
lTo establish a unit of Couples for Christ to roll out its programmes in parishes after ‘service teams’ have moved on, and
lTo create an environment to bring numbers of priestly and Religious vocations back up in the Church.
CFC’s ministry is driven mainly but not exclusively by Filippinos, which is handy, John says, as, due to the nomadic nature of Filipinos, once you’ve got them they go wherever the opportunities are, that’s how this movement has spread, with migration”.
It is a Charismatic ministry – a particularly enthusiastic way of worship that may not suit all, but experience has shown that parishioners are happy to participate for the benefits it brings to their faith and family life.
When CFC starts in a parish it does so with a parish retreat which focuses on basic Christian truths like: God is love, who is Jesus Christ, what it means to be a Christian and repentance and faith.
It also focuses on living an authentic Christian life – loving God and neighbour and living as a Christian family; with a final focus on “growing in the Spirit”, as it is this which gives the Church the drive to evangelise.
At the retreat, there is a special session to pray for people to have a further empowerment of their baptismal graces in the Holy Spirit. There is a talk about growing in the Spirit through prayer, service and the Sacraments; and finally, people are invited to join the work.
“It’s a matter of experiencing God’s love and being transformed by that,” John said, which he said is summed up in the Scriptural quote, ‘God so loved the world that He sent His only Son, that we may have life and have it to the full’.
Knowledge of the faith without acting on it is worthless, he said, which is why “every Christian on the face of the earth has the baptismal call to proclaim the Good News by their words and actions”.
“For our community, we believe the Lord in 2010 is calling us to do that corporately, because as individuals we can’t do it; but collectively when we’re all committed to the same thing we can do great things,” he said.
“It requires everyone in our community to respond to that call to bring new life into the Church today.”
This involves figuring out innovative ways of getting the message to lapsed Catholics, especially the central message that harks back to the time of the Apostles – “that the Mass is meant to be a celebration of our faith, but so few people even have opportunities to relate to other Christians, let alone worship with them in a celebratory way”, John said.
“So if you don’t have relationships, then there’s not much purpose in going to Mass and celebrating the Eucharist.”