Good Catechesis Starts at Home

Catechesis is a means of nurturing and securing a bond with our loving Creator. Catechisms, as our Holy Father tells us, are to present “authoritative expositions of the one and perennial apostolic faith, and . . . serve as a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion and as a sure norm for teaching the faith.”

Every Catholic household should have its own copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and, along with the Bible, it should be a book consulted and read seriously and often by all the members of the family. The Catechism can also be a guide for discerning the value and correctness of children’s religion textbooks. Many Catholic parents do an excellent job of making certain that their children attend a Catholic school if available and are well catechized. Thus they provide their children with good religious instruction through all their years of formal schooling. These fine parents can serve as excellent examples to others of how to enrich their children spiritually and prepare them for happiness not only in this world but in the life to come.

Religious instruction, as well as the religious practice of children in each family, should be closely monitored and promoted by parents. Successful Catholic parents realize that they have a very serious responsibility for the souls of their offspring.

Children and high school age youngsters, particularly those enrolled in the public school system, need to register and attend religious instruction classes regularly. Parents and youngsters have a very serious obligation to give religious instruction a priority over sports, jobs, clubs, and all other activities. Too often people receive their “religious instruction” from inaccurate and erroneous sources, including even the secular media which frequently misrepresent and sometimes seriously distort our religious beliefs.

Instruction about the liturgy, the official public worship of the Church, is vitally necessary since the liturgy, especially the core of the liturgy which is the Mass, only makes sense when seen as the adoration, praise, and thanksgiving offered to God the Father by the “whole Christ,” Head and members, through the working of the Holy Spirit. Not being fully aware of the ongoing supernatural and spiritual union of the members of the Catholic Church with Christ, the invisible and perennial Head of the Church which He founded, lends itself to “yawning at the Mass.”

One frequent and serious deficiency in contemporary American Catholic religious instruction is a failure to adequately present Jesus Christ as the center of all Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. Christ is the culmination of the Old Testament, the fulfillment of God’s plan for human salvation, God’s definitive, final Word, and the complete revelation and gift of God to His creatures. Also, there is a grave imbalance in teaching about Our Lord, when His being our divine Savior is overshadowed excessively by His also being our unique Teacher, Master, Model, Brother, and Friend.

Beginning in the 1930s, but gaining momentum and reaching its climax in the late 1950s and early 1960s, something called “the catechetical renewal” took place in large areas in the Church. There was a new and revised interest in certain areas of ecclesiastical life. There was a “scriptural renewal,” and a “liturgical renewal.” There were efforts to revive, renew, and re-invigorate many aspects of Church life, especially catechetical instruction. Social justice teachings were especially vivid in the minds of many people. It was clear by the 1930s that large areas of the working classes of Europe, for example, the environs of the great cities of Paris and Madrid and the like, had been lost to the Church through Marxism, socialism, secularism, and growing materialism. Large numbers of people found the catechetical instruction, as it was given, to be irrelevant, uninteresting, and monotonous. Ardent people with pastoral zeal—sometimes correct zeal, sometimes misguided zeal—attempted to make catechetical instruction more interesting, more beautiful, more enticing, so that the intellectual content of the catechisms could be more easily apprehended. There began to grow, unfortunately, a certain dichotomy or separation between “content” and “presentation.” In all catechetical work and instruction there must be beauty and excitement in method, united to integrity and orthodoxy in content.

Cultural variations bear rather destructively on catechetics, and unfortunately, the baby is sometimes thrown out with the bath water. As a result, some catechists maintain that this or that teaching is not pertinent or relevant to a particular culture. That might be agreeable if this or that teaching were an accidental or superficial aspect of our religion, but when it is essential or basic to our religion, it is quite another issue. In Africa, for example, monogamy has often been discarded because people maintain that polygamy (one man having many wives) is part of the African culture, and therefore, the Gospel must adopt the ways of Africa. In the United States, many people maintain that artificial birth control and contraceptive sterilization are a basic part of our American culture, and that we, therefore, must discard that aspect of catechetics which teaches the inherent evil of such practices. But the Church teaches that when the culture is misguided, the faithful must follow the Gospel, not the erroneous aspects of many cultures.

The doctrines of the Catholic Church are, of course, founded and rooted in God, who is absolutely perfect and utterly and totally unchangeable. Consequently, the Catholic faith is, as St. Jude tells us in the Bible, that “which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), so there is a completely unchangeable element in the Catholic faith along with a constant renewal or development of doctrine making explicit what is implicit in Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. Conscientiously sharing the deposit of faith with one’s family should not just be a duty, but it should be one of the great joys involved with the privileges and obligations of the vocation of parenthood.

What Every Parent Should Know About Catechesis

1. Religion is the most important reality and relationship for each member of a family. There is a right and wrong way to act. There is only one Savior, Jesus Christ, one Mediator between God and man and one, true Church founded by Christ which has recognizable marks. Therefore, religious instruction must teach religious truth and be a lifelong pursuit.

2. Catechetical instruction is the most important area of study for children, teens, and adults. Therefore, Catholic education is worth the necessary sacrifices and is more necessary than secular education.

3. The value of family prayer and attendance at Holy Mass, receiving the Sacraments of Penance and Holy Eucharist, and participation in the life of a parish is extremely important. The faith must be both caught and taught.

4. Example is an excellent instructor. Therefore, reading the biographies of the saints, knowing and being with good adult models, having good friends, and avoiding bad examples are necessary for good spiritual formation.

5. Catholic inculturation is important. Therefore, it is essential that families use sacramentals, pictures, and statues as reminders of the faith. Also, reading quality Catholic materials and living the Church’s liturgical life at home strengthen and support any catechetical program.

6. The media can be a powerful poison for the minds and hearts of Catholic youngsters.

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