Greg DalyBad catechesis has been an integral part of Catholic tradition for a lot longer than 40 years
Bad catechesis has been an integral part of Catholic tradition for a lot longer than 40 years, according to Joanne McPortland, who writes at the Patheos blog ‘Egregious Twaddle’.
“Our seeming inability to form Catholics who understand and embrace the basics of the Faith is not the fault of Vatican II or goofy textbook publishers or ill-equipped religious ed volunteers,” she says, arguing that our catechesis fails primarily because we’re catechising the wrong people.
Challenging the catechetical tendency to focus on the formation of children, Ms Portland laments how adult catechesis is “just not a part of our regular expectation and structure”, and suggests making it a priority, with preparation for all sacraments being a parish family affair, “in which adult Catholics form and prepare younger Catholics”.
“Let’s make the faith formation of adults a priority, and believe me, their children will benefit,” she says.
Options
Also at Patheos, Tim Muldoon writes at ‘The Capstone’ of how Catholic education must answer today’s challenges by choosing between what he terms “the Benedict option” and “the Francis option”.
The Benedict option, he says, draws on Pope Benedict XVI’s appropriation of Arnold Toynbee’s idea of “the creative minority”, entailing “a small group of people who aim to change the world as leaven”, whereas the Francis option, as pointed to in Evangelii Gaudium, “stresses evangelisation of culture, which always involves the difficult discernment of what is happening in a host culture”.
Both impulses – the essentially monastic Benedictine approach and the more missionary Franciscan one – are, he says, “foundational in Catholic history”, with both being important in the landscape of contemporary religious education. The former, he says, builds places “that cling tenaciously to the richness of Catholic tradition to ensure its transmission to future generations”, while the latter “attempts to rediscover the roots of faith anew, in dialogue with people who encounter them sometimes for the first time”.
Papal critics
Responding to an Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig New Republic piece that observes there “have always been grumblings about popes, but the differences in opinion between Francis and the movement collectively known as the “American right” appear especially numerous, and unusually bitter”, Ross Douthat counters in the New York Times that we should distinguish between Catholics who have concerns about Francis’ papacy.
Drawing lines between liturgical conservatives with an affection for the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, economic conservatives who tend to take issue with the Pope’s emphasis on social justice, and doctrinal conservatives thus far without legitimate complaints but worried about what may come of this year’s Synod on the Family, Douthat nonetheless maintains that full-fledged critics of the Holy Father are actually quite few.
Paschal Emmanuel Gobry, in a piece in The Week on the Pope’s “fledging legacy”, says doctrinal change is nowhere near the horizon. If people think otherwise, he says, media misinterpretation is largely to blame. Partly, he said, this misinterpretation is due to wishful thinking, but even more, he says, “the only thing the press is more obsessed with than pushing its ideology is beating the drum of a narrative”.
Thus far, he says, Pope Francis’ greatest achievements have been Vatican reforms, the rejuvenation of spirituality in our daily lives, and a change in tone. Considering how “the Pope does not have the practical resources to order everyone about” and that the modern papacy's “main instrument for influencing the life of the Church at the everyday parish level is through his public speeches”, he says “a change in tone is still a big deal”.