The Autumn Agony: Recruiting Catechists

I am almost 78 years old, but I still break up the year into “semesters” in my head. And so, it seems we are coming around the corner to the reopening of schools and all that goes with that. Central Florida schools open August 11 this year. It is also the time of year when I scour the internet for the first church bulletin panic appeals for volunteers to teach the fall semester. [If you, the reader, are first to catch sight of a church bulletin pleading for religious education teachers for the 2025 season, let us know and we’ll honor you as “barista” of the month here at the Café.]
 
But seriously, it is no laughing matter, and every year we send good hearted but ill-equipped folks into settings to instruct, teach, and form young Catholics. The ministerial sites may be classrooms, small groups, families, etc., but we do an injustice sending good people, or “faith formers,” into classes or family faith groups without the basic theological/pastoral learning and the skills to teach and manage groups of any age. The challenge isn’t just managing kids, either, although that is harder than it used to be. I instructed adults for my diocese for the better part of forty years—they were catechists, Catholic school teachers, parish ministers working toward a local diocesan certification, etc. During one class, a woman stood up and yelled that I was a Muslim, teaching Islamic heresy. That was a first for Tom el Sheik here, but I was probably 65 years old then, so I had experience to fall back upon. But that would be frightening for a new catechist.
 
It takes a special kind of courage for a Catholic whose own religious formation extended to Confirmation, maybe a parish youth group, to embark upon a parochial teaching ministry. Teachers of the faith never seem to get the public respect and appreciation they deserve from the entire parish. There is a value in students’ encountering such generous individuals like my frequent lunch buddy Mike, a former prison guard among other careers, who is still teaching in his parish as he approaches 80. There are few ministries more demanding in multiple senses than parochial faith formation.
 
Not only do catechists do their work without much recognition, but they are generally expected to pay for their minimum training, where it exists or where it is required, out of their own pockets. Not only that, but the theological products that many of our current faith formation personnel must choose from will never be confused with accredited institutions of Catholic learning such as Notre Dame, Catholic University, Villanova, Dayton, Boston College, etc. Some of these noted Catholic schools offer quality on-line/interactive education. See Dayton’s online program; scroll down to Religious Studies and Theology.
 
For something as central as religious studies, it amazes me that as a Church we haven’t figured out standard issues for religious study of catechists [among other ministries] i.e., issues of preparation and certification. Vatican II, in multiple places, describes ongoing faith formation as a normal and natural endeavor of a baptized person. Given that Baptism “recreates” a person [including infants] into a Christ-bearing source of divine wisdom, our faith data briefcases are awfully thin. Jesus is spoken of in the early New Testament texts as “working signs and wonders” but if you reflect back to the Gospels, much of his work was teaching.
 
HOW DID THE U.S. INTERPRET VATICAN II ON POST-COUNCIL RELIGIOUS EDUCATION GUIDELINES?
 
Ten years before the Council, in 1955, the Church historian Monsignor John Tracy Ellis made waves when he published an assessment of Catholic education in the U.S, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life.” The document can be retrieved here for the analytically inclined, but the gist of his paper was the inferior state of Catholic education in the U.S. [In the 1930’s Ellis found the doctoral history program at Catholic University so deficient that he attempted a transfer to Northwestern University, a public institution.]
 
Ellis saw what few other bishops and analysts failed to see, that American Church learning, like the Rio Grande River, was a mile wide and a foot deep, a description which has not lost its relevance as of 2025. In Ellis’s day, every diocesan bishop and most clerical orders maintained individual seminaries, making for an enormous number of college/graduate school seminaries, four-year colleges, and universities staffed by mediocre professors. Catholics, clerics and eventually lay persons of academic promise, studied in Europe, and continue to do so.
 
A good indication of America’s religious studies atrophy is the dynamic of Vatican II itself. Only one American Catholic cleric of note, the Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray, made a major contribution to a Council document, Dignitatis humanae, the “Declaration on Religious Liberty.” Consequently, the implementation of the sixteen Vatican II documents posed a major challenge to bishops in the States since every aspect of Church life had been reformed and renewed at the Council.
 
This included, of course, religious education. Those in Church authority had to reeducate themselves as well as convey the Council teachings to all the faithful. Looking back on the educational scene, I think most bishops believed they had more time for adjustment than they really had—i.e., they could keep the old Catholic school/CCD model for some years yet, perhaps till the end of the twentieth century. Catholic elementary and secondary schools would continue as before, they hoped, as the option of choice, with CCD as the backstop, where faith formation was concerned. What the U.S. Conference of Bishops failed to recognize were advances in theology and catechetics, professional and spiritual unrest among “teaching” religious orders, particularly women’s orders; the spiraling cost of operating schools that many pastors at least privately were anxious to unload; and the noticeable decline in vocations and departures from the priesthood and religious life. Seminary enrollment dropped like a rock in the late 1960’s.
 
THE BISHOPS RESPOND TO THE COUNCIL WITH “TO TEACH AS JESUS DID [1972]
 
I was more than a little surprised to see that “To Teach as Jesus Did” is still available on the market: Amazon Prime has new copies for $441.75 as of today—I can only imagine that all 140 U.S. bishops in 1972 autographed the text! TTAJD is a 52-page guide from America’s bishops on religious faith formation. I reviewed this work on Amazon a few years ago, mostly from the vantage point of historical wear and tear on its premises. There are few things in my review I would change today.
 
The most surprising thing about this little book is the unspoken assumption that Catholic parents now had post-1972 choice for their children between Catholic school formation and free-standing religious education offered by the parish. This is a reversal of the 1880’s Plenary Council of Baltimore’s mandate that all Catholic children must attend Catholic school, except for serious reasons. I am surprised that few, if any, Catholic analysts or commentators picked up on this in the 1970’s. It may be that the schools were a burden to those who managed them, taught in them, and funded them. Unfortunately, no one picked up the correlation between schools and CCD: as schools closed, and fewer religious maintained parochial presence, the professionalism of free-standing religious education also declined as the Catholic school teachers disappear. In practically a generation, religious ed instruction passed from professional religion teachers [most vowed religious] to parent volunteers with minimal preparation provided for their ministry.
 
A funny thing happened in the 1970’s; for some reason, the term “CCD” became unfashionable. If you visit Facebook sites today for religious faith formation of minors, you see a variety of synonyms for what used to be called CCD. But if you Google “CCD” you see a remarkable story on Wikipedia:
 
In 1536, the Abbot Castellino da Castello had inaugurated a system of Sunday schools in Milan. Around 1560, a wealthy Milanese nobleman, Marco de Sadis-Cusani, having established himself in Rome, was joined by a number of zealous associates, both priests and laymen, and pledged to instruct both children and adults in Christian doctrine. In 1562, Pope Pius IV made the Church of Sant' Apollinare their central institution; but they also gave instructions in schools, in the streets and lanes, and even in private houses. As the association grew, it divided into two sections: the priests formed themselves into a religious congregation, the Fathers of Christian Doctrine, while the laymen remained in the world as "The Confraternity of Christian Doctrine".
 
History is a marvelous thing. What we see here is that in a true moment of Church crisis—Luther had posted his theses in 1517, and the Reformation was in full swing—a rich, educated Catholic layman sparked a movement of fellow laymen and priests in which they educated themselves and quite literally took to the streets to teach the Faith. Of note is the fact that they pledged to instruct “both children and adults in Christian doctrine.” Their mission was more revolutionary than they knew, and years later the popes and American bishops put thought to adult education, as I will highlight in a few weeks.
 
Apparently, lay men and lay women can shape tomorrow’s church if given the tools and the training. But for all practical purposes, ongoing structured adult Catholic study does not exist as part and parcel of American Catholic parish or diocesan life at the present time. What would such a commitment look like? I’m not sure, but I’d know it if I saw it.
 
To be continued….