PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

So who should pay for religious education tuition [CCD]?

4/4/2024

I was browsing through Facebook earlier this week, specifically the “Catholic Directors of Faith Formation” page to which I subscribe, and I came across an interesting post, as I often do, on local problems in parishes. What caught my eye was this post by a Director of Religious Education: I am looking for the Pros/Cons of charging for Faith Formation, at the Parish. We currently charge $60 per kid with a cap of $150 per family. I was informed today by our parish finance committee that beginning next year we will no longer charge. I have a lot of feelings. If it helps, so do I.

I would have liked to see the parish council’s minutes of the meeting that decided the new policy, to see how it addressed the pros and cons. In some parishes the parish council or finance board, if either exists, is a rubber stamp of the pastor which helps him to dilute hostile feedback. [Parish finance boards are mandated as consultative bodies to assist the pastor, per Canon 537 of the Code of Canon Law. Finance boards provide advice; they cannot override the pastor. Canon Law does not require Parish councils.] The issue of “paying for services” in parishes can be a hot potato. And if it makes you feel better, Pope Francis himself is enmeshed in a current controversy about reducing and/or eliminating the cost of obtaining annulments. “The pope said that since 2015, when he tried to streamline the annulment process and make it less costly, he has received “much resistance” to his reforms. Almost all of them were lawyers who were losing clients. And therein lies the problem of money,” said Pope Francis. “In Spain, there is a saying, ‘Por la plata baila el mono’— ‘Monkeys will dance for money.’” [America, 2021]

I have had the interesting experience of pastoring churches with and without schools during my lifetime. And, until very recently, I taught theology to parish staffs, diocesan schoolteachers, and volunteer religious education teachers, and even treated several of the front liners in my mental health practice. One thing that quickly comes to the fore among religious education personnel who work in parishes with schools is a sense that the religious education program[s] are the ugly ducklings of the parish family. I could not help but notice that the religious education director who inspired today’s post was informed of the decision out of the blue, and never consulted. It may be a small consolation to her, but many non-ordained parish ministers/educators are left in the cold. Some parishes have a very weak or non-existent team camaraderie. There is not much that can be done about that, I am afraid. Our American bishops had no time for Synodality, and that was a priority of the pope himself.

It is true that comparing the Catholic religious education experience to the Catholic school experience is an apple vs. orange situation. An accredited Catholic school must meet federal, state, and diocesan standards. Its teachers must be degreed and maintain certification. Schools are enormously expensive to build; the new public school down the street from me [Kelly Park, for you locals] cost $28,521,195.78 to build two years ago. Even with all the population growth in Florida and a very generous tax credit system for students in private schools in this state, schools are enormously expensive to operate. In Florida there will always be applicants for seats, I think, but many of our facilities are getting long in the tooth, and the capital expenses of maintaining and updating aging facilities is a lurking issue, at least in the minds of our long-range planners. Building new Catholic schools seems incomprehensible, price wise.

The history of parochial religious education programs in the United States is complicated. In the 1800’s Catholic youth were primarily immigrants who attended public schools. The curriculum was strongly Protestant and anti-Catholic, and U.S. bishops grew concerned over the faith and safety of their youthful population in secular schools. In the Third Plenary Council in Baltimore in 1884, U.S. bishops voted “that every parish in America should try to build a parochial school within two years of the Plenary Council's closing.” How ambitious is that? And yet, this vote became the guiding template for America. It was common for the next generations of new parishes to build the school before building the church, with Sunday Mass offered in a school room of sufficient size. My school, the now long demolished St. Mary Magdalene on Buffalo’s Fillmore Avenue, was built in 1900; the church in 1904.

The 1884 mandate calling for Catholic schools in every parish was a formidable challenge from a hammer-and-nails vantage point, but the staffing of the schools with competent professionals would have been impossible without the thousands of adult religious who staffed the schools for bargain basement compensation. [I am a product of Christian Brothers elementary education which, curiously, was far superior to my seminary high school experience later.] Consider that for a young Catholic girl of modest means—and that would have been about every Catholic girl till after World War II—religious life, “taking the veil,” was the only affordable route to the educational and medical professions. Hence, U.S. Catholics were extremely fortunate to have the numbers of nurses and teachers that it did, and at exceptionally low cost. I have read documents and correspondence between the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and numerous religious orders in Ireland and elsewhere as Los Angeles was opening a new Catholic school every ninety days in the building boom of the late 1940’s. Irish religious superiors were offered the princely sum of a $90 stipend/monthly for each sister in negotiations with the Los Angeles chancery.

There was an expectation from the American clergy—as late as the 1950’s-- that every child should attend Catholic school, though no one was excommunicated for not registering. In some locales in rural regions, of course, it was a physical impossibility. My best friend as a youth was a Catholic who went to public school—he probably saved me from becoming a religious fanatic. [We still have lunch in Buffalo every couple of years.]

In 1914 the practice of “released time” began in the U.S., which allowed Christian children to miss several hours of public school weekly to attend doctrinal instruction at their local churches. I suspect the privilege applies to Islamic and other religious traditions as well, though Protestantism was the predominant religious identity of this country until after World War II. For Catholics in populated regions, we Catholic schoolers were sent home at noon on Mondays, and our teachers taught religion to the public-school Catholics in our classrooms in the afternoon. Several times we were advised to take our personal things home with us; the implication that public school students were likely to steal them. There was a tacit culture clash between Catholic school children and Catholic public-school children.

What would happen, though, if the thousands of college graduate religious sisters and brothers turned to other ministries or left the religious calling altogether? How would public school Catholics receive religious instruction? Or, for that matter, who would teach in the Catholic schools? This is exactly what happened in the 1960’s. The numbers of religious sisters who left teaching—or the convent altogether—is hard to fathom till you see the actual numbers, which CARA/Georgetown research has tracked for the past sixty years. How many sisters worked and served the American Church?
1965:        178,740
1970         160,931
1975:        135,225
2022:        36,321
The 1960’s was the decade where “religious education” became a freestanding thing. I recall giving a high school religious education retreat in Maryland in 1970; it stands out in my mind because the parish’s religious education coordinator [eventually DRE] was the first lay person in her diocese to hold that position.

Anyone in the ministry of religious education needs to know this history simply to appreciate the challenges he or she is facing. Today a new parish instructor/volunteer as a rule has little or no background in theology and/or pedagogy to start with and receives precious little on-the-job training. My diocese offers none now. Local “certifications” are as flimsy as Confederate dollars. The national conference of bishops has briefly considered a countrywide standard of training and certification for catechists, but little has come of it. We can put it this way: the parish classroom religious educator of 2024 is attempting to fill the shoes of a 1965 religious man or woman in vows, with perhaps twenty-five years of experience and professional schooling in theology.

IN CONCLUSION....
Let me sum up a response to the lady’s original question.

First, religious education/faith formation is in a state of flux, and it is not the fault of this generation of religious educators. After all the excitement of Vatican II, only 17% of American Catholics attend weekly Mass in 2024, which suggests to me that we ignored a lot of problems in the mist of our optimism and ideologies over sixty years. This is what Pope Francis was trying to address when he urged the Church to come together and talk candidly about personal and parochial life in the Synod on Synodality. Regrettably, this generally did not happen in the United States, but again the shepherds, and not the sheep, bear responsibility for this lost opportunity of grace and wisdom.

Second, I do agree with the parish board’s decision not to charge for religious education, nor for any sacramental or ministerial service. From the business side, the various ministries should be included in the general budget, which in turn should be available at any time on a parish’s website. Every financial consultant I ever worked with told me the same thing: your people must know what healthy ministry costs—including, for example, such things as actual cost per student in the parish school vis-à-vis the posted tuition. From the religious side, congregations do need to hear the true “cost of discipleship.” Canon Law is clear on the basic responsibilities of a parish. If a parish cannot afford these necessary services, a bishop cannot be criticized for merging such a parish with a healthier one, or to a cluster of parishes as is done in my hometown, Buffalo.

Third, religious education attracts many candidates [i.e., parents] who themselves need evangelization as much as their children. The sacraments of initiation are particularly rich opportunities to engage whole families to the Eucharistic table. I am seeing more “family-based formation programs.” That is an exceptionally good thing, but while the “retooling” is a lot of work, we should not be afraid to talk about it and even consider moves in that direction.

It is hard for those of us in ministry to admit that our own measures of success might be obsolete. For example, on Facebook one would get the impression that youthful religious education is approached like an SAT tutorial before Confirmation. What if instead we taught children to prayerfully meditate?

Consider this piece from a Catholic journal: Among parishes, the prevalent pastoral assumption is that individuals receive the grace which the sacrament confers, even though there might be the appearance of serious defects of intention, preparation, and understanding. The hope is that “the sacrament will take care of it” and that the sacrament alone will lead to the new life it signifies. This misconception must be addressed to awaken the capacity for an active, relational faith inherent in baptized parents.

Fourth, consider self-care. Pray and play. Read. Meet socially with your local colleagues. [Be sure to have a designated driver.] We belong to God’s Church after all; we alone will never solve all its problems.

Fifth: The most recent research indicates that the median age when Catholics begin to disengage from the Church is thirteen, and in some cases as early as ten. Religion teachers engaged with the young are on the scene when their students are making their lasting judgements about the Catholic enterprise, and organized religion in general. Their parents need to know that, too, and we can engage them as co-evangelists…without picking their wallets in the process.

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Children, the Gateway Home

10/26/2023

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I indulged myself in a little amateur Biblical sleuthing today. I googled “children in the Bible.” Summarizing here with an enormously large brush, I found, not surprisingly, that the Old Testament is strong on the “spare the rod, spoil the child” theme but always in the name of faith in the revealed Law. Children are always spoken of in the Hebrew Scripture as gifts of God. Childlessness, as we know well, was a profound personal and familial tragedy in Biblical culture...and a cross for many people today.

Then I focused upon what Jesus himself said about children, and two major pieces caught my eye. The first, from Matthew 18:1-5: At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me.”

The second teaching, Luke 18:15-17, reinforces and strengthens the first. Now they were even bringing infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”

Scholars tell us that these sayings of Jesus enjoy high levels of historical confidence. [Mark’s Gospel includes similar texts] and words worthy of contemplation. Jesus pulled an anonymous kid out of a crowd and taught that every child is pleasing to God, period. [Original sin disfigurement, where art thou?] But more than that, Jesus proclaims every child is a template of who will be welcomed into the lasting joy of the Kingdom at the end of time. The kids I know and wave to as they go to school in their golf carts every morning—this is Florida--are too young to have read or absorbed the full texts cited above, so it is our call as adults to love them and encourage them to spread their lives to embrace and enjoy God’s universe—by our returning to the child God made us. Right now, we don’t look much like kids—we’re frightened and angry, sensing that we are “losing control” …when “control” is usually an illusion anyway.

I have been a counselor for much of my life, and usefully, a patient as well. I specialized in mood disorder as provider and patient. I learned that depression and anxiety are often comorbid, i.e., you can have both, which makes perfect sense. Science does not fully understand how brain chemistry interacts with how we think and feel, or how “nature and nurture” impact our present state of mind. Depressives do tend to instinctively set goals—very often, unrealistic and numeric goals—to measure personal success or failure, and of course succumb to anxiety when the goals aren’t met. [There is more, of course, to mental health science—don’t be afraid to ask a pro in your circle, like your family doctor.]

If I were going back into providing fulltime ministry, spiritual direction, and even mental health counseling, I would use the benchmark established by Jesus, his Gospel revelation of childhood as “gift of God.” Regardless of age, we are the children of God. Father Edward J. Flanagan, the founder of Boys Town, said in 1949 “there is no such thing as a bad boy, only bad environment, bad modeling, and bad teaching.” And that includes bad catechetics. [Recent research from the CARA institute indicates that the median age when individuals consider leaving the Catholic Church is 13, and for many as early as 10.]

The famous astronomer Carl Sagan observed that when he visited schools, the kindergarteners were voracious questioners: “Why is the moon round? What is a dream? Why do we have fingers and toes?” But when he visited twelfth graders, by contrast, their questions were few and guarded. He lamented that the child’s eye for wonder and knowledge had almost literally been squeezed from their souls. Too many years of “teaching to the test” and not enough playing in the captivating world of humanity and the sciences, perhaps? [Closing down music departments in schools? Shame.]

The Gospel model of childhood articulated by Jesus scares the dickens out of us who are cursed to be stuck in adulthood. We would be less than honest if we denied that Catholic parochial life has never been much of an advocate of imagination and “independent study” of life by the young and the young at heart. Carl Sagan was lucky he was not born Galileo. The Inquisition came into being in large part because some medieval Catholic adults dared to reflect, pray, and live the scriptures beyond the guardrails of mainstream Church life as then lived. They gave full run to their religiously inventive minds and hearts, hungry to turn over every stone and to create for themselves a mosaic of sacred meaning. Essentially, this is how the Benedictines, the Franciscans, and the other great orders came to be. [Sadly, a number of other “experiments” were suppressed with leaders going to the stake.]

Formation of children, whether in the family, the school, or especially the catechism class, is hamstrung by our need to “get it right,” keep it ordered, protect the status quo. Look at a typical early-adolescent parish Confirmation class: the practical goal-preoccupation is to memorize data from the Catechism to ensure readiness to receive God’s Wisdom, the Spirit. The irony here is precious; we are talking about the visitation of the all-powerful God and reducing it to small thumb drive of data. Have we taken time to listen to the young and hear their questions, particularly about the knowledge of God they may have already experienced? Jesus, at the age of twelve, would not be denied his moment with the teachers and scribes of the Temple, the same folks ironically who would later have him crucified for displacing the guardrails of religious uniformity.

Father James Martin’s Learning to Pray [2021] begins with the author’s own youthful experience of a world beyond the tangible, He was riding his bike through a field. “Then I looked around. All around me was so much life—the sights, the sounds, the smells—and suddenly I had a visceral urge not only to be a part of it, but also to know it and somehow possess it. I felt loved, held, understood. The desire for everything, somehow for a full incorporation into the universe, and a desire to understand what I was doing here on this earth filled me.” [p. 23] Not to outdo Father Martin here, but I grew up in Buffalo, without a golfcart, where robins are very common in the spring and summer months. Robins provide a distinctive and soothing song at dawn and dusk. I asked my mother about that—I was probably four or five and quite taken with this gift of nature—and she said that the robins were singing their morning and evening prayers to God. And yes, the few times I get to New York State nowadays, the robins still take me to a very special place.

SOME MEDITATIONAL QUESTIONS:

Jesus tells us that we will find happiness and eternal destiny as we become like children. Can we retrieve moments today when we felt “loved, held, understood” in our childhood, to use Father Martin’s words?

Is your present-day lifestyle drowning out the beautiful singing of birds or the risings and settings of the sun?

Do you sometimes think you hold yourself responsible for too many things?

When you were young, did you go hungry—in the literal sense for the material necessities of life? Or for attention to your questions about life?
Or for adults to take healthy interest in you, just because you were a hearty little kid?

Do you regret you didn’t have someone like Carl Sagan to open your eyes to the universe--created by God for you.

Do you have good, bad, or indifferent recollections of “churchy things?”

We were all children once, and we all have people who, back in the day, affected us positively [i.e., left us with good memories] or negatively [in any number of ways.] Are any of those good folks still around or continue to play an important role in your life?
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No permission necessary for personal and/or responsible ministerial use.

The next essay/meditation will go up in about two weeks—on adulthood-- with more reflective questions. If you have been moved by anything here that you would like to explore further, your parish or diocese may have “spiritual direction” available—trained lay persons, religious, or priests who would meet with you periodically to guide you in your spiritual growth. If you are feeling unduly stressed—anxious, depressed, etc.—your diocesan office may have links to professional counselors for you through Catholic Charities, with fees scaled to your ability to pay.

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ADULT RELIGIOUS FORMATION [PART 2]: "WE ARE GROWN UPS. Quit CATECHETICS; LET'S DO THEOLOGY."

5/19/2023

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COMING OFF AN INTERESTING EXPERIENCE….

I mentioned in the last post in this stream that I was participating in the study of the Vatican II document Sacrosanctum Concilium in my home parish, and on Tuesday night past [May 16] we concluded the five week program with an orchestrated review of the material in group discussions followed by an evaluation of the program as we plan for the fall series from Vatican II, Dei Verbum [“The Word of God.”]. I was talking with my old seminary buddies on a Zoom call yesterday and they asked how the program went. I said, “Well, in many respects we resembled an expansion NFL football team. We’re still getting the plays down and we missed some blocks, but everybody played hard, and I expect that more season tickets will be sold next fall.” We have an evaluation meeting next week to review the submitted forms and to revisit the “playbook” where necessary if I may drag out the football analogy even further.

I just received the numerical tallies from our participants—the written reactions are being processed now—and it was most edifying to see that 75% of those in our Sacrosanctum Concilium study program found themselves satisfied with the amount of material they were requested to digest, while 25% stated that they could have handled more material. That’s good to know. We used the original Vatican II document itself and three chapters of Keys to the Council [2012] devoted to this Vatican II Constitution, in the coursework. It was very encouraging to see that no one felt underwhelmed, and this bodes well for the future.

To assist the group and keep the fires of interest alive through the summer and beyond, I created an online library and book review page in the Catechist Café, which I hope you will enjoy as well. I also spruced up the title page of the Café to boost summer reading…you can find the new book page by clicking underneath the Tower of Pisa.

BUT WE STILL HAVE A BIG PROBLEM….

Building on the last post, I did more research on the status of continuing adult education in the United States. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, on its official national website, devotes one page to the subject, which begins promisingly enough:

“Our adult faith formation ministry must engage the particular needs and interests of the adults in each local community. To be faithful and effective it will offer, over time, a comprehensive and systematic presentation and exploration of the core elements of Catholic faith and practice—a complete initiation into a Catholic way of life. It will do so in a way that is accessible to adults and relates to their life experiences, helping them to form a Christian conscience and to live their lives in the world as faithful disciples of Jesus.”

What I liked here was a clear statement that formative programming for adults was a responsibility “in each local community.” Then my heart sank, for at the end of the page we find a notation: “For more information about Adult Faith Formation opportunities in your area, please contact your (Arch)Diocese.” Parishes, in other words, may continue business as usual, devoting educational and formative resources to youngsters and catechumens. The thoughtful adult is still left high and dry, denied the resources to study Divine Revelation and Catholic Tradition to fully integrate the faith into his or her life.

Where there are diocesan adult programs here and there around the country, most commonly they are the “certification series formats” to train catechists and Catholic school teachers, and after one to three years there is usually a graduation of sorts and a piece of paper saying that “in this diocese you may teach with your pastor’s permission.” I taught catechists and Catholic schoolteachers in such programs for the Orlando Diocese for almost four decades. For most of those years we did so in a 10-hour format, Friday evening and all-day Saturday. While this may sound like an arduous weekend, consider that the student had several years to complete 12 to 15 courses. And, in that 10-hour framework my topic might be “The Hebrew Scriptures” or “The New Testament” or “Catholic Morality.” Imagine providing a full scope orientation to the Hebrew Canon of Scripture in ten hours! Trust me, I had no fantasies I was exhausting the subject, sadly.

This program in Orlando came to an end in 2016. I am not quite sure why. From downtown I heard a variety of reasons—that the students were complaining our program was too intense and time consuming, that there were better programs available on-line, that there would be regular grand retreats at our diocesan retreat center to augment the learning, etc. I attended the meeting where I learned that I was out of a job, replaced by an expensive on-line agreement to access a training-formation program with the Archdiocese of Chicago, I believe it was. I was sorry to end my association with teacher formation. I had just begun the Catechist Café two years earlier so I could continue my personal efforts in adult faith formation, and I was offered an opportunity to work as a psychotherapist for our diocesan Catholic Charities rural medical sites from 2016 till Covid curtailed face-to-face clinical work in 2020.

The last thing I want to suggest here is that adult theological formation is “grown up confirmation formation,” a set period of tanking up the 18+ year-old population of the Church with elementary catechetics, just using bigger words. In fact, catechetics might be a misleading word, period. In practice it has come to imply a mechanical approach to a miraculous relationship, initiated by the One, True, Loving God who has freely chosen to create us and, even more, to communicate an infinite vision of life’s goodness. Catechetics often degenerates into “delivering the goods” without the time, space, and freedom to ponder and digest the offerings.

When I look back at my own diocese’s misadventures with adult formation, and my own participation in it, I suspect that the biggest problem—and it is hardly limited to Orlando—is that the “catechetical template” of so many years past has ground to a halt. Our common approach in the modern era has been a defensive and pessimistic one—education to avoid errors. We have a long history of this: back in 1910 Pope Pius X moved First Communion down to the age of seven because he wanted to protect the young from modernism. Today, at least in the United States, the Church is dug in on issues of sexual identity and gender to the exclusion of all the marvelous possibilities in the spiritual treasures we possess, wisdom that may shed new light on the contemporary pastoral worries that have become our ball and chain. We are a long way from the first and second centuries when church communities gathered weekly to joyfully celebrate the Resurrection and hope beyond the grave. As the excellent Church historian Justo Gonzalez points out, “The most remarkable characteristic of these early communion services was that they were celebrations. The tone was one of joy and gratitude rather than sorrow and repentance.” [The Story of Christianity, p. 108.]

Theology is an education to joy. How can it not be? Its destiny is God. To use the terminology of the Greeks, theology [from logos, study, and theos, God] is the best word we possess to describe the longing of the human heart to know what we can of the infinite goodness and wisdom of God. A cynic might say that if God is perfectly wise, then seeking after divine wisdom is a fool’s errand, as we will never become “like gods” as the author of Genesis would put it. True enough, but it was Jesus himself who invites us to the fool’s errand, if you will, when he declared to his listeners, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Theology is the gateway to a more profound spirituality and a deeper prayer life. When embraced intelligently, theology leads to wonder, to mystery, to experience, to self-understanding, to gratitude. Although we tend to think about theology as a broadly based curriculum [Systematic/dogmatic theology, Hebrew Scripture, New Testament, Christian Anthropology, Christology, Patristics or writings of the Fathers, Liturgy, Ecclesiology, History, Morality, Social Justice, Eschatology, Mariology, Spirituality] all the subsets are intimately connected by the thrust to hunger for God.

The Catholic who immerses himself or herself in daily communion with the wisdom of the saints and scholars will find a broadening of horizons that is, frankly, unnerving at times but in an exhilarating sort of way. Theology creates new mindsets, opens deeper possibilities of self-understanding, and gives hope for a communion with God that is far greater than the routine we usually settle for. We hear in parish talk the importance of “community,” which is often shorthand for “my Mass,” but once you step through the portal into the world of theology you begin to grasp the true nature of your being as a creation of God, as one person in an immense historical community of persons dating back to Abraham in 1800 B.C. You appreciate the heroism and the failures of the massive family we call Christianity in its history and diversity. Much of what seems divisive and distracting in church and in life dissolves into a more wholesome and hopeful outlook.

Of course, we now find ourselves in the position of the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8: “Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked. “How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?”

Indeed, who explains today? And where do we start? That will be the subject of the third installment of this thread, which I hope to post next week.

And it just occurs to me: in every book on Vatican II, we read that as baptized persons we are “priests, prophets, and kings.” So why not educate ourselves to the same depth as our ordained priests? I think that’s reasonable.

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May 09th, 2023

5/9/2023

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ADULT RELIGIOUS FORMATION [PART 1:] "SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW"

5/9/2023

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IT ALL BEGAN WHEN…

For the past several months I have had the interesting and intriguing opportunity to work with a lay group in my parish which was organized several years ago to study Pope Francis’ encyclical Fratelli Tutti. Buoyed by the experience and committed to continuing its adult education outreach, the group decided to engage on a study of the Vatican II documents, beginning with the 1963 Sacred Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. They decided to invite the broader parish at large. As I am a laicized former pastor, psychotherapist, college teacher, diocesan catechist trainer, and presently a catechetical blogger—and my wife was part of the Fratelli Tutti study--I was invited to join the planning circle for this second venture to assist in its planning, organization, and presentation. It has been and remains a source of inspiration, admiration, and yes, even frustration for me as we progress along our way; and it has given me new and renewed insight into the state of “adult education” and “adult faith formation” in the United States.

LEARNING IS PART OF WHO WE ARE…

If God created the heavens and the earth ex nihilo, “out of nothing,” the same is true for any cluster of dedicated parishioners today who wish to form communion with the rich fountain of two millennia of Catholic theology, “the study of God.” The idea that the Church is Western Civilization’s Great Educator is a parish’s best kept secret. If you live and worship in most any parish of the United States, you would never deduce from a sermon that baptism incorporates us into the heritage of divine wisdom from the pens of Paul the Apostle, Augustine, Aquinas, Teresa of Avila, Cardinal John Newman, Karl Rahner or Thomas Merton, or the collective wisdom of the Councils Nicaea, Ephesus, Chalcedon, IV Lateran, Constance, Trent, and Vatican I, to name just seven of twenty before Vatican II. Nor do we ever celebrate in our collective memories the historical reality that the Church established both the curriculums and the concrete slabs for the two hundred great universities of medieval Europe that preserved ancient classical thought in partnership with Islamic scholarship and went on to lay the intellectual groundwork for “the modern world,” all under the umbrella of God’s truth. Nor was “faith and education,” historically speaking, the reserve of only scholars. Even in medieval times, frequent holy days released serfs from their fields to come into the cities for religious formation in the form of morality plays, cathedral preaching, and solemn liturgies.

For many reasons the identity of the Catholic Church as a “studying church” and the church member as student has never blossomed as an element of pastoral life, even after the Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment. It may be that with the Council of Trent’s [1545-1563] decree calling for the establishment of diocesan seminaries, a major innovation, the belief developed that routine parish life, conducted by better trained pastors, would sufficiently educate the laity to what they needed to know. History would sadly prove otherwise. The fathers of Vatican II understood that the key to holiness and the empowerment of the faithful was an educated faithful. A call for greater education permeates nearly all the Vatican II documents—including Sacrosanctum Concilium—and the Council teaches that clergy and laity alike must immerse themselves in study of the sacred scriptures and the rich body of literature we collectively refer to as lectio divina, “divine reading.” In just one of the sixteen Council documents, Sacrosanctum Concilium, there are 29 specific references to the need for the study of Scripture and Liturgical Theology.

BUT IN THE UNITED STATES….

Prior to Vatican II the one jewel of educational faith formation that an American Catholic might experience in his or her lifetime was the formative elementary and secondary Catholic school system. In the 1880’s the bishops of the United States mandated that every Catholic parish have a school. Beyond high school, though, adult formation was poor or nonexistent. In 1955 the American historian Father John Tracy Ellis caused quite a stir when he pronounced the country’s two hundred Catholic colleges to be overextended, understaffed, and intellectually barren. The same could be said of seminaries, of which virtually every diocese and religious order had at least one, and sometimes more. Academic Catholicism in the United States was a parched intellectual desert. Ellis, who desperately fought to attend a Big Ten University for his history doctoral studies instead of Catholic University, was later hired to teach by Catholic University, but he insisted that his CU credentials were so poor that he took one year to prepare at Princeton University. On his assessment of Catholic higher learning, he was mostly right. No American bishop made a significant contribution to the debates at Vatican II.

Contrast the U.S. situation to Holland. Just one year after the conclusion of the Council, the Netherlands Conference of Bishops authorized The Dutch Catechism, a work which became very popular in the United States and elsewhere in the late 1960’s. The substance, quality, and orthodoxy of catechetical programs including adult education was an immediate concern of the Vatican, particularly given the somewhat experimental twist of the Dutch Catechism. In 1971 the Vatican, at the Direction of Pope Paul VI, issued its first post-Conciliar directives on universal catechetics which included this: “Steps which are effective and indeed of the greatest importance for good results must be taken: promoting the growth of the customary forms of the ministry of the word and stimulating new ones; evangelizing and catechizing men of lower cultural levels; reaching the educated classes and taking care of their needs; improving the traditional forms of the Christian presence and finding new ways; gathering together all the practical aids of the Church and at the same time avoiding forms which are not in accord with the Gospel.” [1971 General Catechetical Directory, paragraph 9]. This was more revolutionary than generally realized at the time, for the Church was highlighting a need for catechizing “the educated classes,” a far cry from the gas-and-go Confirmation programs for 12-year-olds, so common, even today, in the U.S.

Feeling some pressure after the Council and The General Catechetical Directory the American bishops issued in 1972 a pastoral statement, “To Teach as Jesus Did.” By 1972 Catholic school attendance was declining; popular wisdom had it that the departure of many religious sisters to other ministries or to life outside the convent was the main cause, but the full reasons have never been sociologically researched. In 1972 the bishops were faced with a conundrum. One option was to double down on an existing educational system their predecessors had mandated in the 1880’s by putting forward more planning for the schools’ funding, staffing, accessibility, and—importantly—certification in Catholic theology for all employees for the next century, in tandem with a declaration that Catholic education for all the faithful was job one for the American Church, consistent with the nineteenth century vision of their predecessors. The second option was to swallow hard and say, in so many words, that CCD religious instruction and new, untested models were just as good as the Catholic school system for faith inculturation.

Actions have consequences, but so do inactions—and in general the bishops did little to shore up either option. In “To Teach as Jesus Did” the bishops basically asserted that both Catholic schools and after-school religious instruction programs were equally good, which in fact they were not. The statistics compiled by CARA-Georgetown over the past half century are startling in that they trace a massive decline in both categories—Catholic school attendees and religious education attendees. [The same studies, conducted annually, indicate that presently 17.1% of self-identifying Catholics attend Mass weekly. I should add here parenthetically that in Holland, the home of the Dutch Catechism, the figure for weekly Mass is 5% the last time I checked.]

In 1999 the U.S. Bishops published a better set of directives for adult education, “Our Hearts Were Burning Within Us.” But Paragraph 43 makes a candid admission that adults in the church remain unserved: “Yet despite the consistency and clarity of this message, the Catholic community has not yet fully heard and embraced it. While most Catholic parishes place a high priority on the faith formation of children and youth, far fewer treat adult faith formation as a priority. This choice is made in parish staffing decisions, job descriptions, budgets, and parishioner expectations.” The popular wisdom which endures to this day is that the best goal to be hoped for in education of the young is to hang on to them till Confirmation, load them up with a lifetime of doctrine, which they immediately forget, and watch them flee the church faster than the confirming bishop. CARA’s numbers indicate that many young people are not making it even this far under a very low bar.

I have concluded that the last generation or two of ordained priests are themselves the products of the general state of poor catechetics, and consequently their grasp of their ministry as educators is not well developed. This is evident in preaching, to be sure, which is generally weak in both content and artistry, but also in the structuring of parish priorities. My guess is that pastors believe the Sunday sermon and the church bulletin suffice as “adult education.” Clearly the observation of the 1999 Bishops’ Document that “far fewer [pastors] treat adult faith formation as a priority” is spot on, but not every diocese generates much heat in this regard, either.

CARA’s numbers indicate that Catholic markers across the board have been sinking for years; one might say dramatically beginning in 1975. Kenneth Woodward, the longtime religion editor of Newsweek Magazine [whom I met at a presentation in 2018] observed that “the best indicator that a little Catholic or Presbyterian will become a big Catholic or Presbyterian is the religious commitment and energy of their parents. The problem is that, in mainline Protestantism and now in Catholicism, we've had several generations of parents who were weakly or poorly formed in their religious faith and practice.”

THE ADULT DEFICIT IN FAITH UNDERSTANDING...

Woodward could not be more correct, and there has been local movement in recent years to address this hard reality. Some parish faith formation leaders are attempting “family-formation programs,” particularly around the celebration of sacraments of initiation [Baptism, Confirmation, First Eucharist]. In these programs the parents are involved in the educational-formative process provided by the Church. Other parishes experiment with a once-a-month day of family formation where multitrack programs are provided simultaneously by age/generation accompanied by a Eucharistic celebration and common meal. I was invited to conduct the adult portion of such a program at a local parish a few years ago—on Valentine’s Day Weekend, no less—and at the very least, the positive reinforcement of the parish as a community around the Eucharist was quite evident. Some parishes actively support religious education homeschooling, whose quality of education will vary with the commitment and competence of the parent[s].

The great vacuum, unfortunately, remains adult religious education. The best way to put it is this: in my parish and elsewhere I have many friends and acquaintances of considerable post high-school education [Ph.D.’s are not uncommon] and professional achievement who live and worship with an eighth grade understanding of Catholic doctrine, wisdom, and life. Vatican II, in Gaudium et Spes and many other places, reminds us that the Church must be intelligible to the men and women in a contemporary world. To wit, consider these points:

[1] Theology, at its heart, comes from the Greek theos logos, “the study of God.” To deny adults the assistance and opportunity to access the richness of the theos logos as it comes from its sources borders on pastoral malpractice.

[2] The Church has been the backbone of religious and philosophical thought for much of the past two millennia. In its long history the Church has faced most of the critical questions facing society today. Its richness, if studied and promulgated, would make a major contribution to our chaotic society. In our present situation, typical pastoral life brings precious little to the questions facing modern society. Actually, parishes avoid them like the plague.

[3] Study of the theos logos brings us into closer communion with God. It is no accident that the Church’s greatest thinkers—from Paul to Augustine to Aquinas to Edith Stein—are also among our greatest mystics.

[4] Monks—men whose lives are arranged around the liturgical hours of prayer—study from two to four hours each day, from the written word of Scriptures, the Church Doctors, the saintly scholars, and Christian history itself. Thoughtful study is the wellspring of prayer.

[5] Every demographic study of the Catholic Church indicates that there will be fewer and fewer priests in our future. The need for an educated laity to step forward in the work of teaching, preaching, and sanctifying will become greater than ever. Thoughtful and regular adult study of theology creates both the enthusiasm and the competence in adults to step forward in embracing these new responsibilities.

[6] The cultivation of healthy understanding of the Church’s tradition protects its members from drifting into dangerous extremist or one-dimensional energies that harm the Body of Christ.

There are those who would say that learning is a distraction, that humble piety is enough to please the Lord. To that, I would simply say that every hour of religious study I have invested in over the years has humbled me profoundly.

And, I would add the wisdom of my old seminary rector. Every year he would preside over the “votation” or deliberation over which seminarians to promote, and which ones to send home. The toughest cases were those of candidates who spent hours in the chapel but not enough in the library. When it came to vote, the rector would say, in Latin:

“Piety comes and goes. Stupidity remains forever.”

The next post: how my fellow parishioners and I met the challenge of theos logos. [In 2-3 days.]

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Spiritual Direction Part 2: What is the "end product" of spiritual direction?

1/17/2023

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I continue to undertake my due diligence as a member of an advisory committee on the establishment of a program for the training of potential laity spiritual directors for our parishes. We will be meeting tomorrow [Wednesday, January 18] and I have been beefing up in the library, in personal reflection, and in conversation with the group’s coordinator. I need to say that the coordinator has been extraordinarily kind to me in answering my initial concerns; I learned, for example, that my diocese receives many requests for spiritual direction. This is encouraging, to be sure. It would be interesting to know what petitioners mean by “spiritual direction” when they request it because the books I have consulted so far diverge rather widely on the meaning of the term over the course of history and there are a variety of schools of spirituality and direction today. Last spring in Spain Margaret and I were returning to Barcelona by bus from Montserrat when we found ourselves in Manresa, the town where St. Ignatius Loyola discovered himself and the spiritual roadmap which is famous today around the world. See Ignatian Spirituality website.

In my reading I have come to discover two useful triads around which to organize my thinking. The first outlines the longstanding three-tiered progression of spiritual development outlined by St. Thomas Aquinas [1225-1274], the actual personal progression into a deeper life of prayer and communion with God, which I think is safe to say the heart of spiritual direction, given how communion with God naturally impacts all other areas of human experience. St. Thomas’s triad of stages of prayer is the purgative/illuminative/unitive progression. Call this the subject matter of what we hope our trainees will impart to those in their care. The second is the triad of the qualities necessary for the spiritual director—learned, experienced, discerning. For today, I will focus on the first triad, and in two weeks I will address the second, on the directors themselves. However, it is important to note here that every source I have consulted agrees that spiritual directors must have a measure of experience on their own journey to assist others on the journey.

Again, our focus today involves the act of communicating with God in prayer, what we popularly refer to as personal contemplation or mental prayer, as distinct from collective liturgical prayer, group recitation of the rosary, etc. Classical church teaching from Aquinas forward has identified three stages to this kind of deep communion with God: the purgative, the illuminative, and the unitive steps. Very roughly described, the purgative stage involves a divestiture of serious sin and preoccupation with the things of the world. The second stage, the illuminative, opens the door to attachment to God’s agenda, so to speak, and awakens in the soul the joys and the pains of potential deeper communion with God. The final stage, the unitive, is a full union with God to the degree possible in this life. Depending upon whom you read, there are many variables—some theologians hold that the third stage is experienced by very few persons, relatively speaking. Franciscan spirituality has held that these three states can be experienced in any order or concurrently. All schools of thought are careful to emphasize that deeper communion in prayer is the work of God. Our work is the response, not the invention. We cannot muscle our way into God’s presence by purely human energies. A serious heresy of the early church was Pelagianism, which held that humans enjoyed enough power to initiate their road to salvation [essentially a denial of original sin.] See A Science and the Saints: Studies in Spiritual Direction [2020], Chapter 2.

In the previous paragraph I did not intend to set meditational prayer at odds with the public prayer life of the Church. Vatican II’s description of the Eucharist, for example, as the source and summit of the Christian life certainly comes into play here in our discussion of meditational prayer. It is by the collective life of the Church that we acquire the inspiration to embrace a more focused and intensive prayer life through catechetics, preaching, and participation in the sacraments. It is hard to imagine a contemplative prayer life that is not in step with the Church liturgical calendar of seasons, i.e., Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Ordinary Time. Nor is it wise to engage in a more intensive prayer experience without the Church’s wisdom, as in the counsel of a wise elder [read: spiritual director] who can assist his or her charge from mistaking God’s inspiration from a deep-seated self-will.

The role of the Church in contemplative prayer is more significant when one considers both the power of prayer and the radical impact of contemplative prayer upon any of us. Consider the “purgative phase.” If one is sincere in engaging in a closer response to God’s being, then the level of intensity and honesty involved in the purgative phase will be life changing. The purifying process involves both the abandonment of “junk” in one’s life and a hardcore sorrow for sins past and present. To pray is to be humble. Recall Luke 18: The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

A prayerful person is a broken person, in the healthiest sense of the word. But the purgative process is no picnic, either, and regrettably it is not a one-and-done deal. To me one of the intriguing things about St. Francis of Assisi was his personal experience with God later in life. Marked as he was by the wounds of Christ, his common prayer in his final years was “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a worm and not a man.” The closer one grows to divine presence in prayer, the more one comes to understand the awesomeness of God’s love and one’s total dependence upon that love. In the process the sinfulness and general mediocrity of our lives comes into clearer focus. The closest experience I can compare it to is joining AA, as I did in 1990. With a new clear head, one looks back at years of drinking, with all its attendant shame, and the effect can be overwhelming. Therefore, back in the 1930’s great thought went into a 12-step process of support and healing penance to prevent relapse. The daily meetings, the Big Book, individual sponsors, moral inventories, confession or the famous fifth step [“admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”], reconciliation, examinations of conscience, service to others, and prayer/meditation were carefully crafted into the program—and remain so today—to allow God to rebuild the soul fractured by substance abuse in honesty but without hopelessness.

The Gospels are united in their call for purgation/conversion, but they also reveal the joy and gratitude of those healed in body or spirit. One might say that this profound biblical experience of salvation is synonymous with the second or illuminative stage of contemplative prayer, the soul’s awakening to a deeper reality. Not to be irreverent, but I suppose another name for this second stage is the “We’re sure not in Kansas anymore, Toto” phase of prayer. When one has divested oneself of many of life’s distractions, there is a vacuum which is both frightening and consoling. In New Seeds of Contemplation [1961, 2007] Thomas Merton puts it this way: “Then, as peace settles on the soul and we accept what we are and what we are not, we begin to realize that this great poverty is our great fortune…We become like vessels that have been emptied of water that they may be filled with wine.” Specifically, one experiences the first inkling of what God is like, up close and personal. This illuminative stage is experientially different from our other more formal and familiar prayer experiences, though it springs from them.

The example of the monks can be very helpful here. The intense early morning hours of prayer in a monastery consist of an immersion into the Sacred Scripture and the holy writings of saints; this ritual is called “The Office of Readings,” and I have a link to the January 17, 2023, office here. The monks collectively hear inspired reading and place themselves totally at its service in undistracted humility. For some years I read the Office of Readings as my springboard to meditation, but more recently I have focused on the liturgical Mass texts and the writings of Thomas Merton. I must be honest and admit that my train jumps the tracks here habitually as I instinctively critique the Scripture, in the fashion of a theology student, rather than rest in its hearing/reading and let God do with me what God wills. Many times, the experience will seem like nothing, though that is not a bad thing; “wasting time with God” is an act of faith and is a more profitable deed than anything else I might do today. It is also true that God is “totally other,” and the void of silence is a reminder that God is the boss, not me. To believe in God’s presence when that presence is not felt is a powerful indicator of the virtue of faith.

On the other hand, illuminative prayer may take its shape and form from what we have just read in Scripture or another religious prompt, such as Eucharistic adoration or the mysteries of the rosary, both of which are synonymous with revealed Scripture. Whereas one might read the Scripture in the purgative stage of prayer to grasp the moral imperative of conversion, in the illuminative stage the Scripture sets the table for us to be passively enveloped in the Word that we might be impacted to our roots. An individual in the illuminative stage may experience dizzying swings between the new experience of the personal presence of God and the old temptations dying long, painful deaths.

The final stage, the unitive, is a full unity of God and the pray-er. Merton puts it this way: “For in the depths of contemplative prayer there seems to be no division between subject and object, and there is no reason to make any statement either about God or about oneself. He IS and this reality absorbs everything else.” [NSOC, p. 267] The term “unitive” is self-explanatory. However, there is considerable discussion about how many Christians attain this level of unity, or more correctly, how many times God extends this heavenly gift to those who seek his face.

One reason we may never know how many of our brethren enjoy this union with God is Merton’s contention that those who are so gifted do not talk about it. Calling attention to this communion of the divine, a rare gift of God, is bragging, a sign that, in St. Paul’s words, “the old man of sin” is still alive and well. In Learned, Experienced, and Discerning [2020] Mark O’Keefe, OSB, cites the practice of St. Teresa of Avila to exercise great caution in this regard. Unfortunately, more than once her inmost contemplative experiences were indiscreetly shared by a spiritual director, causing her considerable pain and misunderstanding. [p. 65]

The Swiss theologian Hans Kung observed that Christianity is the only religion that calls its members to become like their God. Matthew 5:48 puts this well: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Understood properly, Matthew is not endorsing the folly of Adam and Eve who disobeyed in the garden that they might become equal to God. To become like God is to do what God did in Christ and continues to do in the mystery of grace: love totally, to the point of pouring out one’s very being upon a cross. Prayer is nothing less than communion with the One who makes our journey possible. So, for the moment I would say that for any of us who experience that gnawing unrest of an empty soul, the time is ripe to embrace the wisdom of the saints in search of the one pearl of great price, union with God, one step at a time.

Many Catholics are looking for the help to begin the process and stay the course. It is this population—and may it grow ever larger—who look for spiritual directors to walk them through places they have not visited before. Which raises the question of how do we recruit and prepare ministers to take us by the hand down this road to communion with God? This will be the focus of our next installment on this stream in two weeks.

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Spiritual Direction: Who Will Shepherd the Shepherds?--Part 1

12/26/2022

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This fall I was invited to assist a retreat house staff in the establishment of a training program for lay spiritual directors. I am not sure how my name was drawn out of the hat—these days, when my name comes up in the chancery, it is usually followed by “isn’t he dead yet?” But, still alive, I slipped in my dental plate and drove down to the campus. It was a very interesting meeting; all of the participants were considerably younger and had real jobs, not blogging, and thus joined us via Zoom. As I was sitting there, though, I became aware of my own poverty on the subject of spiritual direction, quite embarrassing when one considers that I have been a seminarian, a pastor, a confessor, a theology instructor, and a licensed mental health counselor in multiple settings, from a downtown service church to a boys’ shelter to an alcoholism treatment center. One would imagine that in that soup of experience, an expertise in spiritual wisdom and guidance would naturally rise to the top. But as my fellow parishioner and ESPN celebrity Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast, my friend.”

So, what are we talking about here? Wikipedia’s treatment of spiritual direction is good: “Spiritual direction is the practice of being with people as they attempt to deepen their relationship with the divine, or to learn and grow in their personal spirituality.” It adds: “Spiritual direction is widespread in the Catholic tradition: a person with wisdom and spiritual discernment, usually but not exclusively a priest or consecrated [religious] in general, provides counsel to a person who wishes to make a journey of faith and discovery of God's will in his life.” Father William Barry, S.J., who has devoted a half-century to the theology and practice of spiritual direction, describes his work in considerable detail in this 2016 America feature story.

Unfortunately, despite my age and experience I am still a mere child in the art of delivering spiritual direction. The old Latin maxim is true: Nemo dat quod non habet. “You can’t give what you don’t have.” At least this new consulting project has helped sharpen for me my many inadequacies on my own journey to God’s heart, such as the absence of a focused personal tradition and discipline in seeking God in stillness. I am restless in prayer and meditation, like the kid or the batboy hanging around the dugout for tidbits, souvenirs, and inside gossip on baseball instead of going to clinics and learning what a lethal fastball really sounds like when it crosses the plate next to your head. Fortunately for me and the Church at large, the true historical spiritual mentors have left us remarkably good notes. I just “Primed” A Science of the Saints: Studies in Spiritual Direction [2020] by Robert E. Alvis. The first chapter addresses spiritual direction among the “Desert Fathers and Mothers,” the earliest Christians to flee the decadence of the Roman Empire, particularly city life, for an austere life of prayer, penance, and wordless communion with God. This would be the era of St. Jerome, St. John Cassian, and St. Benedict, roughly 300-600 A.D.

As religious orders developed and multiplied throughout Europe, the ministry of spiritual direction became institutionalized, at least for clerics and religious, and probably for royalty and the rich. Spain’s Queen, Isabella, was profoundly influenced by her personal priest. It is interesting to note, though, that by St. Teresa of Avila’s day [1515-1582] the line between spiritual advice offered inside and outside the confessional was not always clear, and in her autobiography, she speaks highly of the advice she received from confessors as well as priest spiritual directors outside the sacrament. St. Francis de Sales [1567-1622] coined the phrase “spiritual direction,” and he provided a structure for it that is widely respected today in the Salesian tradition.

I can’t give a detailed history of how and when lay persons in the United States began to seek spiritual direction, or to administer it, for that matter—no historian, to my knowledge, has tackled that so far--though Father Barry, in the aforementioned America piece, recounts how he and several other Jesuits established an institute in the early 1970’s to teach lay persons how to become spiritual directors. Vatican II [1962-1965] certainly helped the cause with its teaching that all Catholics are called to a life of holiness by virtue of their baptism, not just those in orders and/or vows. Prior to the Council—and for a while afterward—the popular wisdom had it that clerics and religious were the ordinary providers of spiritual advice and, for that matter, the only ones who were expected to frequent this kind of counseling on a regular basis, too.

If there is one historical figure who opened the door to lay pursuit of deeper personal spiritual searching in the United States, a strong case can be made for the Trappist monk Thomas Merton [1915-1968]. Having entered the monastic cloister in 1941, Merton’s writings on the spiritual life—including his conversion autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain [1948] and New Seeds of Contemplation [1961]—remain in the top 1% of Amazon bestsellers as of this writing. This is even more remarkable when one considers that his main body of work was completed before the end of Vatican II in 1965; his work successfully bridged two eras of Church life. Merton died in 1968—accidentally electrocuted by a faulty fan—but his writing served as a template for future generations of spiritual writers and Catholic laity seeking deeper communion with God beyond the obligatory guardrails of minimal observance.

My personal and professional background is rooted in the Franciscan Order, which in my time was heavily invested in downtown shrine churches [round the clock], educational institutions including colleges, and retreat work. There was a heavy demand for confessional ministry in these venues, as well as “pastoral counseling” as we called it then, which could be one meeting or periodic sessions with the same priest. I cut my teeth in these settings. In my seminary there was a popular elective called “Diagnostic Planning and Thinking,” a cross between basic theology, psychology, and social work which enabled us to discern what kinds of help an individual might need. It was particularly popular for those of us then giving youth retreats. After ordination I conducted retreats for communities of sisters in New York State and New England, where there was an unspoken expectation that every participant would have an hour meeting for spiritual direction with the retreat master, which might or might not include the Sacrament of Penance or “a general confession.” I don’t think I would have the stamina today for those intense 16-hour days anymore; I barely did in the 1970’s. In one retreat house, the retreat master was expected to offer a 5:30 AM Mass for the sisters working the kitchen!

By the time I moved into parish pastoring, c. 1980, I was seeing the national decline in confessions. For a discussion on this trend, see Sin in the Sixties: Catholic and Confession 1955-1975 [2022] by Maria C. Morrow. Pastoral Counseling requests from parishioners and others, however, increased [or remained steady], and in 1984 I began a four-year master’s degree program at nights at Rollins College, and earned the degree in counseling in 1988. I have to say, however, that to my detriment I was neglecting my own need for spiritual direction or guidance. It is easy for a priest to justify that—the demands of a busy parish, alcohol abuse, the excuse that “I read a lot” for my preaching and work. And no, I did not have a spiritual director.

Curiously, the first powerful structure of personal spiritual input for me came in the form of AA, 32 years ago. As many of you know, Alcoholics Anonymous has a strong religious component of daily meetings, prayer, daily examination of conscience, open discussion, penance, reconciliation, and sponsorship. For me, this was buttressed by two years of weekly therapy with a licensed psychotherapist who happened to be an Episcopalian and challenged me on my need to recover [or, in some cases discover] my spiritual roots. She had me reading St. Augustine’s Confessions and possibly Merton. I can’t say the texts alone changed my life, but the atmosphere of personal interaction with a Christian counselor was challenging and fruitful. Although I was seeing this therapist for compelling clinical depression and anxiety diagnoses as well as vocational discernment, it is very true that there was a significant spiritual component to our work that opened the door for a more energetic embrace of a spiritual life later.

That was over three decades ago. Next year I will be celebrating my silver wedding anniversary to a woman of great faith and humor. I think the role of the husband-wife dynamic in spiritual growth is not sufficiently emphasized in our general Catholic practice. Prior to our marriage my pastor sent us on a four-day retreat to a Trappist monastery in South Carolina as our “pre-Cana” marriage preparation back in 1998, thus beginning an attraction to the wholesome structured life and spirituality of Merton’s Trappist monks. In very recent years the wisdom of Merton and the dedication of the monks have focused me considerably. About four years ago Margaret and I joined an online group with four other “alumni” of Trappist retreats to reflect together upon assigned readings from Merton, Richard Rohr, and next year, Joan Chittister. The group experience has been particularly helpful for me in the sense that I read and reflect upon the material not only for myself but for my group confreres. There is a healthy sense of church to all this, though we are of different denominations. The reach of the Trappists is truly ecumenical.

This long personal detour of mine highlights, I hope, the eccentric and lengthy routes many of us take to find God, when in fact God is always there and waiting for us to be still, trusting, and humble of heart. For whatever reason, I habitually wrestle with a tendency to be “all Martha” and “no Mary.” Merton, in New Seeds of Contemplation [p. 255] provides an antidote. “One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is how to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.” Or in Jesus own words, “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.” To dare offer advice to those who seek it requires the heavy lifting of beams from one’s own experience of life.

Which brings us around to the question of spiritual direction for Catholics at large. Do Catholics know what it is? Does or should every Catholic adult have a spiritual director? Are people pounding on church doors looking for spiritual directors? And, to my original question, who should be providing this ministry? There are, in the United States, possibly several hundred programs for training lay spiritual directors ranging from graduate degrees at major Catholic universities to on-line preparatory programs provided by religious communities or lay associations. They vary, obviously, in intensity and quality. Some offer accredited B.A.’s and M.A.’s while others offer “certificates.” I can find only one “clearing house” for spiritual direction certification, The Canadian Council of Professional Certification. The program I am looking at is a one-year certification program. Is this enough? How does one screen applicants? Who pays the tuition? [$4000/year is not uncommon.] Are we coming upon an age where payment for spiritual direction is the new norm? Obviously, this is a ministry that raises as many questions as answers, and I will take a closer look at these in the next installment.

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Church Bulletins As Vacation Souvenirs

7/26/2022

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Margaret and I returned home last night [Saturday, July 23] from a ten-day reunion with her family and sightseeing time in the lower Hudson Valley, primarily Westchester County. Although I have been in that region numerous times before, I still learned a great deal about the river and New York City, which we visited twice during our stay.

We had a hotel room on the river which, I discovered on a morning walk, is a neighbor to the Indian Point Energy Center, a three-unit nuclear energy plant. There is still routine exhaust smoke coming out of the facility, though it was officially decommissioned in 2021. As I understand it, though, you never just close a nuclear plant. In fact, anyone who lives within a ten-mile radius is eligible to get free iodine tablets from the government in the event of an “event” at Indian Point. I did not see any tablets at the coffee bar in our hotel room, so I presumed I could get some at the front desk by showing my car rental papers from Westchester Airport. You can never be too careful.

Travel is indeed a great teacher. On this trip I saw “The High Line” in lower Manhattan for the first time; in another first, I used the NYC bus system, and on the 14th Street Line shared space with a man holding a conversation with the ABC newscaster Peter Jennings, who died in 2005. I had my first meal in a NY Jewish Deli and later discovered the joy of a train ride on the Metro North when the air conditioning fails on the hottest day of the year [so far]. I got to the top of Bear Mountain State Park where the Appalachian Trail crosses. Certainly, one of the most memorable days was Monday when my sister-in-law took us to The Cloister Museum at the northern tip of Manhattan [near the GW Bridge access], a treasure of medieval religious art. The Cloister is the setting of James Carroll's novel of the same name, my inspiration to visit the site.

I like to visit churches, of course, and I was able to attend Saturday evening Mass near our hotel at Croton-on-Hudson, NY, and a parish four-day summer festival in Buchanan, N.Y. during the week. The former pastor of my home parish, now Most Reverend Stephen Parkes, Bishop of the Savannah, Georgia diocese, used to encourage us to bring him copies of bulletins from our travels, an excellent idea. Nowadays it is possible to visit about every parish in the United States as the bulletins are printed online. If you know how to decode bulletins—by what they report and where they remain silent—you can get a fascinating slice of parochial life across the country.

The Business of Bulletin Production

Bulletins were originally printed/mimeographed in the parish office, but after World War II several companies devised the current format of selling advertising to local vendors in exchange for publishing a more professional bulletin layout and the opportunity of parish businessmen and businesswomen to get exposure in the parish family. As a pastor, I had the same bulletin company rep for ten years in one parish and we worked well together, but my memory is that the deal was break-even. I cannot recall any profit to the parish aside from the printing and delivery of the actual product. The bulletin publication industry has much in common with professional sports—the bigger the market, the more money changes hands. I was a small market pastor. Some years later, when I opened my mental health practice, I applied as a vendor in my own mega-church’s bulletin. I was told I needed to sign a three-year contract for thousands of dollars. I was no longer in Kansas, Toto, and I could not afford to advertise in my own parish. By the time I could afford it, my clients’ health insurance contractors provided full regional on-line exposure and I did not need the bulletin, and it did not need me.

Will Bulletins Become Obsolete?

Most parishes have on-line presence to varying degrees, which raises the question of whether the hand-out bulletin will become obsolete. Two factors will determine that: first, with declining numbers of regular worshippers, will the current crop of bulletin providers remain in business; and second, will the current generations of churchgoers continue to demand an in-hand spreadsheet of certain personal parish data. For example, a staple of every church bulletin is a listing of all the coming week’s Masses with its specific intention—specifically, the name of a deceased for whom a monetary contribution or offering has been made to the celebrant of the Mass. We use the shorthand “Mass stipend” and the name of the requesting party is also highlighted. The idea that one deceased member of the parish gets “special grace in Purgatory” beyond the infinite merits poured out by Christ for all the living and the dead in every Mass, as the wording of the Eucharist Prayers makes plain, is more than a little theological stretch.

On the other hand, as Sigmund Freud observed, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” and the Mass stipend listing in the bulletin is just a nice, Catholic thing to do, theology notwithstanding. Not to mention that taking the accompanying Mass card to the funeral home for the family has a much more Christian ring to it that, say, a medium-priced bottle of Merlot. Margaret and I send our stipend money to missionary religious orders such as Maryknoll where the offering is frequently desperately needed by the priest and the mission itself. In recent times I see that some church bulletins include an announcement that the tabernacle candle—lit 24-hours where the Eucharist is reserved—is burned “in loving memory” of a specific individual.

I have no idea what the standard Mass stipends are today in parishes. This is a factoid that is never published in bulletins because of the appearance of trafficking in holy things and the complexity of Canon 952.1 which states that a priest can accept more or less of the standard stipend determined by the bishops of a region. [When I was ordained in 1974, my region’s guideline was $2 for a low private Mass, $5 for a high or public Mass. Or as my boss instructed me, “Two or five, dead or alive.”] The standard local offering can be determined by phoning or visiting a parish office in most circumstances.

Some parish bulletins list the sick of the parish for the purpose of prayer. In the age of HIPAA there probably needs to be clear delineation that the public designation was made at the request of the family. Were I pastoring today, I would not publicly list the names of persons I had visited for the anointing of the sick, for example, without the expressed permission of the family. Of course, as the population ages, the sick lists grow progressively longer. One parish bulletin managed this situation thusly: “Names on the sick list will be included for four weeks unless the family contacts the office to request the names be included for an additional four weeks.” Those terms are more generous than my health care coverage which gives me about 72 hours to get better.

Do Bulletins Communicate Finances Well?

Parish bulletins treat of finances in a variety of ways—including avoiding the subject altogether. Where I attended Mass on July 16, the bulletin provided the collection total of the previous weekend, $4678 in envelopes, and $8098 from its EFT giving program. Doing quick math off these numbers, I figured the annual income at about $665,000. However, here again the data can be misleading. These figures come from the weekend of July 9-10, the heart of vacation season considering the parish’s location on the Hudson and near the mountains. On the other hand, what complicated the math further was an accompanying attendance table. The parish offered four Masses for the same weekend with attendance at 76, 56, 60, and 98, or a total of 290. Were I a new parishioner, I would like to have a bigger picture of the fiscal solvency of the parish operation—are these figures for offering and attendance typical or summer vacational aberrations? When I read in the paper about a parish closing anywhere in the U.S. with the usual local weeping and gnashing of teeth, and then I see the fiscal data of the past decade, I always wonder, “didn’t they see that coming?” Bulletins should, at the very least, provide parishioners with access to immediate and long-range information on the financial health of the parish and the diocese.

Bulletins—particularly on-line bulletins—can provide an excellent service by providing links to both the most recent parish and diocesan financial statements. The Diocese of Orlando, my home church now for 44 years, was recently nationally recognized for its on-line transparency in providing its annual audit for on-line review. [Curiously, my own parish’s most recent annual report on-line dates to the 2019-2020 fiscal year.] It is little known that the 1983 Code of Canon Law mandates a financial council of laity to work with the pastor: [537] Each parish is to have a finance council which is regulated by universal laws as well as by norms issued by the diocesan bishop; in this council the Christian faithful, selected according to the same norms, aid the pastor in the administration of parish goods. The spirit of the law is two-fold: the involvement of competent professionals in the management of the parish, and a measure of transparency in the fiscal dealings of the parish. Curiously, the “parish council,” which exists in many parishes, is a parochial recommendation of Canon Law, not an absolute requirement. It is, when taken seriously, an important facet of parochial life.

And while we are at it, check your diocesan corporate status. Most of us assume that, legally speaking, the bishop is the head of the diocesan corporation or “corporation sole.” But in some states and some dioceses this is not the case. See this instruction from the Archdiocese of Milwaukee: “Each archdiocesan parish in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee is an independent religious corporation established according to the Civil Statutes of the State of Wisconsin. The parish corporation is a civil body created solely for legal purposes. It has authority and competence only in those civil and secular matters for which it was created.” There are significant implications of such structuring when it comes to sexual abuse of minors and the allocation of awards to victims. If each parish is an independent legal entity, the potential exists for significant criminal and civil exposure that ordinarily is borne by the diocese. California was the first state to divest of the diocesan corporation sole model—in 2002, the year of “Spotlight.”

I came across one church bulletin which listed the names of the parish council members as well as the finance board members. This seems like a promising way to facilitate valuable information and to quash rumors, the bane of every parish. I did see something unusual and encouraging on the road—a parish bulletin that published a detailed account of its latest parish council meeting. Not all its minutes were encouraging; a lack of funds prevented several capital improvements from completion. On the other hand, there was a timely report by several members who participated in the diocesan synod listening sessions. The dates for future council meetings were posted in the same bulletin. One might say that such a practice is itself part of Synodality. The very existence of healthy and regular meetings/exchanges of pastor and parishioners is a healthy antidote to clericalism.

Are Bulletins useful for education purposes?

I would say that the bulletin—and the parish’s website—are often untapped possibilities. In some respects, a typical bulletin can model the worst type of education—little boxes of pithy quotes, or an insert on a profound subject, such as the Sunday Gospel that reduces the richness of Catholic faith and writing to the lowest common denominator in an extremely limited space. It is common to see links to FORMED, a traditional Catholic multimedia website established for home study. I have discomfort with a program that includes no reference to the present pope or his teachings. But more to the point, I am not sure FORMED is suited for a critical student of the faith or capable of introducing its audience to the historical depth of the Catholic Tradition.

At the very least, a church bulletin can vigorously promote adult participation in one’s own parish or a regional setting. This assumes, of course, that there are topflight Catholic adult educational opportunities in the parish or region. Catholic journalism of late has been focused on the dearth of Catholic intellectuals available to teach in Catholic universities, and this vacuum percolates down to seminaries, Catholic colleges, diocesan certification programs, and to parish personnel and volunteers. In short, we are in a religious brain drain. Much like secular colleges, we are producing religious technocratic Catholics, not the deep thinkers in the tradition of Augustine or Thomas Aquinas.

About everyone I know seems to belong to a book club, and I am hearing of Catholics forming study groups, even independent of local parishes. I belong to a Trappist reading circle organized by Mepkin Abbey for those who have made retreats there. We meet monthly via Zoom to discuss segments of our current read, Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation. [And why is Merton excluded from FORMED?] Perhaps this is the wave of the future for faith formation and adult education, and again it dovetails with the synodal model of communal growth of faith and exchange of insight.

A church bulletin cannot educate us, but it can become a nexus of grassroots education by carrying recommendations of theologically challenging books and journals as well as links to distinguished on-line Catholic education programs such as the renowned University of Dayton’s “Virtual Learning Community for Faith Formation” led by Sister Angela Ann Zukowski. In any case, observing my own parish, I see that most bulletins are left in the pew, as the reader has most likely perused it to see who died in the past week. The goal here is to make the bulletin worth taking home.

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Exit Interviews: Revealing Stories of Why People Are Leaving the Church--Part 3

12/28/2021

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Another Christmas Eve-Christmas Day observance in my parish. I always had the impression that many more people attend Mass on Christmas Eve/Christmas Day than on a typical weekend of the Church year. My thinking until recently was one-dimensional; I assumed that everybody was too busy or too poorly catechized, to attend Mass weekly, and that the Christmas and Easter extras were just a friendly nudge away from attending more often.

What I am coming to see is that distance from churches is the new norm, in Roman Catholicism and in Christianity in general. I did a little research online to get a picture of church membership and participation in the United States. Take your pick: PEW Research and CARA [the Catholic research center at Georgetown University] provide an in-depth picture of the trend away from both formal membership in a church and frequency of participation among those who maintain an affiliation. Briefly, the number of Americans who identify as “Nones” or having no religious affiliation at all has risen to about one-third of the American population. CARA’s most recent data [2015; 2020 report delayed by Covid] indicates that 23% of Catholics attend weekly Mass; when the number of Catholics who attend about once a month is added, the total is 49%, meaning that half of those who identified themselves to researchers as Catholics do not attend at all or come only for Christmas and or Easter. This is an enormous number of Catholics who go it alone.

If it is any consolation, the drift from Catholicism is not as immediately acute as it is for other branches of the Christian family. CARA’s numbers, taken at five-year intervals since its survey began in 1970, show a massive decline in Catholic practice but it is spread out over the past fifty years. Mainstream Protestantism [Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, etc.] has suffered the greatest losses in the twenty-first century. Evangelical and independent churches have also declined. Catholicism has seen less dramatic declines in the immediate past, though remember that the Covid epidemic has not been factored in yet to the statistical picture, and visual-anecdotal evidence suggests that one “long hauler” impact of Covid may be a significant decline in Catholics physically returning to regular worship. PEW’s commentary observes that while Catholics tend to have the largest exit numbers of members, these losses are softened by a higher birthrate and an inflow of Catholic immigrants, but a close look at CARA’s numbers does not support that take.

With this background I turn again to Exit Interviews, specifically Chapters 20 and 21 on church strategies and winning the hearts of those who have left their worshipping communities. In the preceding post [beneath this entry] I covered the author’s advice to churches on how to think about disengaged Christians and some avenues of rapprochement to those who have exited formal Christian communities. Chapter 20 offers several worthwhile considerations, but I would say that William Hendricks’ presuppositions rest on the idea that those currently disaffiliated are in a temporary state of mind and could be reunited with an ecclesiastical community with appropriate outreach.

Chapter 21 addresses those who have left Christian churches and, in an insightful turn of phrase, “those who remain in the institution [church] but endure…a low-grade virus of discontent…. On the whole, they are disappointed with their spiritual experience…yet they are not dissatisfied enough to leave—until some crisis comes along that forces the issue.” [p. 291] One may argue that the clergy abuse scandals and the Covid crisis represented such tipping points for many Catholics, but my personal encounters with longtime friends and coworkers never cease to surprise me. The strongest sentiment I hear—from Catholics who have left and Catholics who ponder leaving—is the perceived failure of parishes to address the spiritual hungers and the moral dilemmas of adulthood.

Last Sunday, on the Feast of the Holy Family, the homily at the Mass I attended was offered by the celebrant who focused on Pontius Pilate and an assortment of myths about him. Why? What did this have to do with St. Luke’s noble narrative of Jesus in the Temple with the priests? I have no idea. What was doubly puzzling was the vested presence in the sanctuary of a happily married deacon with a family; what a fitting candidate to preach on this Feast of the Holy Family. But alas, it was not to be. As it is scientifically proven that poor sermons always last longer, about halfway through this one I discretely leaned over to my wife and said, “Do you have any rope in your purse? I want to hang myself from the rafters.”

I looked around the church at the several families who had brought their children and I wondered how useful this exercise was for these young souls, or for their parents, for that matter. The 2018 CARA/St. Mary’s Press study, “Going, Going, Gone: The Disaffiliation of Young People from the Catholic Church” found that the youthful process of disengaging from Catholicism begins as early as age 10. Put another way, this is the age when a troubling number of young people decide that “there is nothing here for me to invest in.” It is interesting that back in 2018 several critics of the study—and even the language of the study itself to some degree—blamed this early disengagement on the failure of parents to actively participate in weekly Eucharist. This begs the question of why and how the parents are disenchanted.

The question that Hendricks asks in Exit Interviews—why did you leave? –is exactly the question that we Catholics, as an institution, never ask young people and never ask adults, because there is nothing in our theology to address the issue of a sacrament so poorly celebrated that it actually becomes a countersign of what it intends to convey. Put another way, liturgy can become a sacrament of discouragement for many of us who grimly endure experiences of “what might have been.” [I have never experienced this personally, but I read reports from around the country that the pulpit is used for political profiteering or weekly excoriation of sexual weakness, which is actually an abuse that should be reported to the bishop.]

As a Church, we have tolerated poor preaching for a good many years on the grounds that the celebration of the Word of God at Mass is somehow secondary to the Eucharistic Prayer and the reception of Communion. Put another way, we do not equate poor preaching with failure to distribute communion, although theologically speaking, one can make that argument. For it is the preaching that awakens both belief in the Real Presence and hunger for communion. So, what happens when generations of lukewarm celebration of the Word at Mass begin to pile up and become the norm? Is a Catholic permitted to “go his own way” to seek a deeper union with God?

Hendricks observes that those who have left institutional churches have often networked with other fellow faith seekers to study Scripture and other religious texts [he cites Thomas Merton’s works, for example] in place of membership in an institutional church. He is opposed to this as a permanent solution. “Is this a model to follow? Of course not. There are no models when it comes to trying to grow as a Christian outside the institutional church.” [p. 295] I had to smile when I read a Protestant commentator quoting an old Catholic maxim, “Outside the Church there is no salvation.” Of course, the official Catholic teaching still holds that a Catholic is obligated to participate in the life of the Church, but this leaves us with the statistical reality that about half of those who publicly identify as Catholic are not actively engaged.

We honestly do not know why, with any scientific certainty. This population would be one of the most intriguing groups to engage in the upcoming synodal process called by Pope Francis. I doubt that this would happen, because the synodal consultations in the United States have been less than energetic in many dioceses, even for those who are highly active or leaders of their Catholic assemblies. The Vatican directives on the synodal process instruct that “special care should be taken to involve those persons who may risk being excluded: women, the handicapped, refugees, migrants, the elderly, people who live in poverty, Catholics who rarely or never practice their faith.” The pope, evidently, would like to hear from the 50% of alienated U.S. Catholics in this consultation process. Not all bishops are comfortable with this.

For myself, as frustrated as I may be with the Church, honesty compels me to admit to myself that everything I have learned about Christ and the mysteries of salvation has come down to me through the Church, either through my Catholic family or charismatic ministers, education system, and treasury of sacred writing and theology. I would not be the man I am today without that heritage. I feel enthusiastic about passing along what I have received. But I have respect and understanding of my many friends who, for many distinct reasons, have sought different communities of faith or, in Thomas Merton’s literary example, have gone off to the woods to build their own chapels. There are days I have pondered taking a Eucharistic sabbatical, too. In the next post on Exit Interviews, I will talk more about the ownership of one’s faith, spirituality, and conscience before God vis-a-vis membership in a structured religion.

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Exit Interviews: Revealing Stories of Why People Are Leaving the Church--Part 2

12/14/2021

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Back on November 20, I posted the first entry on William Hendricks’ Exit Interviews: Revealing Stories of Why People Are Leaving the Church [1993]. I checked the book’s Amazon site this AM, and the book is available used in hard cover or paper for under $10 from networked small book dealers. Hendricks, as you may recall, interviewed sixteen persons who had left their Christian churches or, in some cases, had been pressured to leave. The author summarizes his impressions and recommendations in the final two chapters, and today I want to look closely at Chapter 20, “What Churches Can Do.” [pp. 273-288]

I noted in the earlier post Hendricks’ observation that churches spend too much time at the front door and not enough time at the back door, i.e., we are always looking for new fresh faces while the disenchanted are leaving unnoticed. I can say that as a pastor I was guilty of this failing; it is always an “upper” when a new family joins us for Sunday liturgy, usually expressing dissatisfaction with a previous church and/or pastor and telling you how much better you are, or your church is. On the other hand, when someone was disengaging from me as pastor or from my parish—either discretely or by a dramatic letter—it was hard to work up the enthusiasm for a pastoral visit that was bound to be lengthy, critical, and at times passionate. That said, Hendricks’ research found that on average a person leaving a congregation expects an outreach or reaction from the church within a six- or eight-week window before making a final break.

Hendricks makes a good point that none of the sixteen people he interviewed were new converts. All his subjects had been church members throughout their adulthood, so they had “skin in the game,” so to speak. Moreover, they were all dissatisfied with their spiritual progress. Whose fault is this? Churches historically tend to slough off crises of faith on the weakness, disobedience, or other inadequacies of the frustrated believer. But the author raises the painful question of whether the churches do an adequate job in the ongoing spiritual formation of adult members. I recall about thirty years ago when I hired a consulting firm to assist in saving a Catholic elementary school in my parish. The first piece of $30,000 advice was this: “Retention, retention, retention!”

Parishioners grow. Cultures change. The tired recipes of parochial life are not keeping up with the spiritual and psychological needs of longtime members. Hendricks uses an interesting example. “People no longer evaluate Christianity based on whether it is true, but how it is true. As my friend Doug Sherman says, today’s question is not whether God exists, but what difference does He make?” [p. 277] One reason the churches are losing members, he argues, is the absence of age-appropriate faith formation. “Yet spirituality is probably the foremost theological category in people’s minds today. If the church lacks a cogent doctrine in this area, it will keep losing credibility—which is to say it will keep losing people.” [p. 277] No Catholic parish or diocese I am aware of offers an ongoing faith formation that parallels the human life cycle. While it is true that God’s revelation is unchanging, we experience it from very distinct generations and outside circumstances.

I can relate to Hendricks’ point from my personal experience. At the age of 40 I joined Alcoholics Anonymous and promptly fell into clinical depression, a common occurrence when one stops “self-medicating.” My psychiatrist referred me to a therapist on his staff, an Episcopal woman whom I met with weekly for two years. A spiritual person herself, she walked me through a rediscovery of my own soul, making me read St. Augustine’s Confessions and other Christian treasures of conversion while I reviewed the direction of my life and made decisions for the future. She provided the faith formation and the psychological support I needed as I passed through a sloppy stage of human development. To be frank, I sensed at the time that someone outside the Roman Catholic community might be more honest with me about the decisions I needed to make, such as leaving the active priesthood.

Hendricks is a bit flip when he observes that “the church is in the people development business” [p. 277] but essentially he is correct. If the church is not meaningfully engaged with every one of its members through the full spectrum of life and experience, we will continue to lose church members. Hendricks refers to a “theology of persons” in which spiritual development and human development go hand in hand. If you look at your church bulletin, you may notice that our parochial formative ministries are lopsided toward the young; we are still living with the 1950’s sacramental model of cramming in “the essentials” before Confirmation and crossing our fingers that everyone has enough gas to cross the finish line of the faith many years hence.

Following along this line of thought, Hendricks pinpoints a problem that has troubled me for years, i.e., how do we engage all our members in opportunities to exercise their unique baptismal gifts, those charisms mentioned frequently in St. Paul’s letters? He writes “I’ve heard countless pastors and church leaders cry that they cannot find enough volunteers, and therefore the work of the church goes undone. Their tendency is to blame the people. But could it be that the people are merely responding to a woefully inadequate theology of spiritual gifts?” [p. 279]

In my lifetime I have seen a considerable growth in the numbers of Catholics who involve themselves in social outreach ministries, and of course the religious education programs of all parishes are now conducted by lay volunteers instead of religious sisters. However, the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation confer divine gifts upon all the initiated, and this is an area where an entire rethinking is in line. Truth be told, the Church does not know how to facilitate the good will and the talents of its members, nor does it have a “theology of volunteerism” nor a systematic concept of how to engage all members in meaningful missionary work. By this I am referring to the skill of diagnosing how every member can serve in the name of Christ. The recent Vatican declaration restoring the order of catechists, Antiquum Ministerium [2021] and specific directives on the requirements of the catechetical ministry issued last week are a step in the right direction, though I think that current catechists might blanch at the evident call for professional excellence in this ministry. Pope Francis’ vision of catechetics will take a generation or more to implement. But that is as it should be.

Certainly, the Catholic Church is always in significant need of volunteers [and decently compensated professionals] to competently maintain the ministries of a parish mandated by custom and Canon Law. But it is wrong to suggest that baptismal gifts can only be exercised within a parish structure. Those with specialized skills may best exercise them in Christ’s name in collaboration with other faiths or civil ventures. During the Covid crisis medical personnel are working far above the call of duty; this is an exercise of extraordinary baptismal service that we never talk about from the pulpit. Other careers, such as law enforcement, are rich in opportunities to live baptismal goodness and courage. The critical point is to reinforce the importance of every member in the collective mission of the Body of Christ. A failure to do this only reinforces the old “pray, pay, and obey” handle about traditional Catholics. Catholics want to play a meaningful role in the Body of Christ; they also hunger to be fed the spiritual guidance necessary to make prudent decisions.

Hendricks makes more important points on how churches can retain and enrich their members. I will highlight them here:

A church must maintain a theology of grace. The author puts it this way: the preaching and message of any church must put God’s saving grace at the center. Hendricks decries “preaching grace while demanding works.” [p. 280] The author comes from an Evangelical Protestant tradition that, going back to Luther, holds the primacy of God in personal salvation. Hendricks is critical of churches and clerics who pay lip service to the mystery of God and demand adherence to a bureaucracy of hoops to salvation.

The term he uses is “legalism.” “Legalism is keeping people out of the church, it is driving people away from the church, and it is poisoning the lives of those who remain in the church.” [p. 280] In the contemporary Roman Catholic Church, many [I included] hunger for mystical communion with God’s grace but find ourselves tangled in preoccupation with doctrinal purity, moral rectitude, and intramural legal considerations. [I recently began working with adult candidates for Confirmation, and I did raise an eyebrow on the paperwork required for a direct encounter with the Holy Spirit.] But far worse is a maverick moralism/legalism that scandalizes huge swaths of society. Last week the Catholic Diocese of Marquette, Michigan, issued an instruction to its parishes that transgender people cannot be baptized or receive other sacraments “until they have repented.”

Redefining Community: Churches are used to dealing with large numbers of people, to thinking collectively. But Hendricks reminds us that “most people can only relate personally to a handful of others.” [p. 283] It may be my psychological training run amuck, but I am always discomfited by Catholicism’s casual use of the term “community.” There is a dissonance in the pew, or in the rearview mirror, when church leaders talk about community when very few of us feel deeply connected or personally impacted. I cannot help but observe that in my own parish the congregation cannot even agree on whether to wear facial masks to Mass.

I used to instruct large groups of people when I worked in my diocese’s catechist training program. After taking five years off, my parish asked me to conduct the formation meetings for adult candidates for Confirmation. I had five candidates for a five-week series. My biggest takeaway from the experience was my inability to get to know them better personally, to hear their faith journey stories—adult Confirmation is always a conversion of sorts. In short, my vision of church is shrinking, which I believe to be a good thing, albeit a significant challenge to achieve. Were we to see our parishes as collections of little communities, I believe that fewer of us will drift away, unloved, and unnoticed.

Teach people theology. Hendricks observes that “As I conducted these interviews, and as I listen to people talk about spiritual issues today, I was stunned at how much ‘folk religion’ there is on the street…popular but inaccurate ideas about what our faith is and how it applies. Folk religion is marked by simplistic formulations of supposedly Biblical truths. It is essentially ‘McDoctrine’—spiritual fast-food of proof texts and cliches that are filling and fattening, but not particularly nourishing.” [p. 284]

How true in the Roman Catholic setting. We are heirs of the greatest treasury of religious thought in the Western World. But there is no systematic structure for continuing adult education and faith formation built into Catholic pastoral life. And, given this vacuum, a sincere Catholic who sets off on a personal online exploration of Catholic theology will lose his way in a maze of literature and websites that would never find its way to the bookshelves of a decent Catholic college. This is particularly true in the computer age; Hendricks wrote these words in 1993. One of the goals of adult faith formation is precisely the skill of critiquing works that are true to the Catholic theological tradition and meet the muster of peer review.

Catholics have a particular challenge to face; sad to say, I am not sure that many Church leaders are comfortable with a well-read and thoughtful adult membership. No better example of this is the lethargic response of dioceses in the United States to Pope Francis’ call to “Synodality,” a worldwide conversation/consultation of the pulse of Catholic life at the grassroots. I suppose this reluctance to converse with the regular members is symptomatic of clericalism, i.e., the laity have nothing important to impart to the ordained. But by the measure of completed years of schooling, Catholics are the best educated cohort in the United States. The tragedy is that parishes have nothing to offer that is comparable to the competence of doctors, teachers, CEOs, and other professions. Boredom leads to frustration and often to the door.

Think about it: when is the last time a book was cited or recommended from the pulpit?

I have not done justice to all of Hendricks’ insights. But there is enough here to enter another discussion: can a Catholic make a go of it independent of a parish? Hendricks addresses the question of living without a faith community in Chapter 20, “You’ll Never Find the Perfect Church,” the third entry on this blog stream which will appear shortly.

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