Influences on Hans Urs von Balthasar Theology, part 3

So let us recap the posts so far: first, we talked about how growing up in Lucerne, Switzerland with the patrician and cosmopolitan von Balthasar family wedded Catholicism to his very bones. Then we treated the influence in his seminary days of Eric Pryzwara and Henri de Lubac, rescuing him from the extrinsicism of that dreary "sawdust Thomism" of the Suarezian neo-scholasticism of his day. Then in the next post we talked about the French literary tradition within Catholicism and how their passion and lucidity, especially of Paul Claudel, affected his approach to God's self-disclosure. And we spoke of the rejection of the Rahnerian school of Transcendental Thomism because the concept of vorgriff destroyed the need for revelation.

Now we turn to one of the most positive and direct contributors to the life and work of Hans Urs von Balthasar: the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth (pronounced "Bart") and the analogy of faith. Next post (and last!) will be about Adrienne von Speyr. Karl just took up so much space!

Karl Barth and the Analogy of Faith

Karl Barth is one of the most important theologians in the modern history of Protestantism. His goal was to throw off of Christian faith the dead weight of Liberal Protestantism that reduced Jesus to a moral teacher and wise man, rather than the Savior and Redeemer that we all desperately need. In a sense you could say that he was engaged in his own ressourcement of Martin Luther, understanding anew the judgment of God against the hopeless world made clear in his Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Though Balthasar was known as a convert maker, Barth would be the one that got away. Here was Protestantism in its most challenging and most critical phase, and the two would become both great friends and fierce adversaries.

First and foremost, Karl Barth rejected wholly the concept of the analogy of being, which was the set of philosophical presuppositions that Balthasar held to from his mentor, Pryzwara. Now, when I say "rejected" I mean this is the strongest possible way. Barth saw the analogy of being as a doctrine of the Anti-Christ, pure and simple, and as long as the Catholic Church upheld this analogy of being, then the Church is in league with the devil. This wholesale rejection would forever keep Barth out of the Catholic Church.

For Balthasar, the analogy of being remains the only answer without which no possibility in Christian thought could even begin. The reason it is possible for us to think and feel as Christians is precisely our recourse to the analogy of being, and this is the greatest difference between Catholic and Protestant theologies. The analogy of being allows one to navigate the tension between the extreme polarities of, on the one hand, complete and total identity of everything and the other extreme of complete contradiction in which nothing is the same. Applied to God, we have the identity of God and the world on one side and on the other is that complete "dialectic of opposition" between God and the world, finding in the world only evil and depravity. One elevates the transcendence of God that it robs the world of any meaning or reality, and the other is so overwhelmed by God's presence that either God absorbs the world (theopanism) or the world absorbs God (pantheism).

Barthian opposition of God to the world is appealing in its simplicity, but Balthasar finds it unsatisfactory, for he said, "That posture is finally impossible to sustain." It is impossible because you are blotting out all hope if God stands in absolute judgment against the world. There must be a common ground between God and man - being - otherwise God could not judge the world, for the world would find the divine judgment unintelligible. "Only the analogy of being" says Hans Urs, "is the contradiction of sin understood. Otherwise creation and sin would collapse together into the same thing." Just by being a living thing, in the Barthian vision, I am a condemned thing. Balthasar continues:

"Every real contra presupposes a constantly to be understood relationship, and thus at least a minimal community in order to be really a contra and not a totally unrelated Other. Only on the basis of an analogy is sin possible."

Dr. Regis Martin, commenting in his lectures about this situation, says that it is "only on the basis of the analogy of being that grace is possible. Covenant completes creation, God completes man in Jesus Christ." He continues that "in the absence of this analogy (of being), sin is not possible because creation becomes that sin. Virtue, grace, these things are only possible in an analogical universe." In other words, there has to be a real relationship between God and man for man to even sin against that relationship. For God to stand in opposition to man, to the world, there has to first be a correspondance between the two that this opposition is rooted in. God created man and all of nature to be completed in Him. God is existence, we share in that existence. Our being is solely participatory in the existence of God. This is the analogy of being that restrains the poles of absolute identification and absolute contradiction.

But all is not lost between the two geniuses! Balthasar seeks out something they can both agree upon, and this agreement becomes the mold of the rest of Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological writings: the analogy of faith centered on the person of Jesus Christ. Through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, God himself creates a community between himself and the world he made. We can speak of this community as a saving space of grace and salvation. To the extent to which we believe this we are able to achieve this relationship with God himself. Both Protestants and Catholics believe that with my identification in Christ, something new enters the world, a distinct and ontological difference occurs in Christ. This is the analogy of faith.

For Balthasar, in the concrete order of salvation the analogy of faith comes to represent the final form of the relationship between God and humanity, and it is this relationship that God has intended from the beginning for humanity. This is due probably to the influence of Henri de Lubac's understanding of the paradox of the spiritual creature who is "ordained beyond itself by the innermost reality of its nature to a goal that is unreachable by that nature, that can only be given by a gift of grace." As Dr. Martin expressed it: "Hence is the paradox: I hunger for a food that I cannot bake. I aspire to the heaven that I cannot attain."

This goal that is at the core of my humanity cannot be attained by my humanity alone, but rather it is through grace alone that all can be attained. It is in relationship to Jesus Christ that all things are to be judged. He is the line of horizon between the temporal and the eternal, between nature and grace. Jesus sets the standard, or rather, he is the standard, the benchmark. But for Hans Urs and not for Karl, the presuppositions of the whole natural order remain in tact, and this is where the two part company.

Both grace and nature find their ultimate meaning in Christ while at the same time they remain themselves, they do not collapse into one another. There is a place for natural theology, for philosophy, for nature. Reason can accomplish great things for God and even sin cannot and does not completely displace God in nature and in the human heart. Even as sin contradicts and corrupts the relationship between God and man, it is not wholly thrown away. The doctrine of total depravity is a hopeless starting point. C.S. Lewis rejected total depravity because he thought that if the individual person was completely depraved then no one would ever accept the Good News because they would not think it was good, in any way! Nature is made for grace and when it fell from grace it was not totally obliterated.

There is room in the analogy of faith for Balthasar's analogy of being, but he puts that conversation on hold for the time being in order to honestly engage Barth in his project, which is the Christocentric revolution in theology. What each one sought to do was "to make Christ the center towards which all things tend" (Pascal). Christ himself becomes the object of all analogical predications, the still point of the turning universe. In the analogy of faith Christ still remains utterly different while at the same time we are wholly united to Christ and as such Christ identifies with everything and everyone. In him all things are united, while still allowed to remain itself. What these two men wanted in their respective theologies to do was to make the center of gravity, the most profound point of unity, is Jesus Christ.

"Not for a single moment can theology forget its roots from which all of its nourishments are drawn. Adoration in which we see in faith the heavens opened and obedience in living which frees us in understanding the truth." (Balthasar, Explorations in Theology)

Barth led von Balthasar into this Christocentric revolution in Catholic theology, which can be traced back to Barth's Church Dogmatics. There are three themes in this Christocentric revolution of the analogy of faith. First, all theology must begin with Jesus, the relation between God and man, as "the historical self-emptying of the eternal self-interpretation of the Father in the Son." Jesus is the "form of all forms" Who am I and what I must do is contained in Christ's sacred humanity, for in him the whole meaning of Adam is completed.

Secondly, Christology is at the center of Christianity and the cross is at the center of Christology. The life of the God-Man culminates in the Paschal Mystery of his suffering, death and Resurrection. Jesus always remains in obedience to the Father. The Father always comes first, and so it is Jesus who climbs the cross to overcome all alienation.

Third and finally, the theology of history has Christ as the central protagonist. Christ is the concrete expression of that universality of being and meaning which belongs to God by virtue of his being god. In his humanness, all universality and the particularity are gathered up and given weight - he saves everything in the ambit of his sacred humanity. And as God, he is the fullness of meaning. Here is Dr. Martin made this illuminating contribution to the Christological revolution of Balthasar. He said that

"Jesus is unable to be assumed under a larger rubic. All things are measured in relation to him and paradoxically, in him are absolute exclusivity and absolute inclusivity."

Thus in the work of Karl Barth on the Christocentric revolution of Protestant theology, Balthasar, his friend and adversary, were able to build the analogy of faith, seeing in Jesus the center point of all mediation with God. However, much to Hans Urs von Balthasar's great sadness at the end of his life, this project was not fully undertaken in the Catholic Church. There are several reasons for this that Dr. Regis Martin posits.

First, there were those theologians who found their lives and work adverse to this Christocentrism because they were too enamored with Kantian idealism. For these Transcendental Thomists, it was the turn to subjectivity that was the approach, the point of departure. Balthasar saw this as bad, for the real point should always be Christ at the center.

Second, there is the evolutionary progress in theology of Teilhard de Chardin. He swept up the thought of Catholicism after the Council with this theology, though it was presented not under theological prose, but as poetry. He was a faithful son of the Church and a friend to de Lubac, but this theology actually led people away from the Church, losing their faith, and preventing this revolution from bearing its fruit.

Third, we have Marxism, or rather, we have the imposition of ideological faith. Christ is lost, his image is exchanged for Che or Castro. Theologians became ideologues and co-opted Christ for their ideologies, not allowing Christ to be the center.

Fourth and finally, there was a tremendous loss of energy after the Council. Much of the energy was shifted from renewal to restructuring, that is, according to Martin, there was "administrative reform and not renewing her heart, not focusing on the mysteries of the faith. This drew people away from the Church."

But the analogy of faith represents for von Balthasar the pro nobis character of our Lord at the heart of the Creed.

"It was for us that the Son came down from heaven, for us that he was crucified, died and was buried. And this means not only for our benefit but in our place, taking over what is our due. If this is watered down, then the fundamental tenant of the New Testament disappears, and it looks as if God is always reconciled, as if sin is always forgiving... Then the cross would just be a symbol, effecting nothing. There would no longer be the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. ...Without noticing it we have beocme like the men of the Enlightenment, acknowledging his countenance but ignoring his anger towards sin. We run the risk of loosing sight of the integrity of that image [of the severely blood crucifix] and we view it as some Medieval exaggeration, and costly grace becomes a cheap price."

We can say that all of Balthasar's theologizing turns to this event of the Cross, and in response to this we live between the two poles of Adoration and Obedience, of Saint John the Apostle and Saint Ignatius of Loyola, of the contemplative and the active life.

"The life of Jesus was at first a life of teaching. But finally it became a life of suffering unto death. The blazing absolute character of the teaching that shine in everything he said can only be understood if the whole movement of his life is seen as a movement toward the cross; sot that the words and deeds are validated by the passion, which explains everything if one interprets the passion as a subsequent catastrophe then every word, not excluding the Sermon on the Mount, becomes unintelligible. The intelligible content, the Logos of teh teaching and everything he did, can only be read in the light of his Hour, the Hour he waited for, the baptism he longed for, the Hour of the Father, of glory." (Love Alone is Credible)

Christocentrism focuses us on Jesus and his cross. Our response to the moment of Jesus' full self-disclosure that "God is love" in the mysteries of Good Friday and Holy Saturday is adoration and obedience.

Next post we will - finally! - finish with the influences of the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar with the most important one of all, Adrienne von Speyr.

Peace,

gomer

AMDG

“God is not a sealed fortress to be attacked and seized by our engines of war: ascetic practices, meditative techniques, but rather God is a house of open doors through which one can enter…” - von Balthasar

Influences on Hans Urs von Balthasar Theology, part 2

The brilliant theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar developed his theology through a series of encounters with seminal figures in the 20th Century. This second post looks at two major other people whose intersection with von Balthasar has enriched his theology. I decided to push the last two: Karl Barth and Adrienne von Speyr, into a final entry on Balthasar's influences.

French Writer: Paul Claudel

As Hans Urs was now in Lyon, France in the Jesuit seminary, laboring under the dreariness of neo-scholasticism, he not only had the work of Eric Pryzwara and the mentoring of Henri de Lubac to occupy his thoughts, but also it was here that he discovered great French Catholic poets and writers that would turn his theological insight continuously towards the glory of the Lord. Three French writers in particular stood out to him: Paul Claudel, George Barnanos, and Charles Peguy. Balthasar was immersed in the world of the image, of lively imagination and beauty, which appealed to his heart far more than philosophy and the abstract. Encountering the literary approach to theology became his life, absorbing the great literature of half a dozen countries by this time, such as his mastering of Shakespeare in English.

Paul Claudel was arguably the most important figure, because they actually had a personal encounter, of which von Balthasar saw in him a formidable, immeasurable learning. But then again, so was Hans Urs. Authentically Catholic literature had not lost in the intervening years what neo-scholasticism had lost: the beauty of nature and its intimate relationship with the supernatural. What theology discarded, Balthasar recovered in literature.

What most impressed Balthasar with Claudel was the "Celebration of the Finite." This finite world is the immediate backdrop and horizon for the whole drama between God and man. This is the setting, the theater, the "rhapsodic context" as Dr. Regis Martin- a professor of mine at Franciscan University who taught our Texts of von Balthasar class- put it, of the faith. Claudel had an immensely Catholic heart and an astounding ability to take everything in and see it all in the mantel of eternity, which illumines every line of his works.

Regarding Claudel, von Balthasar wrote:

"The question of the horizon can only be solved in God and Claudel understood this more than anyone else. Furthermore, Claudel knows that into this solution through all death, all mortality, all disaster, the unlimited fullness of the earth must enter. This double knowledge is decisive for his Catholicism. No worldly value may be despised out of pride or resentment. Every good is necessar for the Catholic person. He cannot all himself the smallest 'no' when he stands before the worldly good."

This vision of the world is sacramental, incarnational. Every good comes from God, He alone is its author, and it is through the finite that we encounter the Infinite God who freely chose to enter into this finite horizon of human existence, of nature. That is why Cardinal Newman could say, "Nature is a parable". Claudel would say that "we know that the world is, in effect, a text and that it speaks to us humbly and joyously; of its own emptiness and also of the presence of Someone else." The world is not meaningless, for even in its own emptiness it speaks of joy and wonder, "but ultimately" says Dr. Martin, "Nature speaks God's name."

This is an explicitly French literary contribution. These seminal writers poured out an incarnational, sacramental worldview combined with their own personal passion and lucidity, a rare but fertile combination. Soon after Hans Urs von Balthasar was ordained a priest and sent to Basil, Switzerland, a place where immensely important pastoral work was needed and where Catholicism was still illegal to practice in public and the Jesuits were barely tolerable. This was also during the rise of that dark barbarism, the Nazi movement, throughout central Europe. Amazingly, during this time there is a cultural rebirth of Catholicism within Switzerland as they themselves engage is a ressourcement of their own culture and values, surrounded as they were by Nazi barbarism.

Claudel's influence can be seen even in these times. Since public displays of Catholicism were illegal, von Balthasar would hold lectures and conferences under a secular pretext. While in seminary and after, he would spend years perfecting his translations into German of these great French Catholic writers, one of particular importance was "The Satin Slipper" by Claudel. In 1943, in the Zurich Playhouse, Balthasar stage the premiere of "The Satin Slipper", working to evangelize through culture because the front door to faith was closed. More plays would follow, such as Bernanos' play, "The Carmelites", which was about the Carmelite nuns that were murdered in the French Revolution in 1789.

It was through these cultural exchanges in a time of cultural upheaval that Hans Urs von Balthasar became known as a convert maker. He was most successful with the people who occupied the Humanities departments and gained renown as a spiritual director.

Karl Rahner: Rejection of Transcendental Thomism by Balthasar

With the figure of Maurice Blondel and his theology of immanence at the end of the 19 century, we find that there are two distinct lines of development of this theological impulse. The first follows Eric Pryzwara and is completed by Hans Urs von Balthasar. The second goes to a Belgian theologian, Joseph Marechal, and his great pupil who will rise to make this movment more explicit, Karl Rahner.

Transcendental Thomism, to be brief, is a halfway house between the purity of the thought and strict realism of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the idealism of Immanuel Kant's subjectivity. The Transcendental Thomists are less interested in the real, in being, but rather in the processes of consciousness itself, the mind, the thinking subject in its inner movement. This theology rooted God's immanence in the operations of the spirit - intellection and will- and thus they focused on consciousness. A key Rahnerian concept is the Vorgriff, the pre-apprehension of God, of Being, before He reveals Himself, through acts of understanding and willing.

Balthasar rejects this subjective turn, especially the vorgriff of Rahner. From Blondel, they both share an understanding that there is in the human person and in Nature itself the desire for God, for the supernatural, for grace, which will bring completeness. Nature cannot complete itself. But for Rahner, what and how God completes us is pre-apprehended before we even encounter Him, saying basically that I know my lack and that is what God will come and fulfill. For Balthasar, this vorgriff rejects divine freedom and especially the shock of Christ's coming into the world. God does not "fill in the gaps", as Dr. Martin put it, for we cannot deduce Christ from human need. Grace, God, Jesus, the supernatural, is entirely gift. Balthasar sees Rahner's theology missing this essential point.

That is why it is the moment of Christology that separates von Balthasar from Rahner. Rahner is accused of trying to escape the scandalous reality of the Cross. Faith in Jesus is never straight forward, as if He "is the guy who answers my questions and fulfills my needs", but rather the form of Jesus Christ is always "a revelation of my untruth, my sin" according to Dr. Matin. In fact, Jesus reveals a shameful capacity of the human person to chose self-deceit and self-enslavement, so not every act of the spirit is a transcendental encounter with God.

"The framework of God's message to man in Christ cannot be tied to the world in general nor to man in particular. God's message is theological, or better, theo-pragmatic. It is the act of God upon man, for and on behalf of man, and only then to man and in man. Only then can we say it is credible in love." (Love Alone is Credible)

Thus the remedy for Transcendental Thomism is the way of divine love, of revelation. What Balthasar is proposing is that God's divine drama can only finally be understood by God himself and so he wants to reject any understanding of that plan that would reduce it to the proportions of created reality (cosmos, the world, or created). As Dr. Martin so elegantly put it in class, "When man merges with God, it cannot be that God has been swindled!"

Jesus does not just come to us like the much anticipated missing piece to the puzzle that is my life, but in the shock of his coming, he reveals far more about myself than I was hoping to know. If Rahner's Christ is the answer to all human questions, than Hans Urs von Balthasar's Christ remains a question mark in the face of all human answers and all attempts to achieve some sort of metaphysical closure. Transcendental Thomism appreciates the immanence of God, but makes this Presence too automatic, too predictable. God provides exactly what the human question demanded, already inscribed upon my consciousness.

Balthasar continually points to revelation as the "self-authenticating glory of God's gift of love" to the world, and Rahner and the rest would have seen the Word in advance, which would destroy revelation itself. Any understanding of revelation whose point of departure is other than God Himself is flat out wrong, bringing down the whole order of the supernatural. Only God can validate God, and the scriptures are filled with precisely this self-ratifying, "self-authenticating" affirmation. This is way "the Incarnation is the historical manifestation of the self-emptying of the eternal self-interpretation of the Father in the Son."

Thus the 20th century was divided up between these two giants of von Balthasar and Karl Rahner. In his book, The Moment of Christian Witness, Balthasar makes it clear for the first time that he and Rahner have parted ways. In the words of Dr. Regis Martin in our class, this book "is the most sharply polemical of all his works. He names names and take Rahner by the throat; and not only Rahner but the whole school of Rahner." In that book his points of objection are threefold: Rahner reduces the love of God to mere philanthropy, he seems to reject the notion of the hiddenness of grace, and holds to the idea that man is somehow endowed with, possessed of, a natural aptitude for a transcendental revelation that comes to man through the structures of his own dynamism, somehow knowing the story that God has yet to tell about salvation.

To finish here with the critique of Rahner and his school, the overarching criticism against Rahner is that when you confront the majesty of Christ's power and love, you cannot appeal to some theological a priori and say, "Yes, this is how it will happen." Rather, it must happen as an event whose logic is entirely internal to itself and is a manifestation of freedom. "No outer or external condition" according to Dr. Martin's summation, "can dictate in advance the structure and movement of this grace. It determines its own unfolding because it carries its own justification on every line, every page."

Conclusion

From the celebration of all things finite of Paul Claudel to the rejection of the Rahnerian school of Transcendental Thomism, Hans Urs von Balthasar's life and work remains shaped by these key figures. The third and final post will be on the famous Protestant theologian and personal friend to Balthasar, Karl Barth, and the mystic convert to Catholicism and single most influential person in his life and work, Adrienne von Speyr.

Peace,

gomer

AMDG

"It is the perception of faith of the self-authenticating glory of God's utterly free gift of love." - Love Alone is Credible, von Balthasar

Influences on Hans Urs von Balthasar Theology, part 1

So much of the life and thought of Hans Urs may be said to have been enriched by a series of encounters with important figures of 20th century Christianity. I'm going to explain the fallout from these friendships and how they helped give distinctive shape to his theological vision.

The von Balthasar Family: Child-like Faith

The roots of his family go back before the Reformation. He was born in Lucerne, Switzerland, in 1905. Lucerne is a place that is practically synonymous with Catholicism in Switzerland, for it was the center of cultural resistance of the Reformation. It was an outpost of Catholic Christendom. It is today still filled with the world of Baroque Catholicism. Hans Urs von Balthasar was steeped in this world, this Catholicism was in his bones. His family represents the old patrician stock, providing men of rank, prestige and distinction. They were pretty cosmopolitan and therefore fluency of the various languages, including English, as a mainstay. He absorbed that environment entirely. It was here that his mother's simple and childlike faith, undisturbed by doubt, would remain with him for his entire life.

The encounter with music in his childhood would give shape and form to his theological aesthetics. He was gifted with a perfect pitch and had given away all of his Mozart records because he had memorized them all and could replay each note, each composition in his own mind. He was a roommate for a time with Rudolph Allers, who was a medical doctor, theologian and translator. In the evenings they would play an entire composition together. The proportion, harmony, and the graced notes always stayed with him. For many, the Word became music before it became flesh, the "song that lies at the base of all that is made" (Ratzinger).

An interesting note: when von Balthasar left the world to enter the Jesuits, he gave up all of his music as a sacrificial offering. This is pretty similar to what Gerard Manley Hopkins did when he entered the Jesuits, giving up his poetry, until his superior asked for a poem to commemorate a tragic event when a boat, the Deutschland, sunk.

"Sawdust Thomism" in the Jesuit seminary

For Hans Urs von Balthasar, seminary was not easy. The curriculum of the day consisted of neo-scholasticism, that is, the philosophical and theological approach of Saint Thomas Aquinas as interpreted by later followers, such as Suarez and Fr. Reginald Garague-Lagrange (who was the neo-scholastic superstar of the day). Balthasar cringed under the "sawdust Thomism" of the neo-scholasticism that dominated all of Catholic thought until the middle of the 20 Century, For him it was a "grim struggle with the deariness of theology" for they had removed the glory of revelation and reduced it to a series of syllogisms. In this desert came his first great mentor: Eric Pryzwara.

Neo-scholasticism tended to produced what many would end up calling a "separated theology" which introduced an extrinsic relationship between grace and nature. Extrinsicism put forward a pure human nature, and because it was self-contained, was endowed and prescribed with a structure and finality entirely immanent to itself. The ultimate end - telos - of the person was hermetically sealed within this nature and therefore remained neutral and even indifferent to grace, for grace was understood as a quality wholly outside this world- extrinsic- and then attached to this human nature.

In the neo-scholastic mind grace never quite reached the depths of the created spirit, created nature. It always remained on the outside, almost accidental to the life of man, in a sort of parallel line where the two are moving in the same direction, but never intersect. It is a two-leveled universe where grace and nature never really have anything to do with one another, which leads one to question or doubt why a man would need grace if he is already in possession of a pure human nature.

Opposition to Neo-Scholasticism

In the 1890's a man named Maurice Blondel was one of the greatest adversaries of this neo-scholastic extrinsicism. His attack on it was in his book Action, which was to try and demonstrate the inner human desire (intrinsic) for the supernatural life. Even after the Fall we never lose the desire for God and that to be human means to be possessed by this desire for God. This is Blondel's method of immanence, inspired by Saint Augustine's landmark quote: "You have made us for Yourself and so our hearts are restless until they rest in You." Blondel labored to show that there is a real correspondence between human nature and the whole realm of the supernatural, and that this nature will never be satisfied short of union with God, and His revelation gives us communion with Him.

Blondel's method of immanence became a movement that revealed the dynamism and intensity between revelation and reason, between human experience and divine faith, but done so in a way that does not disturb the difference. Grace is not nature and nature is not grace, but only grace can complete nature. Grace is a pure gift from God freely given in order to save man, which is the only thing that will bring happiness to the human person.

From Maurice Blondel's immanence theology came two different lines of development within theology. On the one side, you have Joseph Marechal, a Belgian theologian, and his great pupil who will make this movement more explicit, which is Karl Rahner. The other line of development would be taken up by Pryzwara and deepened further by his student, Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Eric Pryzwara and the Analogy of Being

Eric Pryzwara (1889 - 1972) became a seminal figure in the life of Hans Urs von Balthasar. He introduced him to the centerpiece of theology, the analogy of being, was a disciple of the famous Anglican convert, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and saw mysticism in the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Pryzwara was one of the brightest minds that Balthasar would ever meet, eventually being the source of why Balthasar and Rahner would break with one another.

Pryzwara was decisive in his life and thought for through him Balthasar would have a set of philosophical presuppositions that enabled him to surpass the "sawdust Thomism". It was Eric Pryzwara whose great work was to rehabilitate, re-pristinate the ancient doctrine of the analogy of being, which would bring the neo-scholastic model to an end in the 20 Century. The analogy of being shows the paradoxical structure of existence: that I am is never reducible to what I am. Essence is not existence, which is always held in sufferance. My being (act-of-existing) is participatory. "Grace is nature's finality" for nature does not have its own finality. Extrinsicism holds that nature has its own finality in itself, which produces alienation from the supernatural and produces this "separated theology".

My being is wholly derivative, for I am not identical to existence; essence is not existence. The analogy of being shows this real correspondance between God and man in the participatory act of existence and is a real communion. This is the human point of departure that Pryzwara gave to von Balthasar and that is why his later theology reflects the idea that this world was never "purely natural", but is completed in the supernatural. Christianity, then, is a totalizing event in the encounter with Jesus, where at that is true, good and beautiful is caught up in him.

Henri de Lubac and the Return to the Sources

Henri de Lubac opened up vistas of possibilities of theology to von Balthasar while he endured the "sawdust Thomism" of the seminary. De Lubac opened up for him the Fathers of the Church in the attempt to resource the past and recover it. It was during this time that the whole corpus of Augustine was devoured by von Balthasar, as well as Orien, Maximus the Confessor and the "Father of Western Theology", Irenaeus.

Henri de Lubac was key in the ressourcement movement to turn back to the great saint-theologians of the past and mine these sources for vitality in the Christian faith. In de Lubac's book The Mystery of the Supernatural he caused great controversy in the 40's concerning the nature-grace question, attacking the neo-scholastic theory, by returning to the source of Saint Thomas' unique contribution to theology and philosophy.

De Lubac had struggled with neo-scholasticism for years, which he described as "rear-guard Suarezianism." The scholastic worldview of Spanish Jesuit Francesco Suarez of the 16-17 century had produced a closed system that supposedly explained everything. Though Suarez traces much of this thought to Aquinas, he departed in significant ways from him, such as the distinction between essence and existence. As de Lubac resisted the whole Suarezian closed system, he became known as a "pure Thomist" and was put out by the Jesuits, which were Suarezian. De Lubac had to reject this, because for him, nature cannot be fully natural without grace. It is not self-contained.

"It is the end, the vision of God, that is primordial and summons up the means... We cannot envisage nature in its concrete reality that existed before it had its finality imprinted upon it... The supernatural comes first in the order of intention. The whole initiative is and will always be God's."(The Mystery of the Supernatural, 123)

God gives us nature to anticipate grace. This is why the neo-scholastics had to be resisted, because they posited a finality of the created order that is wholly foreign from God. This gives permission to the world to be re-founded on wholly secularist grounds. Henri de Lubac saw that there "was a sort of unconscious conspiracy between the movement which led to secularism and a certain theology which had less to say to people of faith." Theologians left a void between God and the world, which man's response was to fill with secularism. "It put dogma beyond thought and reason and secondly it placed the supernatural world outside the world of nature." Neo-scholasticism, to end this point, committed the fault on the basis of their false intention to try and maintain nature and reason but doing so without allowing grace and the supernatural to penetrate nature and reason. It was a two-story house with no staircase!

In returning to the sources, especially the Fathers of the Church, Henri de Lubac would positively influence the theology and life of Hans Urs von Balthasar. His studies of Augustine and the rest revealed a beauty in theology that rested up the self-disclosing glory of God in His revelation, especially in His definitive self-communication to the world in the Incarnation. The Fathers and Aquinas' analogy of being would combine with his childlike faith to produce a powerful theologian in the Church during the 20 century with unique contributions that are truly unrivaled.

In the next and last post I will talk about the two Karls (Rahner and Barth), as well as French Catholic writer Paul Claudel and finally, the mystic and personal friend of Hans Urs von Balthasar who definitively shaped all of this theology, Adrienne von Speyr.

Peace,

gomer

AMDG

"God is so fully alive that He can afford to be dead."

-von Balthasar

On Catechesis in Our Time, part three

Evangelization and Systematic Catechesis

Continuing our look into Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Exhortation Catechesi Tradendae, On Catechesis in Our Time, we will now move from understanding catechesis as maintaining the integrity of the deposit of faith to the notion of systematic catechesis.

Systematic catechesis is the process whereby an individual is brought from the moment of initial conversion to Jesus to a mature discipleship in the Church. The questions of method and approach are subordinated to the broader concept of this systematic catechesis because the pedagogy serves the goal and may be changed in order to properly meet the ends of those receiving instruction in the Gospel, which we talked about in the last post.

From our previous understanding of keeping the integrity of the message and balancing it with the disposition of the intended audience, we now proceed on how to make that accommodation worthy of the title "catechesis."

Systematic Catechesis: From Initial Proclamation
The pope is framing this systematic catechesis within the “moment of evangelization” as Pope Paul VI put it in his Evangelii Nuntiani. Evangelization "is a rich, complex and dynamic reality, made up of elements, or one could say moments, that are essential to and different from each other, and that must all be kept in view simultaneously." Catechesis cannot be separated from evangelization, but its "specific character" is that

"catechesis is an education of children, young people and adults in the faith, which includes especially the teaching of Christian doctrine imparted, generally speaking, in an organic and systematic way, with a view to initiating the hearers into the fullness of Christian life." (CT 18)

In this regard, catechesis is related to, but not the same as, the initial proclamation of the gospel or missionary preaching, "apologetics or examination of the reasons for belief, experience of Christian living, celebration of the sacraments, integration into the ecclesial community, and apostolic and missionary witness." Catechesis is complementary with all of these works of the faith, remaining "one of these moments - a very remarkable one - in the whole process of evangelization."

CT 19 speaks to this relationship between evangelization and catechesis by making it “distinct from the initial conversion” of the individual. Catechesis has two objectives: to “mature the initial faith” and to educate the student “by means of a deeper and more systematic knowledge of the person and message of our Lord Jesus Christ” (CT 19).

And it is here that the pope makes an important observation about the relationship between initial proclamation and catechesis in various scenarios. For example, it is true that many children today have been baptized into the faith and come to the church for instruction "without receiving any other initiation into the faith and still without any explicit personal attachment to Jesus Christ." This probably the most common experience of the typical America parish. Kids who have been Catholic since infancy have no real commitment to Jesus or the Church. This affects the way we catechize, for it

"must often concern itself not only with nourishing and teaching the faith, but also with arousing it unceasingly with the help of grace, with opening the heart, with converting, and with preparing total adherence to Jesus Christ on the part of those who are still on the threshold of faith. This concern will in part decide the tone, the language and the method of catechesis."

We see here in the language of the pope the desire to intentionally frame catechesis to initiate the individual systematically into the Mystery of Christ. Systematic catechesis does not mean just lesson plans, scope and sequences, and a five year curriculum. It means discerning the place of the hearer and making decisions on how to proceed to develop them into mature disciples. Method and language are the means to that end.

Systematic Catechesis: It's Specific Aim

Now we proceed to CT 20, which is a crucial component to understanding our work as catechists.

“The specific aim of catechesis is to develop, with God’s help, an as yet initial faith, and to advance in fullness and to nourish day by day the Christian life of the faithful, young and old. It is, in fact, a matter of giving growth, at the level of knowledge and in life, to the seed of faith sown by the Holy Spirit with the initial proclamation and effectively transmitted by Baptism.”

Our work is that of the farmer, who utilizes his skills and knowledge in order to cultivate the land and make the craps grow. Patience with our student is key, as we seek not only cognitive apprehension of data, but life-changing understanding. In short, we preach ongoing conversion to Christ to an audience who little knows Him and in an age which has found itself moving past Him. The steady cultivation of the faith of each disciple must be as systematic as the farmer, knowing when to utilize apologetics and when to cultivate prayer, how to engage the culture and when to stand against the tide of society. This is why our work is more an art, keeping in mind always the tension that catechesis brings.

We have mentioned numerous times the aim of catechesis. The pope restates this aim in a more specific way:

"Catechesis aims therefore at developing understanding of the mystery of Christ in the light of God's word, so that the whole of a person's humanity is impregnated by that word. Changed by the working of grace into a new creature, the Christian thus sets hiself to follow Christ and learns more and more within the Church to think like Him, to judge like Him, to act in conformity with His commandments, and to hope as He invites us to."

We work for two things: understanding and change. As our Lord prayed in John 17: "Now this is eternal life: that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you have sent, Jesus Christ." The individual meets Christ and converts to Him, but needs further instruction on what this new life of grace means for him and how he is to be "filled with the fullness of God" (Ephesian 3:19). The following of Christ for the rest of one's life is the purpose of being His disciple and it is the task of the catechist to present the depths of the wisdom of God's word so the following of Jesus can actually take place.

"To put it more precisely" says the pope in the third paragraph of CT 20, "within the whole process of evangelization, the aim of catechesis is to be the teaching and maturation stage". The initial proclamation is "the period in which the Christian, [has] accepted by faith the person of Jesus Christ as the one Lord and [has] given Him complete adherence by sincere conversion of heart". Encountering Jesus as both my Savior and my God begins conversion. Catechesis, then,

"endeavors to know better this Jesus to whom he has entrusted himself: to know His 'mystery,' the kingdom of God proclaimed by Him, the requirements and promises contained in His Gospel message, and the paths that He has laid down for anyone who wishes to follow Him."

Being a Christian means living a life of faithfulness, not just the initial response of our confession of faith in Jesus as our Lord and Savior. We must go deeper as believers and as catechists:

"It is true that being a Christian means saying 'yes' to Jesus Christ, but let us remember that this 'yes' has two levels: It consists in surrendering to the word of God and relying on it, but it also means, at a later stage, endeavoring to know better and better the profound meaning of this word."

Systematic Catechesis: Needed Now More than Ever

Pope Paul VI gave some closing remarks to the fourth general assembly of the synod of bishops on the topic of systematic catechesis and how he views this moment of evangelization. It is precisely through the "reflective study of the Christian mystery" that is systematic catechesis which "distinguishes it from all other ways of presenting the word of God."

There are four key points that Pope John Paul wants to emphasize for our instruction:

"It must be systematic, not improvised but programmed to reach a precise goal

It must deal with essentials, without any claim to tackle all disputed questions or to transform itself into theological research or scientific exegesis

It must nevertheless be sufficiently complete, not stopping short at the initial proclamation of the Christian mystery such as we have in the kerygam

It must be an integral Christian initiation, open to all other factors of Christian life."

Our instruction must be relational. We need to know our student and where they stand before Christ as best we can before we presume to engage them in the message of the Gospel. Some children or adults may be surprisingly advanced in personal prayer and morality, causing us to refocus our teachings along doctrinal and sacramental lines, taking such a soul into mature knowledge. This means we have to have real goals set for each catechetical session and in a broader sense as well.

For me in working with high school youth I have a 4 year curriculum plan framed by CT 20: understanding and change. These are goals: what will the teenager in my ministry understand after 4 years of being involved and what in their life will have changed. Then I get even more specific with my semester breakdowns. Each semester forms a catechetical unit, such as on the Person of Jesus, or the Paschal Mystery of Jesus, following the USCCB guidelines and the Life Teen resources. Within each semester all of the individual Life Nights, as we call them, are broken down by the twin goals of understanding and change. I ask myself this question every single time I plan a Life Night or educational event: what will they understand about Jesus Christ at the end of the night through my talks, the prayers and small groups and what in their lives will have changed.

This keeps our focus on living the Christian life and not just having information accumulated. The pope goes into the relationship between orthodoxy- right teaching- and its relationship with orthopraxis- right living, showing how catechesis and life experience are inseparably united. Understanding and change bring about true conversion as every new thing we learn about our Lord becomes yet another reason to love Him more.

God love you,

Michael Gormley

AMDG

On Catechesis in Our Time, part two

“He had been instructed in the way of the Lord" (Acts 18:25). We ought to develop an understanding of the Word to change the world with the Word. The aims of catechesis is to develop an understanding of Christ, and with this knowledge, to impregnate the world. We must change people by the working of God’s grace through evangelization and catechesis that is faithful to the whole message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. What, though, is the content of catechesis? It is the Deposit of Faith.

What is the Deposit of Faith?

The deposit of faith is the revelation of Jesus Christ imparted to his Apostles in the Church, through both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. It is the life, words and deeds of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the institution of His Church governed by His Apostles and their successors. His whole life - three years of public ministry, the Paschal Mystery, the 40 days after the Resurrection where Jesus spent time opening the scriptures to them (Luke 24:13-35) and teaching them about the kingdom of heaven (Acts 1).

Thus, the deposit of faith is the content of the whole gospel. It is Jesus Christ and all that His Spirit led the Apostles and His Church to teach. He commissioned His Apostles to make disciples of all nations in Matthew 28:18-20, and to do this He gave to the Apostles the Holy Spirit (John 20:21-23) to lead them into all truth and to guide their proclamation of the gospel.

In summary, then, the deposit of faith is the Gospel of our salvation in Jesus Christ.

Saint Paul charged one of the bishops in the early Church, Saint Timothy, to “guard what has been entrusted to you” (1 Tim 6:20). Some biblical translations have “guard the deposit.” This is the deposit of faith of Jesus and the Apostles. Thus, as catechists, we are to guard the Deposit and entrust it to future generations of believers. This involves our intentional protection of what has been handed down to us as we teacher seek to hand it down to others.

Maintaining Its Integrity: Catechetical Tensions

The entire gospel message must be shared in a way that is responsive to the audience's limitations, experiences and potential. In order to present the whole gospel truth to the disciple, one must engage in systematic and organic catechesis, putting aside the foolishness of thinking one can just show up and "wing it". When catechizing, such a haphazard approach can cause more harm than good.

Each catechesis is caught up in the tension between two poles: one must teach the entire deposit, while also adapting the message to the concerns, need and understanding of the audience. If you do not make it relevant, then the message will be lost; however, if you water it down or otherwise alter the content, then you render the message meaningless and deficient. We cannot be stuck in closed inflexibility in our catechesis, nor facile accommodations.

Now you know why St. Paul told Timothy to "guard the deposit" and why prayer is so important in catechesis! The integrity of the gospel must not be lost in our teaching.

Catechesi Tradendae: Integrity of Content

Hosea 4:6 declares: "My people perish for want of knowledge." If Jesus is not taught fully and faithfully, then how can anyone come to say "yes" to Him? In CT 30, Pope John Paul II dives into the crucial problem of a lack of integrity in the content of catechesis following the Second Vatican Council. If the aim of catechesis is to insert the person into the Mystery of Christ, to have a real relationship with the Blessed Trinity, then the content must not only be guarded, but systematically and organically proclaimed in a way that leads souls to be conformed to Jesus Christ.

Catechesis: Ordered to Holiness

One's holiness is dependent upon their discipleship, which may depend on our catechesis! Thus the Pope starts out his section on the integrity of the content with these words in CT 30.

"In order that the sacrificial offering of his or her faith should be perfect, the person who becomes a disciple of Christ has the right to receive 'the word of faith' not in mutilated, falsified or diminished form but whole and entire, in all its rigor and vigor."

We cannot be mistaken here. As a catechist you bear awesome responsibility that echoes loudly into eternity. Catechesis that mutilates parts of the deposit- for whatever reason- interferes with the disciple's ability to be conformed to the likeness of Jesus Christ. This affects worship, the "sacrificial offering" of ourselves!

I think special importance needs to be placed on the phrase "rigor and vigor." The gospel is not an easy path. It is not easy to carry one's cross, to deny oneself, to die daily to self so that Christ might live all the more in one's heart. It is a rigorous life, demanding simply everything you are, do and have! There are today grave temptations in the catechist to waterdown the moral teachings of the Church in order to present a gospel more palpable to contemporary tastes.

This dilution of the rigors of the Christian life empties the cross of its power and its true "vigor". The gospel is life-giving. It is truly vigorous, but in stripping pieces of it away, we lose its vital power for the sake of social conformity.

The pope continues:

"Unfaithfulness on some point to the integrity of the message means a dangerous weakening of catechesis and putting at risk the results that Christ and the ecclesial community have a right to expect from it."

Catechetical experiments in the 70's and 80's have deprived generations of the full gospel, offering instead endless educational models that are devoid of content, but full of activity. This situation is what prompted the desire within Cardinal Ratzinger to help steer the project to write a new universal catechism for the whole Church.

He received a letter from a French catechist who wondered why there was not only no conversion or interest among her students, but that there was no retention of information by the end of each class! The kids were bored and disconnected. So this teacher took it upon herself to critically analyze what the materials she was given were exactly teaching and the why they communicated it. In the end she realized, as did Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict), that there was hardly any content at all, just endless ways to engage the kids in this or that learning experience without the actual transmission of information.

How many religious education classes are filled with hours of projects, crafts, songs, games and positive feelings without actually communicating to them truth accommodated to their abilities? Our students have a right to the truth and the Church has a right to expect results from our students. Let this be our wake up call!

Variations on a Common Theme: Selective Negligence

The pope is not done. Next he takes aim at those catechists who may not be fully convinced by the whole message of the gospel, so they deliberately remove elements of the deposit they do not like. Continuing from above, the pope speaks not of the rights of the student or of the Church, but rather he zeroes in on the problem of the unfaithful or agenda-based catechist.

"Thus, no true catechist can lawfully, on his own initiative, make a selection of what he considers important in the deposit of faith as opposed to what he considers unimportant, so as to teach the one and reject the other."

Remember, Jesus said, "I will build my church" in Matthew 16. He did not say, "You should build your church..." It is His, not ours, not yours, and certainly not mine. He builds His own church. We are simply the co-laborers with Him.

Recall what I said in the previous post on CT 5 and 6 about Christocentricity of catechesis. It is Christocentric because Christ is both the goal of all catechesis in the Church and because Christ is the content. It is not our teaching, but His and Him. CT 6 says it best:

"Every catechist should be able to apply to himself the mysterious words of Jesus: 'My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me'."

In our catechesis to the children, teens or adults, do we make distinctions between the gospel and our political or social beliefs, or are we so lax that we let them intertwine so that they are no longer two things, but one? Are we so wed to our agendas that we force the gospel to conform to them instead of the other way around? It is a slippery slope that is navigated only those who are prayerful, disciplined, and humble.

Relevant Catechesis: Suitable Pedagogical Methods

Turning from his focus on the need for transmitting the entire gospel message, the pope now looks to the needs of the hearers of the Word. In CT 31 the pope addresses within the context of the integrity of the deposit the need to adapt our catechesis to the present situation the catechist is dealing with. The pedagogy used to communicate the gospel can change in differing circumstances. On this the pope says:

"Integrity does not dispense from balance and from the organic hierarchical character through which the truths to be taught, the norms to be transmitted, and the ways of Christian life to be indicated will be given the proper importance due to each. It can also happen that a particular sort of language proves preferable for transmitting this content to a particular individual or group. The choice made will be a valid one to the extent that, far from being dictated by more or less subjective theories or prejudices stamped with a certain ideology, it is inspired by the humble concern to stay closer to a content that must remain intact."

Accommodating the message to the understanding and preparedness of the hearer is one the central tasks of all teachers. God Himself accommodates His revelation to the level of human understanding. For communication to happen the hearer needs to comprehend the message spoken. The Incarnation is the greatest of all acts of divine accommodation to the human condition. Our task as teacher is no different. Different audiences have different abilities, potentials, backgrounds, baggage, wounds, etc. We need to speak to them as the situation presents itself. For if we fail to realize the disposition of the hearer, if we fail in being systematic in our catechesis, then conversion cannot continue to take place.

"The method and language used must truly be means for communicating the whole and not just part of 'the words of eternal life' and the 'ways of life'."

And this is the tension of catechesis spoken of near the beginning of this post. Each catechist is caught between two poles: presenting the whole gospel and accommodating the gospel to the audience. There can be neither rigid uniformity nor compromised conformity, but only the complete message of the gospel. The youth minister will use different language and methods than the homilist or the adult formation leader, but as long as we get humble and stay as close to our Lord as possible, then our accommodation becomes the initiation of the student into the Mystery of Christ!

Sincerely,

Michael Gormley

aka gomer

AMDG

On Catechesis in Our Time

If you are a catechist in the Catholic Church and have never read Pope John Paul II's Catechesi Trandenae, then you are missing out! This early Apostolic Exhoration of the pope speaks on the content, method and aim of catechesis that everyone who assumes the title of "teacher" in the faith must humbly understand.

You can find the whole exhortation here on the Vatican's website.

In this post I just want to pull out some choice quotes from the beginning of the document that will blow your mind and sober you up quickly if you teach the Christian Faith. But first things first, the pope wrote this as a follow up to Pope Paul VI's Evangelii Nuntiandi, to develop the theme of catechesis as "a moment in evangelization" and to continue the spirit of the Synod of the fourth general assembly of Bishops in 1977.

Apostolic Exhortation: Why One On Catechesis?

(Paragraph 1.) "The Church has always considered catechesis one of her primary tasks, for, before Christ ascended to His Father after His resurrection, He gave the apostles a final command - to make disciples of all nations and to teach them to observe all that He had commanded."

(Paragraph 4.) "I ardently desire that this apostolic exhortation to the whole Church should strengthen the solidity of the faith and of Christian living, should give fresh vigor to the initiatives in hand, should stimulate creativity - with the required vigilance - and should help to spread among the communities the joy of bringing the mystery of Christ to the world."

It was Christ Jesus in Matthew 28:18-20 in the Great Commission to the Apostles that He charged them with the care of the truth of the Church to "Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them... teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you". This task is essential to the Church, which is why catechesis- the art of making disciples- is a moment within evangelization, bringing the Gospel to all nations and peoples.

Christocentrism: Source, Center and Summit of Catechesis

All catechesis in the Church needs to be essentially Christocentric. There are two meanings of Christocentrism in catechesis that always need to be kept in mind. One pertains to the aim of catechizing, the other to the attitude of the catechist towards the content of the message.

The first meaning refers to the goal or end point of teaching is that "at the heart of catechesis we find, in essence, a Person, the Person of Jesus of Nazareth". Jesus is the center of our all of our teaching. The second meaning shows us that the content of catechesis is not our teaching, but His.

Christocentrism: Who We Teach

The pope speaks of the first form as follows: "The primary and essential object of catechesis is, to use an expression dear to St. Paul and also to contemporary theology, 'the mystery of Christ.' Catechizing is in a way to lead a person to study this mystery in all its dimensions".

All of our teaching is meant to point the student always to Jesus Christ: "It is therefore to reveal in the Person of Christ the whole of God's eternal design reaching fulfillment in that Person."

Now the Pope makes this first form of Christocentricity absolutely clear: "Accordingly, the definitive aim of catechesis is to put people not only in touch but in communion, in intimacy, with Jesus Christ: only He can lead us to the love of the Father in the Spirit and make us share in the life of the Holy Trinity."

Catechesis is meant to foster relationship, intimacy, unity with God through Christ Jesus in the Spirit. It is not the accumulation of facts regarding history, anthropology or church politics. But rather, every fact, date and doctrine is meant to cause within the believer yet another reason to fall in love with Jesus Christ.

Christocentrism: What We Teach

The second meaning of Christocentricism concerns the content of our teaching as not really "our teaching" at all, but rather His. In paragraph 6 the Pope refers to this type of Christocentric catechesis as "the intention to transmit not one's own teaching or that of some other master, but the teaching of Jesus Christ, the Truth that He communicates or, to put it more precisely, the Truth that He is."

John Paul sums it up by saying: "We must therefore say that in catechesis it is Christ, the Incarnate Word and Son of God, who is taught - everything else is taught with reference to Him - and it is Christ alone who teaches - anyone else teaches to the extent that he is Christ's spokesman, enabling Christ to teach with his lips."

Every catechist must take this seriously, no matter who the audience is or the context of the teaching. Volunteer moms teaching first grade religious education once a week, probably the most common catechist in the typical American parish, need to take this as seriously as Adult Faith Formation directors, youth ministers, sacrament preparation leaders and clergy giving homilies. And this responsibility is not just about saying the correct words, but of living one's life worthy of the Gospel. As the Pope says, "Whatever be the level of his responsibility in the Church, every catechist must constantly endeavor to transmit by his teaching and behavior the teaching and life of Jesus."

The teachings and life of Jesus, not my own agenda! Not the agenda of DNC or the RNC! Not the agenda of the UN, the US, the EU or some popular NGO! It is Jesus' church, not ours, and it is His gift of Faith that the catechist is charged with protecting and defending.

To teach is an utterly serious enterprise and many should discern soberly if she or he is called to such a task. Along these lines the Pope continues: "He will not seek to keep directed towards himself and his personal opinions and attitudes the attention and the consent of the mind and heart of the person he is catechizing. Above all, he will not try to inculcate his personal opinions and options as if they expressed Christ's teaching and the lessons of His life."

Would that this were the case in American catechesis! Too often we interpose our own schema and schemes in between Jesus and potential disciple. Imagine those who abandoned the Gospel because of the politicking of the RCIA director or the agenda (both Right and Left here, mind you) of today's trendiest Cause.

No. It is not my faith that I teach. It is not my Church that I represent. It is not my cleverness that turns hearts to God and away from sin. It is not even me that teaches!

"Every catechist should be able to apply to himself the mysterious words of Jesus: "My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me." St. Paul did this when he was dealing with a question of prime importance: "I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you."

And here is the quote that confronts my own heart as a catechist more than any other part in this Apostolic Exhortation:

"What assiduous study of the word of God transmitted by the Church's magisterium, what profound familiarity with Christ and with the Father, what a spirit of prayer, what detachment from self must a catechist have in order that he can say: 'My teaching is not mine!'"

Discomforting Implications: Self-Accusation

Am I teaching the content of the Faith, or my own personal views, agendas and ideologies?

Am I altering the Gospel to fit my social, political and/or economic perspective?

Have I alienated people from the Good News by putting too much "me" in the middle between Christ and His disciple?

Do I pray before, during and after my catechesis?

Is prayer a part of my life as a catechist and as a Catholic in general?

How much time do I carve out of my day to make room for the moments of God in my life?

Do I have "profound familiarity with Christ and with the Father", or am I just a warm body in a classroom for an hour on Sunday afternoons?

Do I assiduously study the Bible? the Catechism? the Church's teachings? Council teachings? or do I just regurgitate the text the DRE placed in my hands?

Do I regularly practice asceticism, mortification, penances, fasting, almsgiving in my life so that I become more and more detached from my self in order to make room for the Gospel?

Is it my teaching, or His?

If you answered poorly to these question, the Good News is that His mercy is here and that tomorrow truly is a new day.

Sincerely,

Mike "what does 'assiduous' mean?" Gormley

AMDG