In the summer of 1969 I delivered an evening lecture in Caldwell Hall at the Catholic University of America on the topic, “The Transcendence of God.” I had not published the title beforehand. My audience listened with puzzlement, disappointment and even hostility. The applause at the end was light and half-hearted.
After the speech I went with some friends to Our Savior’s Coffee House on Columbia road, a popular rendezvous for university students and teachers. A number of people there had been in the audience during my speech. Several of them approached me and said, “Al, you let us down tonight.” I replied, “I’m sorry you feel that way, because I think I did you a favor.”
Why did this happen? What was the background of this little story? The answer lies in a catechetical journey I have experienced over the last twenty-five years and may prove useful to others trying to unravel what is happening in catechetics.
I had just completed my third year as a visiting professor of catechetics at Catholic University. I had attracted attention and popularity with a graduate course entitled “The Human Dimensions of Catechetics.” My students were nuns, priests, brothers and well-trained laity, whose knowledge of the catechism, Catholic doctrine, and morality was extensive. In their other courses they were receiving new and legitimate insights into Catholic teaching flowing from the impetus given by Vatican II and thinkers such as Congar, De Lubac, Rahner, and Danielou.
It seemed to me that the students in my course needed practical ways to teach religion, not more religious content. They were content rich and process poor. So my concern was primarily a methodology for teaching the faith. The students not only were religiously literate, but were accustomed to teaching religion in a deductive style that overlooked or missed a number of effective ways to reach people.
I believed that a richer catechesis should include an immanent, human dimension to complement its transcendent one. The immanent side of the equation that I was interested in stressing reflected the significance of the incarnation of Jesus as well as the spirit and teaching of Gaudium et spes. That document began with an inspired description of the human person who is called by God to transcendence and whose humanity is perfectly revealed by Jesus.
I chose the catechetical method of Paul at Athens as a model for the course. Paul attempted to construct his catechesis out of the questions, themes and culture of Athens itself. He walked through the city, exploring its moods and getting the feel of the people. He looked at their gods to see where they placed their ultimate concern. He listened to their poets and philosophers expound the meaning of life. He allowed secular wisdom to yield its best and its worst. Only after he had Savored the soul of Athens did he mount Mars Hill and deliver his famous sermon at the Areopagus.
But when he went to Corinth, Paul appeared to have changed his catechetical method. Now he speaks “not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with the demonstration of Spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom, but on the power of God” (I Cor 2:4-5).
I was certainly aware of the transcendent method of Paul at Corinth. In 1965, I had written a book, Catechetics: A Theology of Proclamation, which adopted exactly that aspect of catechesis. But on this occasion I decided to imitate Paul’s method in Athens because it seemed responsive to the need of the students at the time. I believed then, and still do, that the immanent and transcendent aspects of catechesis complement one another.
Pope John Paul II confirmed the same conviction in his Apostolic Exhortation, “On Catechesis in Our Time.” On the value of the immanent, the pope writes, “Catechesis will seek to know cultures and their essential components; it will learn their most significant expressions; it will respect their particular values and riches. In this manner it will be able to offer these cultures the knowledge of the hidden mystery and help them bring forth from their own living tradition original expressions of Christian life, celebration and thought.”
In the late 60s I wrongly assumed that my students understood and accepted all Church teaching. I believed they were so well instructed in the content of Catholic teachings and so vigorously imbued with a traditional perspective that they would explore questions presented by the culture as well as integrate its many strengths into their sharing of the faith.
I could not have been more mistaken. After three years of teaching my human dimensions course, I realized that secularity had intruded into the consciousness of many of these students. A number of them had succumbed to a modernity that rejected history and tradition. What’s modern is good. What’s pre-modern is outdated and useless. That virus was there, even though I did not recognize it initially. I found myself, tragically, nourishing it with all my talk about modern drama, poetry, fiction, philosophy, and communications theory.
These particular students failed to see the culture as instrumental, as a means to an end, an opening to revelation. Instead they swallowed it indiscriminately as an end in itself. The transcendent was collapsing before my eyes, but at first I did not recognize it. It was probably no coincidence that the famed 1966 Easter cover story of Time magazine, “Is God Dead?,” coincided with the initiation of my course. The law of unintended consequences took over.
All this led me to that fateful evening in 1969 when I attempted to draw my listeners back from the brink. I asked them to remember and appreciate that God is both transcendent and immanent, that Jesus Christ is the embodiment of this mystery. I reminded them that faith and cultural contributions to the acceptance of that faith should be integrated in any catechetical presentation. The human person is temporarily here on earth, but destined for God and heaven.
During the 1960s most religion textbooks had become doctrinal wastelands filled instead with games about friendliness and stories about “secular saints.” Unfortunately, methods of teaching religious content began to emphasize process at the expense of the message. The unhappy result of this approach was an acute crisis in religious knowledge that radically undermined the beliefs, attitudes and practices of the students.
Pope Paul VI demonstrated his concern about adherence to the truths of faith already in 1968 when he published “The Credo of the People of God.” With a pastoral anxiety for the Church he wrote, “We are well aware of the disquiet in matters of faith which is unsettling some of the convictions of our contemporaries. These have not escaped the influence of a world in which many truths are either completely denied or called into doubt.”
The bishops of the United States began to perceive the same problem. They sponsored the development and publication of the National Catechetical Directory, entitled Sharing the Light of Faith (1978), with the intention of strengthening the catechetical ministry. With his customary wisdom and deep faith, Archbishop John Whealon chaired the committee. Msgr. Wilfrid Paradis and Sister Mariella Frye dedicated themselves selflessly as directors of the project. While this Directory accomplished much that was positive for catechetics, the negative counter-currents severely diminished its effectiveness. A much deeper solution was needed.
As NCEA’s religion director, In 1976 I assembled a team of religious educational leaders from around the country to create an instrument that measured the religious beliefs, attitudes, and practices of our students in Catholic schools and parish-based religion programs. The result was the Religious Education Outcomes Inventory (REOI) that by 1978 was administered to 100,000 eighth graders in 2,000 institutions in over 100 dioceses. I hoped this would alert teachers to the need for a religious instruction that passed on Catholic tradition. In 1978 I wrote:
For the second year in a row, students appear to falter when faced with religious code words (eternal life, ecumenism, grace)…. Here I wish to draw your attention to the matter of what some call a religious ‘illiteracy’ among our young Catholics. One cannot conclude from REOI that a working vocabulary for young Catholics is not being taught. But one could infer than many of them are not learning it. Frankly, they are not learning the words, let alone the content and meaning of the terms. Such competence ought to be a sign of a trained, informed and literate Catholic.
Not only did I begin to battle with the loss of content in catechesis, but I also became aware of a series of false assumptions in the field of catechetics. I summarize them this way: 1) Human nature is intrinsically good. This erodes Catholic teaching about original and actual sin and makes Christ’s sacrificial act of salvation irrelevant. 2) There are two magisteriums. This introduces a second magisterium of some theologians and other opinion-makers and results in undermining the revelation-based Magisterium of the pope and bishops. 3) Concentrate exclusively on a human experience-based method in teaching. This eliminates the pedagogy of faith and revelation which argues that there is a knowledge of our relationship to God which cannot be known from reason or human experience alone; it must be revealed.
In 1991 I examined these false assumptions in an address to the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. Regarding the first assumption about the intrinsic goodness of human persons, I cited the influential teachings of Matthew Fox in his book, Original Blessing. Arguing against original sin, he wrote, “We enter a broken and torn and sinful world, that is for sure. But we do not enter as blotches on existence, as sinful creatures. We burst into the world as original blessings.” Fox denies original sin.
This is a comforting myth for many members of the ascendant Catholic middle class, now moved to the suburbs and frantic about feeling good about themselves and their social and economic achievements. Religion texts, teacher-training institutes, and religious education congresses too often reinforced this view and reflected the absence of a Christian anthropology of being radically flawed by sin and redeemed by grace.
Secondly, I addressed the assumption that some theologians and catechetical specialists could form a parallel magisterium. How did their approach work in practice? When there is a teaching of the Church Magisterium that certain theologians and catechists wanted to disregard, they took three steps in presenting their viewpoint:
• First, quote the Church’s teaching.
• Second, relativize the teaching by making it sound ambiguous.
• Third, introduce a new teaching.
A catechist, for example, could begin by asserting that Jesus is our redeemer. Then the catechist could render the teaching ambiguous, asserting that God seems to be absent from our world, so we are left on our own and must use our personal powers to save ourselves. Lastly, the catechist argues that there is no divine salvation and claims that even God himself tells us we can get along without him.
The third assumption is the so-called human experience-based method of catechesis, one that is widely used in many textbooks. It is a method that follows these steps: 1) Begin with the human experience of the student and see what aspect of God shines through. 2) Refer to Scripture and see how it speaks this truth about God. 3) Ask the student to compare the two results. 4) From that discussion, move the student to apply this in his or her personal and social life.
Plausible, isn’t it? The basic flaw is the moral equivalence given to the first two steps. Human experience and revelation are made equal partners. This approach forgets that human experience is limited in what it can know about God. Only revelation can tell us about the fullness of the possibilities of relating to God. Secondly, human experience suffers from the “wounds” of original sin, darkness in the mind, weakness in the will, and disorder in the passions. Hence, even at its best, human experience alone is not going to tell us much about God. The light from revelation is like a roaring fire. The light from human experience is the “pale moon.” They are not on equal footing.
As I see it, my thinking changed and developed in relation to the issues I was facing. In the 1960s I was interested in a methodology that included the human dimension, but realized that one has to keep the divine component intimately connected with it. In the 1970s I turned my attention to the necessity of content in catechesis, because I saw the growing crisis in knowledge. In the 1980s I was drawn to analyze false assumptions about catechesis and present a true perspective in the light of an ecclesial method.
The publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church will make an enormous difference for catechesis in the years ahead. It will dispel the present confusion about what Catholics believe and thus revitalize a strong sense of Catholic identity. Properly used, the Catechism will restore an experience of unity and community in our Church by strengthening our faith in Christ who is the source of that unity.