Per Christum

I went to a Catholic educational conference last year. While some of the stuff was trendy educational stuff, one seminar stuck with me. The presenter reminded us that even when teaching baptized and confirmed Catholics, we may have to evangelize before we catechize.

A light suddenly went on in my head. While I am not turning into Jack Chick, who would perhaps agree that Catholics need evangelized(!), I think it is true: many Catholics do not have a personal or corporate relationship with Jesus. It is difficult to teach students about the Trinity when they do not have a relationship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is difficult to create an interest in the teachings and person of Jesus Christ, when he is, for all intents and purposes, just another distant historical figure. Teaching personal sacrifice that does not benefit the self is next to impossible if one has not been transformed through a relationship with the Risen Lord. Now, I am not saying that your average nominal Catholic thinks of Jesus as a distant historical figure, or denies the Trinity, but when this average Catholic doesn’t go to Mass but once a quarter, doesn’t prayer regularly, and makes no effort to follow Jesus, then in reality, Jesus is simply a distant historical figure, and God the god of Oprah and self-help books.

I think the need to focus on first on evangelization holds true for non-Christians, and this is more obvious, although sometimes we don’t always approach non-Christians in this way. I seem to remember a devout Catholic telling a non-Christian how meaningful Eucharistic adoration was, and how this non-Christian should visit the parish sometime and try it. The non-Christian sat puzzled. “You know, the body and blood of Christ!” The non-Christian again sat puzzled. The Catholic, well-meaning, was trying to speak to this non-Christian as if the non-Christian was already evangelized. Now, I am not saying we shouldn’t speak about adoration to non-Christians, but I think adoration is something that is more advanced, and for the initiated. We need to be able to defend it and explain it, but it really is for the initiated. It is like the evangelical who asks the stranger, “are you washed in the blood of the lamb?” To which the non-Christian promptly replies, “I sure hope not!”

This places a religion teacher such as myself in a bind. I have no choice but to teach more advanced doctrine. I have to provide advanced catechesis. This works well for Catholics raised in devout homes, but it presents problems for students who are nominally Catholic or even non-Christian. I am glad to do advanced catechesis, because I love teaching Catholic doctrine and morals. However, I also have to evangelize, to go back to the basic, fundamental, message of the gospel, and emphasize it constantly. I have had to rethink the way in which I teach. Trust me, despite all the idealistic pontifications of devoted Catholics in the blogosphere, you can’t just jump into the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas when many in the class can only vaguely explain what the exclamation “Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again” means. However, I think that in the post-modern world, this “post-Christian” society of ours (and I am very tired of “post” language, since so many trendy Christians these days are “post” just about everything…but I think these labels are accurate), we have to know how to both evangelize and catechize effectively. We also may have to take a cue from our early Christian brothers and sisters, and reserve the more advanced material for the properly initiated and evangelized. Unfortunately for those of us in religiously mixed classrooms, or those of us blogging in a very diverse internet, we have to balance our presentation, because we are speaking to the initiated and uninitiated (and those initiated, but who have not grown since). Perhaps, rather than lamenting this situation as “unfortunate,” we are really fortunate, because this is actually an opportunity to refine our own faith and better understand how to teach others about Jesus Christ.

So, like our evangelical brothers and sisters, we need to develop an urgency of mission and evangelization, although I pray that we do not succumb to some of the hokey techniques that some evangelicals utilize. Let me leave you with a quote from John Paul II:

But what moves me even more strongly to proclaim the urgency of missionary evangelization is the fact that it is the primary service which the Church can render to every individual and to all humanity in the modern world, a world which has experienced marvelous achievements but which seems to have lost its sense of ultimate realities and of existence itself (Redemptoris Missio 2).