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CATECHESIS/ CATECHETICS
My Teaching Is
Not My Own
Jesus Christ the Model of Catechesis
According to Pope John Paul II
by Douglas Bushman, S.T.L.
The Christocentric Principle
The principle upon which the following reflections are based is simultaneously simple and profound: "In all of His life Jesus presents Himself as our model" (CCC 520).
This statement is nestled in a beautiful section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church entitled Our communion in the mysteries of Jesus. It begins: "All Christ's riches are for every individual and are everybody's property" (CCC 519). Christ "invites us to become His disciples and follow Him," giving us an example to imitate and drawing us to reproduce in our own lives what He did and experienced in His (CCC 520). "We are all called only to become one with Him, for He enables us as the members of His Body to share in what He lived for us in His flesh as our model." By the power of grace, "Christ enables us to live in him all that he himself lived, and he lives it in us" (CCC 521).
The riches of Christ are infinite, since He is the very fullness of God Himself. The essence of our new life in Christ is precisely to share in His fullness: "From His fullness we have all received" (John 1:16). As the Catechism puts it, we are called to be in communion with Christ, which means being in communion with the mysteries of His life.
Every believer, and every generation of believers, must return to this well of divine life in order to draw from it living water. After the initial conversion of faith, growth in this life-in-Christ comes about through prayer. In meditation we reflect on the inspired witness to Christ, the Sacred Scriptures, and confront what is revealed about Christ with the reality of our own lives (CCC 2706). This inevitably leads to conversion, since we cannot measure up to the fullness of Christ. But the confrontation and conversion are sweet because they are God's answer to our desire, a desire which he placed within us in the first place (Phil 2:13), to die more completely to ourselves in order to become more fully found in Christ.
This has been the substance of Christian meditation from the beginning, and in our own time Pope John Paul II has presented the Church with a renewed Christocentric teaching. Typical of his application of the principle from the Catechism is the insight that Baptism ought to result in Christians experiencing interiorly what Christ experienced after His baptism, namely, that He is the object of the Father's love:
Rising from the waters of the baptismal font, every Christian hears again the voice that was once heard on the banks of the Jordan River: "You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased" (Lk 3 22). From this comes the understanding that one has been brought into association with the beloved Son, becoming a child of adoption (cf. Gal 4:4-7) and a brother or sister of Christ (Christifideles laici, no. 11).
Similarly, and most pertinent to our subject, the Pope teaches that the words Jesus used to articulate His understanding of the mission He received from the Father should be discovered as the adequate expression of the individual Christian's sense of being sent:
With this spiritual "unction," Christians can repeat in an individual way the words of Jesus: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" (Lk 4:18 19; cf. Is 61:1 2) (Christifideles laici, no. 12).
The Pope's approach to renewing catechesis is no different. It cannot be a question of simply renewing methods, or of preparing new materials.1 While these are necessary, they cannot be effective without a return to the life-giving waters of the well which is Christ. Otherwise, catechesis will suffer from what the Pope has called the drama of our age, the rift between faith and life. No, authentic catechesis must be an expression of life, an action of the Christian in communion with the mystery of Christ's own teaching activity.
This is why the Catechism teaches that catechists must be totally one with Christ, even in His sufferings, if they are to be effective teachers of Christ.
Whoever is called "to teach Christ" must first seek "the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus": he must suffer "the loss of all things . . ." in order to "gain Christ and be found in him," and "to know him and the power of his resurrection, and [to] share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible [he] may attain the resurrection from the dead" (CCC, no. 428).
The implications and applications of the principle are endless. The purpose of this article is to set forth an application in the area of catechesis. Based on the example of Christ, Pope John Paul II has discovered two fundamental poles of catechesis, one vertical, the other horizontal. Christ's teaching is essentially and simultaneously an act of fidelity to God the Father (vertical dimension) and a service to man (horizontal dimension). Similarly, all catechetical activity of the Church must be marked by what the Pope calls a sense of responsibility to the truth and a sense of service to others.
The Vertical Dimension: The Sense of Responsibility for the Truth
The Christocentric approach of the Holy Father is evident in his first encyclical:
With deep emotion we hear Christ Himself saying: "The word which you hear is not Mine but the Father's who sent Me" (John 14:24). In this affirmation by our Master do we not notice responsibility for revealed truth, which is the property of God Himself, since even He, "the only Son," who lives "in the bosom of the Father," when transmitting that truth as a prophet and teacher, feels the need to stress that he is acting in full fidelity to its divine source? The same fidelity must be a constitutive quality of the Church's faith (The Redeemer of Man, no. 19).
If, with St. Paul, all who are baptized can say, "I live now not I but Christ lives in me" (Gal 2:20), then all who are engaged in the Church's catechetical activity must likewise be able to say, "I teach no longer I, but Christ teaches in me." This is precisely what the Pope would teach just seven months after The Redeemer of Man, in his first apostolic exhortation, On Catechesis in Our Time. In catechesis "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."
On Catechesis in Our Time takes up the same emphasis on responsibility for revealed truth, only this time it is another passage from John's Gospel which inspires the Pope's thought: "Every catechist should be able to apply to himself the mysterious words of Jesus: 'My teaching is not mine, but His who sent me'" (John 7:16). Here the Pope makes very explicit what the opposite of "enabling Christ to teach with one's lips" is:
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. He will not seek to keep directed towards himself and his personal opinions and attitudes the attention and content 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.
Just as the Catechism pointed out that communion with Christ the Teacher means communion with sufferings of Christ the Crucified, the Pope teaches that in order to say with Christ, "My teaching is not mine," a catechist must engage in "assiduous study of the word of God transmitted by the Church's Magisterium," and have "a profound familiarity with Christ and with the Father," as well as a profound "spirit of prayer" and "detachment from self" (On Catechesis in Our Time, no. 6).
Catechesis is much more than simply repeating the lessons of Christ's teaching; it is teaching directed by the same motive that inspired our Lord, namely, a sense of responsibility for the truth. In more personal terms, this sense of responsibility is a sense of fidelity to the Father.
In Christ, fidelity to the Father is not an exterior reality; because the Father and Son are one, it is wholly interior. Christ's sense of responsibility for the truth is measured, not by something outside of Himself, but by His own oneness with the Father. Thus, He could say that He is Himself the truth (John 14:6) because He and the Father are one (John 14:10-11). This is why no one knows or can reveal the Father except the Son who knows Him (Matt 11:27; John 1:18).
The Church's Participation in Christ's
Prophetic Office
In contrast to Christ, we are not the source of truth, nor are we sufficiently conformed to it so as to be completely, though indeed in a limited way, identified with it. We are made for the truth, the truth sets us free, and our task is to conform to divine truth as thoroughly as possible. But the truth itself always remains greater than we are; it can always make a claim on us and call us to conversion. It can also judge us, and this more than anything else distinguishes our relation to the truth from our Lord's identity with the truth.
Because we are not the source or truth, since the truth is not identical with our being, we need an objective and divinely guaranteed measure of revealed truth. This is why we cannot free ourselves. Only the Son, Who is the Truth, can set us free (John 8:32). And yet, according to the principle that it is no longer I who live, Christ Who lives in me, grace brings about in us a real, though limited, assimilation to the truth of God's word, to the extent that each believer is able to hear the word of God within.
First and foremost here comes responsibility towards the word of God entrusted to the Church... A prophet is one who speaks in the name of the Lord, who knows the truth contained in the word of God; he hears it in himself, imparts it to others and guards it as his dearest heritage (Sources of Renewal, p. 244).
This inner hearing of faith is a believer's participation in Christ's oneness with the Father in the truth. Grace makes us sharers in God's very nature (2 Peter 1:4), and this makes us connaturalized to the truth. It still comes from outside of us, from God, but grace makes the discovery of divine truth like a coming home, like a finding of our true and deepest self.
The Pope makes use of Vatican II's teaching on the sensus fidei to concretize the sense of responsibility for revealed truth for us. Its act is not a vague and personally determined act, but a freely chosen act of acceptance of the authority of the magisterium.
The prophetic nature of the attitude of Christian testimony is centered in the sense of responsibility towards the gift of truth contained in Revelation. This is expressed through the sensus fidei and determines the close harmony between faith and the teaching office of the Church (Sources of Renewal, p. 245).
The unanimity of pastors and the faithful in "maintaining, practicing and professing the faith that has been handed on" is thus guaranteed and conditioned by the supernatural appreciation of the faith possessed by the whole People of God, as well as by the teaching office of the Church. The munus propheticum is expressed through both (Sources of Renewal, p. 247).
The sensus fidei or supernatural discernment of the faith is the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church which assures fidelity to revealed truth. Concretely, the sense of responsibility for the truth takes the form of faithfully teaching what the Church teaches, since Christ established the Church as the "pillar and support of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15), and since He declared to the Apostles: "Anyone who listens to you listens to me; anyone who rejects you rejects me, and those who reject me reject the one who sent me" (Luke 10:16).
The obedience of each and every disciple of Christ to the supreme magisterium of the Church is the expression of responsibility to the word of God and to the gift of truth embodied in revelation. The element of responsibility gives to this obedience in faith the character of an active and committed attitude. It is significant that the Council at no point repeats the traditional distinction
between the Ecclesia docens and the Ecclesia discens: this is evidently because it wished to avoid an insufficient consciousness of universal sharing in the munus propheticum of Christ (Sources of Renewal, p. 253).
The sensus fidei is based on the insight of faith that since Christ established the Church fidelity to God, and to God's truth, is measured by fidelity to the teaching authority Christ instituted in the apostles and their successors. John Paul II is very concerned to lead the faithful to understand that in this obedience, submission, or docility they are no more merely passive than Christ was in His fidelity to the Father. Since there was no authority on earth greater than He, our Lord's fidelity had no measure outside of His own power of discernment. Just as we can only see the Father in seeing the Son, so we can only be faithful to the Father by being faithful to the Son. And we can only be faithful to the Son by being faithful to the truth which bears the stamp of apostolic authority.
Thus for John Paul II the sense of responsibility for the truth, the vertical dimension of catechesis, is concretely expressed in an acts of obedience to the magisterium.
The Horizontal Dimension: Catechesis as Service
In its most general articulation, the Christological foundation for the horizontal dimension is this: Man is the path for the Church because man is the path for Christ. This is the central teaching of John Paul's first encyclical, Redeemer of Man. Christ came, not to be served, but to serve (Mark 10:45), and the Church is charged with continuing Christ's mission as the expression of its sharing in His life. All of the Church's apostolic activities are a specification of the Church's call to serve man by promoting authentic and integral human development, key to which is man's communion with God.
Catechesis, which transmits the good news about this communion with God in Christ, is therefore a fundamental way of serving man. It is a fundamental path which leads the Church to man and through the service of man to God.
Because man is the path for the Church, the Church must be concerned about human dignity. But human dignity is defined by the Holy Father with reference to the truth: "Thus it is that truth makes man what he is. His relationship with truth is the deciding factor in his human nature and it constitutes his dignity as a person" (Sign of Contradiction, p. 119).
Truth has a divine dimension; it belongs by nature to God himself; it is one with the divine Word. At the same time it constitutes an essential dimension of human knowledge and human existence, of science, wisdom and the human conscience.
Every man is born into the world to bear witness to the truth according to his own particular vocation (Sign of Contradiction, p.120).
The Pope uses the language of rights to accent the obligation that members of the Church have to bring to the truth to others.
Jesus said very clearly that the truth must not be denied to men or concealed from them (cf. Mt 5:14-16) but must be openly professed (Matthew 10:32). Truth has a social, a public dimension. Therefore man's right to the truth must never be denied (Sign of Contradiction, p. 120-121).
Every baptized person, precisely by reason of being baptized, has the right to receive from the Church instruction and education enabling him to enter on a truly Christian life (Catechesis in Our Time, no. 14; see Code of Canon Law, canons 213, 217).
The right to the truth is grounded in the call from God to live according to the truth. Divine Providence provides all that we need to respond to this call, and no one is acting rightly in interfering with Providence; that is, no one has a right to thwart God's will. Put positively, everyone has an obligation to conform to God's will. Since God's will provides that the truth be brought to us through the agency of others, it follows that there is an obligation to communicate the truth to others, this obligation corresponding to the others' right to the truth.
Truth has a social, public dimension. It is a common good. As a good it is perfective of the human person, as we have just seen. As a common good, it is able to bring fulfillment to many at the same time, without being diminished. St. Augustine provided an unforgettable description of the common good: "Any good thing which can be shared is not properly possessed unless it is being shared" (On Christian Doctrine). This applies to the truth in a pre-eminent manner. We do not possess the truth for what it truly is, the common good which fulfills all made in the image of God, unless we share it, communicate it, to others.
Thus, the sense of responsibility for truth is not a defensive attitude of lock-it-up-and-keep-it-safe. Truth is like an electrical charge. One may fear that by touching something or someone who is grounded one will lose one's charge. But the proper way of conceiving the truth is that by touching others they become charged by it through us. The sense of responsibility for divine truth cannot be separated, in the mind of John Paul II, from the notions of encounter and mission.
Thus, a sense of responsibility for the truth is one of the fundamental points of encounter between the Church and each man and also one of the fundamental demands determining man's vocation in the community of the Church. The present-day Church, guided by a sense of responsibility for truth, must persevere in fidelity to her own nature, which involves the prophetic mission that comes from Christ himself (The Redeemer of Man,
no. 19).
By serving as catechists, men and women fulfill the commandment to love others as they have been loved by Christ (John 13:34) and as they love themselves. Because Christ loved them by bearing witness to the truth (John 18:37) and they have experienced being set free by this truth, bringing the truth to others becomes the measure of their Christian love.
The Christological principle is also applicable to the joy and sorrow which those who love the truth and love others by bearing witness to the truth. Love always begets her twins of joy and sorrow in those who follow Christ just as it did in Him (see Luke 10:21 on joy, and Luke 19:41, John 6:66 and Luke 18:23 on sorrow). Joy and sorrow are necessary to love because love is defined in terms of the good. Love desires what is good, and when the good becomes a reality, joy results; but when the good is absent, sadness results. This is yet another aspect of the horizontal dimension.
A Text of Pope John Paul II
On April 25, 1988, Pope John Paul II addressed the participants in a National Congress of Catechists (L'Osservatore Romano, May 30, 1988, N.22) This text shows how consistent the Holy Father is in conceiving of catechesis in terms of the vertical and horizontal dimensions, in terms of fidelity to God and service to man.
However, as in all things regarding the education of persons, in particular the education to the faith, quantity must be matched by quality. To be a catechist of high quality: this is what those who perform that important task today must aspire to. To be a catechist of high quality in accordance with the characteristics that the Church authentically proposes. You know these characteristics. The catechist must, first of all, be a person who affirms gospel certainties with conviction: "We live in a difficult world in which the anguish of seeing the best creations of man slip away from him and turn against him creates a climate of uncertainty. In this world catechesis should help Christians to be, for their own joy and the service of all, 'light' and 'salt.' Undoubtedly this demands that catechesis should strengthen them in their identity and that it should continually separate itself from the surrounding atmosphere of hesitation, uncertainty and insipidity (Catechesi tradendae, no. 56).
The catechist must also be a faithful servant of the gospel as it was entrusted to the Church by Jesus and as the Church has assimilated and transmitted it in her bimillenary tradition. The presentation of the faith is authentic, liberating and fruitful if it clearly shows forth the genuine sense intended by Christ and the witness of the Apostles. It is for this reason that, during these years of my apostolic service, I have spoken repeatedly of the "need for a systematic catechesis" (CT, no. 21) and for "integrity of content" (CT, no. 30). It would truly be a grave sin against fidelity to the gospel, but also against culture, if the immense patrimony of the faith contained in and developed from the Bible and made explicit and defended by the Church, under the guidance of the Spirit, for these twenty centuries, were in some way distorted. It is precisely with a view to facilitating the transmission of the incomparable riches of the faith, as they have been authentically reproposed for our era by the Second Vatican Council, that the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops asked for the composition of a "catechism for the universal Church."
The catechist must also be an expert in humanity, that is, deeply attentive to the sensibility and the problems of the persons being catechized; it is of no use to give a beautiful lesson if it does not respond to the questions and the expectations of those to whom it is directed.
Here, along with being systematic and integral, catechesis must be intensely meaningful; it must, that is, prolong the attitude of Jesus who, as he gives the Word of life, meets each person in the reality of his needs, his expectations, and his ability to understand.
Finally, the catechist must suit his teaching to the social context in which those being catechized live. In other words, he must not reduce his service to the Word of God to purely interior forms of adherence and of worship, but must open himself to the
great moral and social questions of our day, questions which I have recalled more in the Encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis. He proclaims the gospel to the men and women of today, whom he helps to grow according to a strong and intense morality which must be measured against respect for and the elevation of the human person, especially with regard to the poor, throughout the world. He must always join solidarity and freedom (cf. Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, no. 33).
If realized in a consistent way, these characteristics permit the fulfillment of what remains as it were "a law that is fundamental for the whole of the Church's life: the law of fidelity to God and of fidelity to man, in a single loving attitude" (CT, no.55).
Conclusion
"You must not allow yourselves to be called teachers, for you have only one Teacher, the Christ" (Matthew 23:10). In this passage Jesus instructs us that He is the ultimate source of truth. He therefore is teacher like no one else can be. The task of the catechist is to allow Christ to speak to today's world the same message that He revealed in His words, actions and life, in a way which corresponds to the questions of modern man.
In a remarkable description of the spirit of an authentic renaissance, Etienne Gilson expressed the way in which scholastic theologians approached the ancient texts of Greek philosophers. St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure and others did not look at the texts of Aristotle and Plato as lifeless letters but as the expression of life of the mind, of minds engaged in the pursuit of understanding. "What Albert the Great or St. Thomas asked of these Ancients was not so much to tell them what they had formerly been in Greece or in Rome, but rather what they were still capable of becoming, what they themselves would have become, if they had lived in Christian territory, in the 13th century."2
Catechists must approach the inspired witness to Christ's life with much the same goal and spirit. Only here, there is the Divine Spirit who animates and guides the process. They must so thoroughly "make their own the mind of Christ" (Philippians 2:5) that through them Christ Himself can speak to the men and women of today the same truth He spoke in Palestine 2000 years ago.
Truth is the "middle term" that unites the vertical and horizontal dimensions of catechesis. Which is to say the Christ, Who is the truth, unites these two dimensions. God is truth, and man, made in God's image and likeness, is made for the truth. There is no need to feel compelled to choose between fidelity to God and effective love for one's neighbor. Just as God and man are one in Christ, so love of God and love of neighbor are united in all of our actions which have Christ as their model. In catechesis, the divine and the human dimensions, the vertical and the horizontal, responsibility to God for the truth and responsibility for others in love, are complementary elements of one and the same act of teaching the truth.
No one has ever been more explicit about the spirituality of the imitation of Christ than St. Paul. He set himself forth as a model for imitation (1 Cor 4:15-17 and Phil 3:17), but only to the extent that he himself imitates Christ (1 Cor 11:1). As an apostle and foundation of the Church, he gives us a model of modeling Christ.
For St. Paul, the word "servant" encompasses everything we have reviewed in the preceding. He is servant of God and Christ (Rom 1:1; Gal 1:10), servant of the Gospel (Rom 1:1; Eph 3:7), and servant of those to whom he has been sent (2 Cor 2:4; 10:6). He is capable of adapting himself to the needs of every class of person (1 Cor 9:19-23). He is, by reason of his faith, inwardly free from dependence upon every human authority so that he can put God's truth and preaching that truth above every consideration of being acceptable to others (Gal 1:10).
St. Paul forged a spiritual synthesis according to which he understood that in order to be faithful to God he had to be faithful to the grace of being called to be an apostle and herald of the Gospel. Because it is the same God who died to save him Who also called him to this service, St. Paul understood that his relationship with God would be measured by his fidelity to the Word of God and to his mission to bring the Gospel to others. He is under compulsion (1 Cor 9:16-18). The same can be said of catechists.
Since he was aware that by God's grace it was no longer he living, but Christ living in him, St. Paul's synthesis is one of remarkable simplicity. This identification in Christ results in there being no conflict between fidelity to God, fidelity to the Gospel, and fidelity to himself. This is what empowered him to give the ultimate catechesis, the witness of martyrdom. Martyrdom is the act which testifies to the identification of oneself with the truth and with Christ Who is the Truth. Catechists are called to such identification.
Such identification with Christ is the key to the renewal of catechesis. If Aquinas and others were able to enter into the minds of the Ancients to such a degree that through them the Ancients could speak to the thirteenth century, then how much more does Christ require us to be identified with him if He is to speak to the people of our times through us!
The most compelling aspect of Pope John Paul II's teaching on catechesis is his focus on the power of the Christ-conforming grace of the Holy Spirit as its foundation. Implicit in this is an understanding of the Church (an ecclesiology) which gives definite priority to the universal call to holiness and which holds to the conviction that "The saints have always been the source and origin of renewal in the most difficult moments of the Church's history" (Christifideles laici, 16). The Pope's vision for the revitalization of catechesis is that it will come essentially through a renewed commitment on the part of all catechists to embrace the call to holiness and to become one with Christ, so that through us He can appeal to the hearts of those we teach. Every catechist ought to be able to say, with St. Paul: "We are ambassadors for Christ; it is as though God were urging you through us, and in the Name of Christ we appeal to you" (2 Cor 5:20).
Douglas Bushman holds a Licentiate in Sacred Theology (STL) from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is Director of the Institute for Religious and Pastoral Studies of the University of Dallas.
Endnotes
1 "Any pastoral activity for the carrying out of which there are not at hand persons with the right formation and preparation will necessarily come to nothing. The working tools themselves cannot be effective unless used by catechists who have been rightly formed. Hence, the suitable formation of catechists must come before reform in texts and strengthening of the organization for handling catechesis" General Catechetical Directory, 108.
2 Quoted in M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas.