Catechal Responsibility

I've mentioned again and again and again that the primary responsibility of the catechist is to teach what the Church teaches. Now it is true that to teach well the catechist must be able to relate to the student in an appropriate way. All of the teaching techniques, that is the pedagogical skills necessary to any teacher, must be mastered. The catechist should inspire their students, just as any sucessful teacher will inspire.
But the most inspirational catechist in the world will not be doing his ministry well, or at all, if they do not teach what the Church teaches.
Case in point:
He Said What?

The primacy of Catholocism

So at one time I was facilitating a class on Biblical study and the area being covered was on judges, which ends

In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what he thought best.

This passage can be a reflection of the way in which Protestants view Solo Scriptorum, with the Bible the only source of faith, interpreted by each person themselves.

Sometimes in the modern ecumenical spirit members of the Church forget that the purpose of ecumenism is not just one church or a group of churches which play nice, but the reunification of Christ's Church, that is the separated Protestant communities with the Catholic Church.

Sometimes one will hear from individuals who are well meaning, but have been poorly catechized:

Shouldn't a church be open to anyone who wants to come? It wasn't like Jesus founded the Catholic Church. He founded His Church. If the Catholic church had stayed true to the teachings of Christ and His mission on earth, there never would have been a need for Protestant religions.

This kind of statement shows a fundamental misunderstanding of Catholic doctrine. As it states in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

*811 *"This is the sole Church of Christ, which in the Creed we profess to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic."
These four characteristics, inseparably linked with each other, indicate essential features of the Church and her mission. The Church does not possess them of herself; it is Christ who, through the Holy Spirit, makes his Church one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, and it is he who calls her to realize each of these qualities.

*817 *In fact, "in this one and only Church of God from its very beginnings there arose certain rifts, which the Apostle strongly censures as damnable. But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions appeared and large communities became separated from full communion with the Catholic Church - for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame." The ruptures that wound the unity of Christ's Body - here we must distinguish heresy, apostasy, and schism - do not occur without human sin:

The Church does not deny that members of the Church, even popes, bishops and lay ministers are sinful. The fact that some in the Church sin does not excuse the sin of heresy practiced by the original Protestant schismatics. The Church has also stated that modern members of Protestant congregations, raised in those traditions, are not guilty of the sin of heresy. This does not apply to those members of the Catholic Church, who for reasons of disagreement with teachings of the Magisterium, have left the Church.

Last year the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a document, un-named as far as I have been able to find, which was meant to clarify the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium. In that document it states:

"In fact, precisely because the Church willed by Christ actually continues to exist (subsistit in) in the Catholic Church, this continuity of subsistence implies an essential identity between the Church of Christ and the Catholic Church. The Council wished to teach that we encounter the Church of Jesus Christ as a concrete historical subject in the Catholic Church. The idea, therefore, that subsistence can somehow be multiplied does not express what was intended by the choice of the term “subsistit”. In choosing the word “subsistit” the Council intended to express the singularity and non “multipliability” of the Church of Christ: the Church exists as a unique historical reality."

The Church's stance on whether the Catholic Church is the Church founded by Christ is pretty clear.

The consequences of sin

One of the points often made by atheists is how can a loving God exists in a world with so many bad things?

The explanation for this is often framed in the principle of free will, and indeed that is a major part of the answer. The extension of this point is that we do not live in a consequence free world.

What exactly does that mean? At its most basic it means that if you step off a cliff the natural laws which God has seen fit to enforce in his created universe will cause you to experience a world of hurt as your body makes contact with the ground below.

So in reality the Commandments and teachings which God has given us are warnings about how to avoid bad consequences. Many people point to the Ten Commandments and describe how they are the rules by which a society must live for a community to be able to live together. Certainly a community can not survive if the people in it steal from one another or commit adultery or bear false witness against each other.

In the new age the Church has illuminated the meanings of the original Ten Commandments to tell us about many other things which just seem to have bad consequences when we do them. Most of these consequences are present in this world, so that it really isn't necessary to talk about the dire consequences that will occur in the next.

Sometime the consequences don't seem to follow so directly from our point of view, but the Church has had centuries to think about and see the end results, and knows where individual actions will lead.

That is also why there is no such thing as a private sin. A sin hurts the whole community. There are consequences for the whole community.

This is not a popular stand today. People want a consequences free world. That ain't going to happen!

Live a promiscuous life and there will be consequences. There's heartbreak, low self esteem, using others as objects, which results in loneliness, possible pregnancy, guilt for "taking care" of that "problem", disease, and on and on.

Follow the cult of instant gratification and find a life bereft of meaning.

Cheat on your spouse and destroy your family, lose the respect of your children, your friends, possible even consign the woman you said you loved and your children to a life of poverty, since being from a single female parent household is the greatest indicator of poverty in the U.S.

The God who loves you wants you to avoid bad consequences. He wants it so bad that He has told us how to minimize the chances of making decisions which will cause us to experience a whole bunch of bad consequences. To do that avoid sin. Respect and follow the teachings of the Church. Teachings not created because the Church is anti-this or whata-phobic that, but because these actions, those lifestyles are bad for you. Thaey are bad because they have consequences, in this world as well as the next.

History lesson

John Henry Cardinal Newman once wrote "To know history is to cease to be Protestant." What Newman meant was that to anyone who read the Church Fathers, who was familiar with Scripture, who knew of Roman history and the history of Europe the truth of the Tradition of the Catholic Church was obvious.

The Bible itself is primarily the story of Salvation History. As such it has depth. I've written about compenetration before. Compenetration refers to the fact that biblical prophecy has an immediate fulfillment while simultaneously having a more ultimate meaning as well. So when Jeremiah talks about the return of Israel from the Babylonian exile he is also talking about the ultimate return to God which will come though the salvation of Christ.

A different kind of depth in Scripture is the way in which ordinary objects, things and concepts in the mortal world reflect or mirror things either spiritual or Divine. The relationship between God and his people, Israel in the Old Testament and the Church in the New Testament, is mirrored in marriage. Some would even go so far as to say that marriage is a sacrament because it mirrors God's relationship to his Church. So we see in the Song of Songs the relationship of a lover as the relationship of God to his people. We see in Hosea Israel compared to an unfaithful wife, who takes other gods to the sorrow of the true God.

The Ark of the Covenant and the Holy of Holies in which it was kept was believed to mirror Heaven, or at least the Holy Throne Room of God.

Israel itself was to mirror the Heavenly Kingdom. Remember in Scripture God originally did not give Israel a king, even though Moses made allowances for a king in the Law. God was their king. As a matter of fact when the people asked the prophet Samuel to anoint a king for them Samuel was angry. He knew God was their King. But God knew what was best for the people. So he gave them their way, because he knew ultimately he would get his way.

So as God often does he wrote strait with crooked lines. He took many bad and some good kings and paved the way for the Eternal King, Himself.

Along the way he used the trappings and traditions of Jewish royalty to model his Eternal Kingdom and his Church. So a careful reading of the two Book of Kings shows that in the ancient kingdom the king ruled, but the other power in the kingdom was not his wife, for the ancient kings had many wives, but his mother. Read 2 Kings. Note that for every king there is an entry identifying the queen mother, for the queen mother had real authority in the kingdom.

In Isaiah 23 the prophet describes the office of the steward, second only to the king. In Matthew 16:18 Jesus uses the same words when appointing his steward, Peter, the first pope.

So the concept of Mary as the Theotokas and Queen of Heaven are Scriptural in origin, not some post Roman innovation. Likewise the Magisterium and the power of the Pope to bind and loose is a legal concept based on the Scriptural description of the officer of steward in the ancient kingdom of God's people, not some offshoot of Roman government or Catholic power grab.

As Christ said Let those who have ears hear, and I might add let those who have eyes read.

Franz Werfel and Bernadette

So its amazing the way sometimes things just fall into line. Today I was looking up something on Wikipedia and the article included a quote from Franz Werfel. Werfel, was a Jewish poet and play write who wrote against the Nazi's in the period prior to their take over of Austria. As the National Socialist Party came to power he fled to France, only to have to flee again when Germany invaded that country. Unable to procure the necessary documents he fled across France, finally hiding with various families around Lourdes.

While there he learned of the story of Bernadette Soubirous. Werfel made a promise to God that if he and his wife escaped to America he would write a song about Bernadette. With the help of American journalist Varian Fry he managed to escape. In 1941 he wrote Song of Bernadette, a novel about the young girl and the apparition of the Blessed Virgin which appeared to her.

Though Werfel never converted to Catholicism his book was very Catholic in tone.

Amazingly at the present time I'm doing a Lenten reflection on Mary. Today's reading was on Bernadette Soubirous and Our Lady of Lourdes.

Just moments ago someone sent me a factoid. It seems that this year Lent and Easter correspond exactly with those of 1858, the year Our Lady appeared to St Bernadette in Lourdes.

The Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes was last week, on Feb 11. Somehow that date passed without my really noticing it. For some reason today the Spirit seemed determine to bring it to my attention

The danger of the mystic

We live in a society where it has become common to face the spiritual with skepticism or indifference. Even in the Church it is not uncommon to find even priests who deny the actual existence of Satan, angels, or demons. Often these same people deny, if not the existence of sin, its power to eternally separate us from the presence of God.
This has resulted in a situation where our youth are exposed to many false and dangerous beliefs. Some of these beliefs are considered harmless or even silly by secular culture, when they are in truth dangerous. Dangerous to the soul and sometimes even dangerous to the body.
Take Wicca. Basically a made up religion with its historical origins in the 19th century. Based upon vague fantasies of a non-existent ancient witchcraft Wiccans themselves do not believe that they worship the devil. However many do call upon powers from beyond this world, attempting to affect happenings in the physical world through the exercise of power.
Now there is a real spiritual world. It is a plane of existence inhabited by the angels and demons, that is fallen angels, and includes the heavens and hell to which those who die go awaiting the final coming of Christ. There is a power in this spiritual world. It is the same power that exists in the mortal plane. The power of God. But God also allows other forces to reach from that plane into the world. Some actions occur through His own power, as when God answers a prayer, or allows the Blessed Mother or a saint to appear to a mortal. Other forces God also allows to enter the world, as when Satan is allowed to tempt the living or when a demon is allowed to possess a person's body.
It has become unfashionable to talk of such things, but they are as much a part of our Catholic teaching as the Sacraments or Original Sin. It is true that not every mentally unstable or epileptic individual is "possessed." But just as most wild bears are not man eaters, that does not mean that there does not exist a man eating wild bear or two. It also means that its a bad idea to dance with the bears.
So in the present secular world its very likely that if you work with a youth group that some of the members of the group have friends who are either dabbling with Wicca or even from families where it or other pagan practices are considered the norm. It is also likely that they have been exposed to Ouija boards, tarot cards or other spiritually dangerous items.
Think this is a silly thing to worry about? Let's look at it this way. Do you believe in the efficacious power of prayer? That is, do you believe that praying to God or to the Saints or the Blessed Mother actually has the result of causing an effect in the physical world? If you do is it then unreasonable to believe that Satan and his fallen angels can also respond to "prayer." God has allowed Satan power in this world, at least until Christ's second coming. If someone is using an object or ceremony or ritual in a way to reach out to a higher power, and the intent of that individual is not directed toward God then does it not make sense that another power could respond?
Even if such a power does not manifest physically it is dangerous to soul to dabble with such things. It is especially dangerous for the young, those who are not fully formed in their faith and the weak willed, those already seeped in sin, to fool with such things.

New Media

Now I am of an age where I can say that there was a time when I had a familiarity with literally all aspects of computer and network use. There was, quite literally, no application or protocol used to communicate between computers that I did not have at least a passing relationship with. As an example, several years ago the Smithsonian had an exhibition on computer technology at which were present all kinds of computer hardware from the famous ENIAC to the more pedestrian S-100 bus based PC, Atari, Pet and of course the IBM PC. I took my son though the exhibit, who was in high school at that time and heard, "Dad, don't you have one of those?" at far more of the pieces than I would have expected, starting with the S-100 unit.
On this extensive array of computer hardware I managed to communicate with computer bulletin boards over phone modems, moved onto first AOL and CompuServe, and eventually to the Internet. Once on that world spanning network I found myself using email, Internet Relay Chat, FTP with its ARCHIE search engine, GOPHER with its equivalent VERONICA search engine, and of course Usenet.
Somewhere around the time the WWW came into existence I started to fall behind. Second Life was an environment I only heard about at a Systems Controls conference, where the other programmers had pretty much the same disinterested response I did to the presenter's enthusiastic endorsement of Linden's virtual world. I grabbed onto blogging after a fashion, though my lackadaisical update of this blog shows I'm certainly not in the league of the great Catholic bloggers who typically post a dozen times a day. I found Instant Messaging a total distraction that prevented me from getting any work done. MySpace and Facebook seem to require a much greater level of exhibitionism than I am comfortable with. Twitter? Does anybody really care where I am and what I'm doing?
So how does this great glut of social communication tools effect the ability of the catechist to carry out the mission? The Holy Father has said that it is important that the Church use the new media to evangelize, teach and proclaim the Good News. So it is incumbent on us to think and investigate how it is best to do that.
We must also remember that social media can be a two edge sword. Just as thoughtlessly placed photos on Facebook can cost you a job, it can also cost you the respect and trust of young people placed in your charge. IM or email between adults and young people must be carried on according to the highest standards of propriety.
When youth invite you to their IM buddy lists or friend you they should be made to understand that while you might indeed be their friend, you are also an adult who has a responsibility to report certain things to authorities or parents.
Any kind of relationship which could lead to scandal must be avoided. Remember any piece of information which travels through the Internet and including information which transverses the cell phone system never goes away. It is never private.
Provided that new media is used in a way that enhances human dignity and supports the commission laid on us by Christ it, like writing, radio and television before it can be used to the greater glory of God.