While the Catholic landscape is improving, I still frequently hear about problems with catechesis along with complaints that many Catholics are ignorant of the faith. We rightly examine the various factors that contribute to this phenomenon, from defective catechetical materials to lackluster teaching and a lack of parental support. There seems to be plenty of blame to go around.
While all of the above is true, I nonetheless think it’s fair to say that the problem is not so much a failure of catechesis as it’s a lack of evangelization (and thus a lack of faith).
Catechesis is about helping a person mature in the faith. In other words, it’s about “educating the true disciple of Christ by means of a deeper and more systematic knowledge of the Person and the message of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Pope John Paul II, On Catechesis in Our Time, no. 19).
Notice that the Holy Father assumes here a living faith, that the person being catechized is already a disciple. In practice, that’s an assumption we cannot afford to make, especially in today’s culture. The Holy Father admitted as much, and also said that catechesis must not only concern itself with nourishing and teaching the faith, but also unceasingly arousing it. While all of this is part of ”evangelization” in a broad sense, arousing one to a personal commitment to Christ is evangelization in the stricter sense, and that’s the sort of evangelization that I think is often lacking, and when it is, catechesis just doesn’t stick.
Let’s look at it this way. Most Catholics are baptized as children. They receive the gift of faith, and so in a real sense their Baptism is a moment of conversion. Yet, infant Baptism presupposes an integral Christian formation ordered to a personal appropriation of one’s baptismal faith. After all, Our Lord told the apostles to “go and make disciples,” not “go and make baptized babies.”
When baptized children are not raised in an environment that fosters a personal relationship or commitment to Christ and His Church, is it really surprising that they are not actively engaged in their religion class? Isn’t this the next generation of “Sunday Catholics” (at best) who look upon the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with blank, glassy stares? Trying to teach the faith to those who have not in some meaningful measure committed themselves as Christian disciples is like reading the owner’s manual to a new pc to someone who hasn’t yet decided that he wants a computer. The information will come in handy at some point, but the timing is not right. More...