Catechesis of the Heart and Soul

If we want our children to continue practicing their faith, then they must have a positive experience

Photo by Erika Giraud on Unsplash

This is part two of what I have decided is going to be a three part series on catechesis in American Christianity, the first part being “What Happened to Catechesis in American Christianity?” where I focused more on the intellectual aspect of catechesis. Hearing this essay read in my voice is behind a paywall. Part three will be about social media, and since it will be my second essay this month, it will also be behind a paywall.

I read the Catechism of the Catholic Church from cover to cover between 2019-2020 shortly after I returned to the sacraments, and I am going through it again with The Catechism in a Year. The concluding paragraph of the Prologue struck me, as the Roman Catechism was quoted

The whole concern of doctrine and its teaching must be directed to the love that never ends. Whether something is proposed for belief, for hope or action, the love of our Lord must always be made accessible, so that anyone can see that all the works of perfect Christian virtue spring from Love and have no other objective than to arrive at love.

Now, I know I am quoting, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, specifically the Roman Catechism, which was first published in 1566 after the Council of Trent, but I hardly think any Christian of any Church or denomination would disagree with the above mentioned statement. Unfortunately, that whole goal of catechesis, the whole point of our intellectual growth in the faith, to grow deeper in love and be made saints, is so often missed in catechesis, even when the intellectual side of the faith is not completely abandoned.

Many of us are familiar with the quote widely attributed to Tertullian, a second-third century Church Father, who said, “See how these Christians love one another (for they themselves hate one another),” contrasting the Christian way of life with the Roman pagan way of life. One need only to spend two minutes in the comments section of a YouTube video and see Christians smear each other with obscenities for daring to say something different to see that reality is often not the case today. I distinctly remember in high school watching a YouTube video I’d doubt I’d be able to find again, where a young woman told a story through flashcards of how she had gone from being a morally judgmental person who only associated with “good” people to finally recognizing the call of Christian charity, that she was to love everyone and that that was ultimately what her faith was about. Immediately in the comments, someone had pulled some Bible verse out of context about not associating with wrongdoers. In 2020, Bishop Barron felt the need to make a video about the abhorrent way Catholics treated each other online, saying he had had to devote the time of full-time staffers to removing offensive comments from an article he had written.

I think a lot of this comes from the tendency to replace Christianity with ideology. Christianity is ultimately a way of life and deeply intertwined set of relationships with God and with others. This is an incarnational experience, not just a set of ideas. Saints know the faith better than people with doctorates in theology; however, it’s always easier to have a set of ideas than to live a way of life, which is why one of the greatest temptations of Christians is to turn Christianity into an ideology and forget the relational aspect. Within orthodox Catholicism and other “traditional” forms of Christianity, the main temptation is to mistake American conservatism for theological orthodoxy. This is not to say there are not those on the Left in religious circles who replace certain left-wing ideologies for Christianity, but those people tend to be fully aware when they are going against the teachings of the Church and explicitly say so. This is not so much the case for Christians more on the Right, particularly since the Conservative Resurgence in the 1970’s, 80’s, and 90’s in the Southern Baptist Church, the rise of the moral majority within Evangelical culture, the elevation of Irish and Italian Catholic immigrant communities to the middle classes, and the Democratic Party’s wholesale support for abortion, alienating many Catholic voters. Within this climate, voting for “traditional” Christian values has meant voting Republican, often at the expense of other “traditional” Christian values, like care for poor, marginalized, and oppressed. If I were to bring up race in certain Catholic circles, doesn’t matter how, I would be accused of being “woke”. When this happens, the triumph of ideas becomes more important than the salvation of the souls of persons.

This is particularly dangerous when it comes to retaining children and youth in the Church. As I alluded to in my first piece on catechesis on the intellectual emptying of catechesis in American Christianity, people need exposure to the intellectual side of the faith to know the faith is well-thought out and relevant to their lives; however, no amount of logic or facts can get people to stay in a place where they have had a terrible experience or witnessed people they deeply love have terrible experiences. This, of course, is not to downplay the intellectual side of the faith, for it was the Christian intellectual life that got me to remain Christian when I was twenty and my spiritual life completely collapsed, but as I wrote about nearly a year and a half ago, the reasons why we convert or de-convert go far deeper than that. We are attracted to places where we feel loved and in a relationship. We shun places where we do not.

When ideology and Christianity become commingled and the triumph of ideas becomes more important than the salvation of the souls of persons, we find ourselves with an “us vs. them” mentality, be it against “the libs”, or “the gays”, etc. Within this mindset, the inherent dignity of the human person, the fact every person bears the image of God, an idea so central to Christian theology, gets lost. People might claim to believe such a doctrine, but if it is not lived out, then it becomes meaningless.

If the goal of Christianity is the triumph of ideas, then we end up disincarnating our faith, so to speak, where we remove the Christian life from living Christianity. We lose love. Doing this is quite easy. It it much easier to divide the world up in the ideological camps, where we are the good people, and everyone else is the bad. I have yet to read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn though it is on my list, and it is true what he says that, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart…” We have to recognize our own ability to do evil and strive to do good. Doing good is not done through winning battles on the internet, but through the direct human action, through performing acts of love in the real world in the flesh.

Not only does the recognition of the fact the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart mean we need to recognize our own ability to do evil and then do good in an incarnate manner, but it also means we must recognize the goodness and dignity of the people “on the other side.” They are also persons made in the image and likeness of God who are to be treated with love, kindness, and respect. Considering our failure to treat our own like this, how can we truly effectively spread the Gospel?

I am never once going to downplay the importance of having correct doctrine. I am an orthodox Catholic who assents to all the teachings of Mother Church; however, truly handing down the faith to others cannot simply entail intellectual catechesis. It requires acts of love and service. It requires doing things like speaking in such a way where the dignity of every human being, even those on the others side we are tempted to dehumanize, is recognized. It requires confessing sin and repenting. It requires direct care for the poor and marginalized, through doing things like volunteering at soup kitchens and/or homeless shelters, volunteering at refugee resettlement services, volunteering at food banks, volunteering at pregnancy centers, donating blood etc. It requires loving our own through doing things like not writing hateful comments on other Christians’ YouTube videos, but instead participating in meal trains for people at our parishes who have had new babies or are going through a crisis, sitting with fellow parishioners in grief, mowing other parishioners’ lawns, etc. Above all, it requires recognizing the humanity of the other, asking Christ to imbue the belief into our entire beings that each and every individual is a beloved child of God.