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In his day-long presentation, held at the St. Anthony Retreat Center on Jan. 11, Mulhall delivered observations and invited response on “The Status of Catechesis in the USA Today.”
He began by leading the attendees, which included diocesan directors of religious education and formation from throughout Texas, on an exploration into the current health of catechesis in their own dioceses.
“We have to do serious evaluation of the lay of land in which we find ourselves,” said Mulhall, “and ask ourselves those critical questions and then ask, ‘What happens if we don’t make changes?’ and then, ‘What steps will we have to take to make the important changes that will make a difference?’”
Mulhall noted that while people may say catechesis is important, it is what they are willing to pay that determines whether or not it truly is. “It’s one thing to say it’s important, but where do you put your resources?” he said. “Where do you put your time? Where do you put your effort? All those things are your measuring stick.”
He added that the National Directory for Catechesis clearly states the importance of having a well-prepared professional and that if parishes lack the funds, a rethinking of how people are utilized may be in order. A suggested possibility was a sharing or partnering by parishes having more resources with poorer parishes, not only financially but in DRE services.
When a participant commented that “by the time you move into a new paradigm, there’s a new shift coming,” Mulhall pointed out the rarity of true paradigm shifts, naming the industrial revolution as one and the recent communications/technology revolution as another. A paradigm shift “changes the whole way we see the world,” he said. “It changes the way we operate within the world, changes the way our structures are set up.”
A radical transition is involved, he noted, adding, “We have changed from a faith-based world to a knowledge and science-based world. That means that the way people see and understand the world is different. People no longer approach the world from faith. In the Middle Ages, faith guided everything that people did and understood.”
There has been a tremendous shift, he related, moving away from the church being very localized and at the very hub of the communal life, with everything taking place through the church community. “Today,” Mulhall said, “parishes are voluntary organizations that people join because it meets their particular need or interest.”
He noted that following the recent hurricanes, within six months people had resettled with family members in every state in the union and half the zip codes — a major change from the days when families were close-knit units and remained together in the same community.
An attendee pointed out that in parishes with Asian, Hispanic and Filipino communities, these ethnic groups tend, to some extent, to bring that feeling of community with them.
Mulhall added that we have moved from the sense of the importance of family and the belief that everything revolves around family. “But we still operate as if the old paradigm is still in place,” he said. “We still expect all these things to be taking place in families, even though they are not taking place.”
“If what I was saying is true,” he said, “about the change in culture, the change in technology, the change in the way we see and understand the world, then we need to ask questions about how that affects how we communicate, how people live faith, how people experience faith.”
He noted that there is a hunger for mystery by people today, evident from the tremendous popularity of The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series. “My feeling is it’s a hunger for the mysterious,” he said, using a scene from The Lion King, when the three animal pals ponder the stars, to illustrate the three primary ways people see and understand the world — the scientific view, literally or through mystery.
Around the time of World War II, science and technology began to replace the sense of the mysterious he observed, though a number of persons still view the world in literal mode. In earlier times, people were immersed in mystery. “It was part of the milieu they lived in,” said Mulhall. “They had no other choice and so, to them, it might be literal mythic, but they knew and understood mythic just automatically. Today people would be literal or literal scientific, which means they have to discover and explore the mythic.”
He pointed out that since all of our language is mythic, our starting point from a cultural perspective must be in recognizing how that transition takes place and helping people understand what mythic language is. Today, he noted, the taking away of mystery is intentional.
“It’s important that we understand that we are in a paradigm shift — across cultures, across world visions, across how people see and understand their neighbors, their careers, everything else,” he said. The church finds itself on the opposite side of that paradigm, making it a continual struggle to help people claim and live their faith.
Delving into the importance of culture, Mulhall related that prior to the creation of the printing press, which led to the age of reason and the industrial revolution, the primary means of transmitting culture was through storytelling. “Now we’re into lyric culture,” he observed. “But what’s the next culture? What are the tools that we need to learn to live and exist in that next culture?”
One problem brought up by an attendee was the fact that those who remember the pre-Vatican II days are aging out, leading to a large group of Catholics who never experienced faith in the old way and “who are in this new world, this technological, non-mythical world ... trying to minister, speaking different languages.”
“All of us operate out of the culture in which we were shaped,” said Mulhall, who noted this is something we can never get rid of, although it is still possible to learn to operate in new cultures. It is never a question of “either-or,” he said, but of using both methods and more.
Mulhall then used a three-legged stool to illustrate the old model of catechesis, with family, community and society as the three supporting legs and instruction as the seat holding everything together. The assumption has always been that formation takes places in the three “legs,” said Mulhall, noting with this model, “We don’t have to worry about forming. It’s not part of our task.” A participant observed that this follows society’s view of secular education as well.
The group was then asked to consider if it was because of the failure of the “legs” (family, community, society) that the schools took up the formation task, or whether the schools felt they were better equipped to handle this and so took it away from the “legs.” Mulhall noted that the school’s taking on of these tasks is exactly what the bishops have been trying to do with catechetical ministry as well, because it is the only “delivery system” they know to get the message across.
“This is a system that exists, that works extremely well,” said Mulhall, but it is an instructional model based on assumptions that are no longer valid. The General Directory calls for the catechumenate as the model for all catechesis, meaning we must find a new model that reflects the RCIA.
Asking the attendees what they thought such a model would contain brought forth that it would involve being based on story, journeying with a person, ritual, conversion, formation, relationships and reflection of community, as well as being dialogical and lifelong and would take place in a variety of places, based on the popular culture of the society. Mulhall noted a major cultural change for us today is that instead of life revolving around communities, we value “personal space” that we willingly or unwillingly share with others.
He then asked attendees to consider how this new model of formation could be replicated. “How do we set up a structure that allows us to replicate so that people from the earliest baby to the oldest adult has these types of things taking place in their lives?” he said. He noted this does not mean abandoning instruction.
Mulhall likened the new formational model to a spider web, with the central hub being “instruction,” which holds everything together and from which all else radiates. While the bishops may see the instructional system as having failed, it was not the failure of instruction but of its underpinnings, noted Mulhall, who added that while many of society’s current ills came out of the ’60s, neither the ’60s nor the changes of Vatican II were responsible. They instead were a reaction to the changes taking place in our culture, with the structures on which the old culture was based ceasing to function because they were built to work within the former culture.
“When the paradigm shifts, when the culture shifts, we’ve got to come up with new ways that work within the culture,” said Mulhall, who noted that in the catechumenate, people are initiated into a way of life, although instruction in the faith is still a key piece. “What would you expect to happen in a school of faith?” he asked the gathering. “Not a school about faith — a school of faith.” The answer was a whole structure approach of teaching someone what it means to be a part of this way of life.
When looking at the catechumenate as the model for all catechesis, he said, “instead of a program, we must make it “a whole way of life that changes the way you think about the world and how you act.” To illustrate this new model, he drew concentric circles, with instruction being the center, surrounded by the circles of faith experience and life experience.
Mulhall proposed a proportionality scale, including life experience, faith experiences and instructional experiences — for example, when teaching forgiveness, along with classroom instruction, holding a prayer service where we pray for forgiveness or participating in the sacrament of reconciliation as a group. “Once again, I’m not saying anything bad about instruction here,” said Mulhall. “And I’m not saying that we can’t improve the way we instruct or anything else. I’m looking at what the directory calls for and what does that mean for us.”
He concluded this portion of the presentation by pointing out that the parish is the delivery system to help support its people and make the kingdom of God possible. “I look at how we do sacramental preparation and it’s like I don’t know how we can do it any worse,” he said, noting that parents complain about having to go for the fourth time to baptismal instruction for their fourth child — because it is the same thing they heard the first time. “Nowhere does it say, ‘How are we forming them as people of faith and how are we shaping them?’” he said. This, he thinks, is something we need to really think about when constructing our new model.
“We’re still going to have classrooms, we’re still going to have this type of instruction,” he said, “but it’s the model, how we think this through, how are we intentionally planning formational activities.” |