St. Paul model for teachers at catechetical gathering

Attendees at the Archdiocesan Catechetical Center’s Mid-Winter Gathering for Catechetical and Team Leaders break up into small deanery groups, following the keynote address on St. Paul by Auxiliary Bishop Oscar Cantú. Carol Baass Sowa | Today's Catholic

SAN ANTONIO • In this Pauline Year, St. Paul’s presence was felt in a special way at the Archdiocesan Catechetical Center’s Mid-Winter Gathering for Catechetical and Team Leaders on Feb. 17 at Holy Spirit Parish. The title for the conference was “St. Paul: Teacher of the Faith,” with Auxiliary Bishop Oscar Cantú presenting the keynote address on Paul as a model for teachers of the faith.

Beginning with a brief overview of key points in the life of the “Apostle to the Gentiles,” Bishop Cantú noted Paul grew up in the Diaspora, when Jews had migrated out of their native land, so was essentially a Jew growing up in the Greek culture in what is today Turkey. Thus he was probably known by his Hebrew name, Saul, in Jewish circles, and by his Roman name, Paul, to the Greeks. Born about 8 A.D. in Tarsus, he likely would have received a Greek education but gone to Jerusalem for study of Jewish law.

Paul was a tentmaker by trade, later working in this occupation as he traveled from town to town with the Christian message, Bishop Cantú related. Before his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, he had been known as “the strictest of the Pharisees,” and this encounter was “certainly transformative, central in his life to his faith,” the bishop said. He noted that while Paul then became a Christian, he continued to understand himself as a Jew.

With a copy of the Caravaggio painting, “The Conversion of St. Paul,” behind him, Bishop Cantú, observed that the only descriptions we have of what Paul looked like are from the apocryphal Acts of St. Paul and Paul’s own letters.

The apocryphal Acts describe him as small, bald-headed and bowlegged, with eyebrows that met and a large nose, but also as “full of grace,” and as one who sometimes appeared “like a man, but sometimes had the face of an angel.” Paul’s own writings, said Bishop Cantú, say that neither his physique nor speaking abilities were impressive. “Yet when he wrote to them,” he said of the communities receiving Paul’s letters, “he wrote to them as if he were a god, as if he were Hercules.”

We can also learn more about Paul, he noted, from the words of St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles.

Bishop Cantú spoke of Paul’s use of the incarnational principle, beautifully described in the writings of the great theologian St. Irenaeus in the second century — the truth that Jesus became fully human, save for the presence of sin. “He took on all of our humanity,” said the bishop, “penetrated the depths of humanity in order that he might transform it by his divinity, by his grace.”

To translate that into common terminology, said the bishop, “Bloom where you’re planted,” adding, “I do not need to over there to find grace, because I am here and, through the incarnational principle, this is where I find Christ.” Christ is thus found in the midst of our humanity.

Paul had something in common with South Texans, Bishop Cantú said, in that he was bicultural and bilingual. Thus he would have understood the words of Mexican-American singer Selena’s father in the film on her life, when he observed how hard it is to be a Mexican-American because “you have to be more American than they are” regarding the Anglo culture and English language, and at the same time, are expected to speak Spanish perfectly and thoroughly know the Hispanic culture.

“I think Paul would have identified with us in our reality,” said the bishop of Paul’s Greek upbringing as a Jew.

Paul’s teaching, he said, began with his own experience, his pivotal encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus that caused him to rethink his entire understanding of the law and the prophesies of the prophets. As a Pharisee, said Bishop Cantú, Paul believed in the resurrection. He came to understand that Jesus was the first to rise from death, in a unique manner, and that “when we are baptized, we are co-baptized with Christ. We are buried with Christ so that we can rise with him.”

Paul spent much time in prayer and reflection before he ever began to preach publicly, he related, noting that one of his first actions after his baptism was to meet with Peter and the other apostles. By doing so, he acknowledged Peter’s authority, and Peter acknowledged Paul’s as well. “He too was rightfully an apostle,” said Bishop Cantú. While he had not been present in the room with the other apostles whom Jesus visited following the resurrection, Christ had appeared to Paul later on the road, calling him to be apostle to the Gentiles.

In visiting the various Christian communities, Paul traveled out of Asia Minor and throughout Greece, staying with each community from several months to a year and getting to know them on a personal level.

“He lived his faith and he shared it, so it was a lived reality,” said Bishop Cantú. “It was not simply a preaching that swoops in and does not take into consideration the context of the people with whom he is preaching. He first lived their reality.” This, he said, is an example teachers can learn from.

It is not enough to simply recite the Scriptures or the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he said, though that is important. What is essential is that we internalize what we read, “that we live what we believe and then that we teach what we understand” — the very words a bishop tells the newly ordained deacons and priests.

Faith, he said, refers both to the content and act of believing, and justification by faith was an important theme of St. Paul — that it “is not the law that justifies us, but rather God’s grace allows us to believe.”

The centrality of the death and resurrection of Jesus is not simply an analogy or “nice story,” he said, but something that has critical information for our faith. He noted Paul’s preaching that “if there is no resurrection and death, Christ himself has not been raised and, if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is void of content.”

Paul’s beautifully and poetically put understanding of his faith helped him to understand the church, said the bishop, illustrating this with Paul’s words describing the church as one body with many parts.

The saint is usually depicted with a sword and Bishop Cantú noted the Gospel points to this being a two-edged sword. “Woe to me, if I do not practice what I preach,” he added.

In conclusion, he advised those present to reflect on their own lives and faith as a means to becoming more effective as teachers of the faith. “Who are the people to whom you preach and teach?” he said. “Have you embedded yourself in their reality? Do you reflect theologically on the reality of your faith?”

“Those,” he said, “are the implications that Paul’s life and example give to us.”