Savoring the Mystery Liturgical Catechesis and the New

Savoring the Mystery: Liturgical Catechesis and the New Evangelization

The Church Today

The Sacraments and the Church Today Sacraments 1965 (48. 5 million) 1990 (62. 4 million) 2014 (66. 6 million) Infant Baptism 1, 310, 000 986, 308 713, 302 First Communion NA 849, 919 758, 034 Confirmation NA 491, 360 568, 344 Marriage 352, 458 326, 079 154, 450 Mass Attendance 55% 39% 24% http: //cara. georgetown. edu/caraservices/requestedchurchstat s. html

Liturgical Catechesis for the New Evangelization “The question is whether the wonderful opportunities now open to the liturgy will achieve their full realization; whether we shall be satisfied with just removing anomalies, taking new situations into account, giving better instruction on the meaning of ceremonies and liturgical vessels or whether we shall relearn a forgotten way of doing things and recapture lost attitudes” (Romano Guardini)

Exercise 1: Challenges to Liturgical Evangelization • What do you see as the five most significant cultural obstacles to liturgical and sacramental formation in your particular ministry as catechist or liturgist?

Six Obstacles for the Liturgical. Sacrament Catechist 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Closure of the Theological Imagination Clashing Expectations The Vigil of Consumer Desire The Technological Savior The Isolation of the Individual A Misunderstanding of Full, Conscious, and Active Participation

Closure of the Theological Imagination

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism “What we are dealing with here, then, seems to be a hybrid, ‘least common-denominator’ religious faith. It is an understanding of life and the divine that represents what sensitive and tolerant Americans would naturally gravitate toward who are looking for a belief system that facilitates personal fulfillment and smooth interpersonal relations. There is very little, if anything, that is religiously particularistic here, that might cause offense or express incivility…There is very little that stands within any specific historical faith tradition. In this way, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism provides explanation with few obligations, morality with few demands, divine assistance on call devoid of a divine calling, and assurance of eternity in heaven with the bar set very low” (Christian Smith, 65 -66)

The Effects of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

MTD and the Liturgical Year O God, who gladden us year by year as we wait in hope for our redemption, grant, that, just as we joyfully welcome your Only Begotten Son as our Redeemer, we may also merit to face him confidently when he comes again as our Judge. Who lives and reigns…

Clashing Expectations

Cultural Catholicism, Meet Conscious Catholicism “Whereas the ritual of baptism, for instance, insistently proclaims that baptism is the sacrament of the faith in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, numerous people who ask for the sacraments are so faraway from this faith that they have not just forgotten everything they learned in catechism but in many cases believe only in a vague deism, when they have not reached a sort of practical atheism…One gets the impression that in a great many cases ‘the order of the rite’ as it is established by the church, practically functions as ‘the rite of the order’—of the established order, that is, of a meditation of conformity to the dominant value system” (Louis-Marie Chauvet, The Sacraments, 176)

The Vigil of Consumer Desire

Salvation and Consumer Desire “Consumer desire is neither about attachment nor about enjoyment. While by most standards of Christian anthropology, it is clearly a disordered desire, the disorder is not adequately described by focus of desire on particular objects…Seduction is not about having the perfect outfit, piece of jewelry, or CD. It is about seeking the perfect one, about ensuring that one has access to just the right one for just the right time” (Vincent Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture, 127).

The Technological Savior

A Damning Salvation “There is a tendency to believe that every increase in power means “an increase of ‘progress’ itself”, an advance in “security, usefulness, welfare and vigour; …an assimilation of new values into the stream of culture”, as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such. The fact is that “contemporary man has not been trained to use power well”, [84] because our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience. Each age tends to have only a meagre awareness of its own limitations. It is possible that we do not grasp the gravity of the challenges now before us” (Laudato Si 105)

The Isolation of the Individual

False Understanding of Full, Conscious, and Active Participation “If the various external activities…become the essential in the liturgy, if the liturgy degenerates into general activity, then we have radically misunderstood the ‘theo-drama’ of the liturgy and lapsed almost into parody. True liturgical education cannot consist in learning and experimenting with external activities. Instead one must be led toward the transforming power of God, who wants, through what happens in the liturgy, to transform us and the world. In this respect, liturgical education today, of both priests and laity, is deficient to a deplorable extent. Much remains to be done here” (Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, 108 -09).

Exercise 2: Re-Assessing Liturgical Challenges • How does this resonate with your own ministry? What might you add? Take away?

Liturgical Catechesis and the New Evangelization

Exercise 3: Liturgical Formation and the New Evangelization • Based on our assessment of challenges to liturgical formation today, imagine how one might begin to respond to these challenges through catechesis for liturgical prayer and the celebration of the sacraments.

Evangelization and the Liturgical. Sacramental Celebration

Sacramental History and Human History “To receive the Christian sacraments, whose meaning is none other than the insertion of [humanity] into the historical context that comes from Christ. To receive the Christian sacraments means to enter into the history proceeding from Christ with the belief that this is the saving history that opens up to man the historical context that truly allows him to live and leads him into his true uniqueness—into the unity with God that is his eternal future” (Joseph Ratzinger, “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence, ” 163).

The Pastoral Interview and the First Kerygma

The Exigence of the Liturgy and the Sacraments “Certain exigences exist in the innermost depths of the child; if the Christian message is presented in such a way as to satisfy these, the child will appropriate the Christian message with a vital impulse, and will then be capable of reliving it in his everyday experience” (Sofia Cavalletti, The Religious Potential of the Child, 173).

The Liturgical and Sacramental Kerygma

An Aesthetic-Contemplative Pedagogy

The Technology of Practice

Marriage Preparation, the Family Life, and the Domestic Church “In these first years of the third Christian millennium, a new missionary spirit and a true missiological orientation should have the family as its catalyst and great promoter. Evangelizing the family’s various relationships in the image of the Trinity, cultivating its sacramental life and consciousness, and revealing to the family the divine missions in which it participates; all this could have a planetary impact on the mission of the Church and the future of humanity” (Marc Cardinal Ouellet, Divine Likeness: Toward a Trinitarian Anthropology of the Family, 76)

Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults

Young Adults and the Eucharistic Vocation

Liturgical Catechesis and Aesthetics

Conclusion 1. What is one insight that you’ve had today about the work of liturgical catechesis for the new evangelization? 2. What is one question that you’re still struggling with? 3. Among the pedagogies that we have considered, what might you incorporate into liturgical and sacramental education/formation at the parish level?