Dear St. Rita Families,
When was the last time that you spent time studying the truths of our Faith? On occasion, we priests will hear someone boast to us as a credential that, “I went to 12 years of Catholic school.” It can come across, intended or not, as akin to the 4th Sacrament of Initiation – that having run the gauntlet of nuns and yard sticks, etc., I am now a card-carrying Catholic. And unfortunately, nearly every priest I know cringes interiorly when we hear this sometimes very solitary, Catholic boast, because what can often follow is an opinion or perspective about something in the Church that would be understandable for a teenager, but not for an adult.
I do not intend to denigrate Catholic education as such (even 12 years of it!) – recall a maxim supposedly quoted by St. Ignatius of Loyola: “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.” And yet, the boast itself is somewhat self-defeating, because the 12 years of Catholic education seem to be…the end of the individual’s Catholic education. In other words, what was supposed to be a formative time in Catholic school did not translate into a dynamic journey of faith. Catholic education, rather, was completed, set aside as accomplished, and attention was turned to the rest of life.
Hopefully the difficulties are clear to see. I offer two of them. The first is that the Faith is reduced to a bunch of facts to be memorized and regurgitated. The second is that reflection upon the truths of the Faith stops at age 18, and therefore application of those truths remains at the level of a recent high school graduate. We could spill a lot of ink (figuratively now in this digital age) expounding upon how Catholic education should be oriented to help students want to continue learning even after they leave. My purpose here, however, is simply to galvanize the reader into realizing, no matter what his Catholic education was, to engage or re-engage the truths of the Faith both intellectually and spiritually.
If the last time you seriously thought about the Assumption of Our Lady (for example) was when you were 18 years old (or younger), perhaps it is good to approach this dogma of Faith with the 15+ more years of life experience you have now. The meaning and importance of the body, every action of ours, purity, death and the possibility of eternal life, etc., are all given a fuller natural perspective over the course of years, and the dogma of the Assumption has something to say about each of them. An 18-year-old cannot be expected, as a rule, to plumb the depths of these things in the same way as someone with more life experience. Conversely, a 40-year-old should be held to a higher standard of wisdom and knowledge than an 18-year-old.
In an ideal world, 12 years of Catholic education imparts the Faith in an age-appropriate way and prepares our youth to engage the world with the Gospel. That engagement is what demands our continued learning, prayer, and wrestling with Truth. The world presents lots of reasons not to believe and not to practice the Faith, and they can be very convincing. Engaging those reasons requires an ever more mature faith on my part, which is sustained by continued prayer and study. In fact, the presence of those challenges to our Catholic Faith is meant precisely to be an impetus for us to continue to pray and study. God wants us to engage those falsehoods so that our faith and the faith of others might be strengthened.
Practically, this means that you should always be working through some book or series on our Catholic Faith. All it takes is 10 minutes a day. You will never run out of possibilities. Some places to start could be Theology for Beginners, The Light of Christ, Love Unveiled, The Faith Explained, the Catechism of the Catholic Church or online here. And there are countless others! If you prefer online resources, you can try Aquinas 101, the Bible in a Year, or the Catechism in a Year. As you read or listen, ponder and pray. Ask the questions about how these things apply to your life and what you should do or think differently because of the truths of the Faith. The world needs your proclamation of the Gospel, and answers suited to teenagers are not always enough for 50-year-olds.
In Christ,
Fr. Christensen