Building the Capacity and Commitment of Staff for New Evangelisation in Catholic Schools
Paul Sharkey. (2002). “Building the Capacity and Commitment of Staff for New Evangelisation in Catholic Schools” in Journal of Religious Education. Vol 50, n. 3.Abstract
Catholic schools contribute powerfully to the Catholic Church’s ministry of evangelisation to young people across Australia. Features of a contemporary Catholic vision for the mission of evangelisation in a Catholic school are identified and a range of skills, knowledge and dispositions necessary to realise this vision are highlighted. Concrete capacity building initiatives for evangelisation are then discussed.
Two tasks in particular are central to the mission of a Catholic school: the task of synthesising culture with faith, and the task of synthesising faith with life (Catholic Schools, n. 37). Neither of these tasks is straightforward in our current age, but they lie within the grasp of Catholic schools with appropriate staff selection policies and properly framed and delivered programs of professional formation. The synthesis of culture with faith challenges teachers to ensure that the light of the Gospel illuminates all learning areas in the curriculum. The synthesis of faith with life challenges the school to nurture the growth of Christian virtues, thus building a capacity in students to participate actively in the reign of God. The Congregation for Catholic Education recognised that the current age is not one where culture, faith and life are brought into an easy synthesis. Despite the difficulties however, contemporary Church documents on the mission of evangelisation in general, and Catholic education in particular trace the contours of a realistic and positive way forward.
Some key terms and partnerships
Before considering particular initiatives or principles, it is helpful to clarify some key concepts and partnerships that shape the evangelisation process. A lack of clarity at the conceptual level easily gives rise to misunderstandings in regard to the evaluation of current performance, or in regard to planning future initiatives and directions. The mission of evangelisation is harmed by people who misunderstand its modes or fail to identify the differing contributions made by its distinct partners.
By infusing the curriculum with the light of the Gospel and by building up Christian virtues, Catholic schools make a unique contribution to the Church’s essential mission of evangelisation. In these reflections the term ‘evangelisation’ is used in its broad sense to include not only the explicit proclamation of the Gospel or programs of sacramental administration but also the wider process of conversion as articulated in Evangelii Nuntiandi. Here evangelisation is understood as a process of deep interior transformation – a conversion at not only the individual and collective levels of conscience, but a transformation of the whole sphere of human activity and even of the total environment in which humanity lives and has its being (Evangelii Nuntiandi, n. 18). Using methods and practices that are appropriate for an educational institution, the Catholic school can be a powerful instrument for the evangelisation of the students within it.
There are many modes in which the process of evangelisation might unfold in a school. The pastoral care offered within the school community can become a Christian witness for students. All of the learning areas in the curriculum provide the opportunity for basic proclamation when questions of meaning, values and faith are considered in the light of the Gospel. In a Catholic school, the learning areas do not just teach students facts or skills, they open up a formative space that leads students into a process of conversion that is animated by the experience of God’s love. Evangelisation is deepened in a catechetical mode through liturgical, retreat and prayer experiences along with any sacramental programs falling within the school’s ambit. The Religious Education learning area makes an important contribution to the evangelisation of students because it explicitly studies the beliefs, teachings and rituals of the Catholic Church. Religious Education is religiously authentic when it systematically and faithfully communicates key aspects of the Catholic tradition. It is educationally authentic when it employs teaching methods, assessment strategies and educational outcomes that are commensurate with the best of what is found in learning areas across the curriculum. All learning areas in the curriculum of the Catholic school are called to create a space where the Catholic tradition resonates with the life questions, concerns and hopes of the students.
Before considering the kinds of initiatives Catholic schools need to undertake to fulfil their duties in the religious domain, the project of Catholic education needs to be situated in the broader contexts of family and parish.
A speaker at a recent conference recounted an experience she had in Saudi Arabia as she accompanied a man around his remote village. The man came across a teenage girl and admonished her over some minor behaviour issue. Afterwards, the speaker questioned the man about his admonishment and asked whether he was related to the girl. The villager indicated that the teenager wasn’t directly related to him and then he made the following comment: ‘it takes a village to raise a child, and the parents can’t be left to shoulder this important responsibility on their own’. This communal type of child-rearing is quite foreign to the experience of many of us who don’t live in villages. The experience of Australian families, perhaps particularly families in urban Australia, can differ markedly from family life in a traditional village. Any consideration of the project of Catholic education needs to be undertaken with due regard for the actual socio-cultural situations of those who experience it.
It is recognised that the proper place for catechesis is the family helped by other Christian communities, especially the local parish. But the importance and need for catechetical instruction in Catholic schools cannot be sufficiently emphasised. Here young people are helped to grow towards maturity in faith (Catholic Schools, n. 51).
The Church understands that there are at least three significant partners to Catholic education in its broadest sense: the family, the parish and the school. A good case can be made for privileging the role of the family and the parish above that of the school when it comes to an analysis of the evangelisation process. The primary responsibility for the education of the young person was ascribed not to the school but to the family at the second Vatican Council (Gravissimum Educationis, n. 3) and the Council even went so far as to describe the family as the ‘domestic Church’ (Lumen Gentium, n. 6). The rights and duties that parents have as educators are ‘original and primary with respect to the educational role of others’ (Familiaris Consortio, n. 36) and it is the parish and not the school that is the first locus for the formation and expression of Christian community (Directory for Catechesis, n. 261).
Despite the primacy given to families and parishes, the importance of the evangelising contribution of the Catholic school is nonetheless affirmed. The Congregation for Catholic Education has asserted that the complexity of the modern world has made it all the more necessary for the ecclesial identity of the Catholic school to be recognised and for its mission to be understood as a genuine instrument of the Church. The Catholic school is ecclesial because it evangelises, and it does so in an educational mode as an educational institution by bringing faith, culture and life into a harmonious coherency (The Catholic School on the Threshold of the Third Millennium, n. 11).
The Church presents an attractive ideal of the family, parish and school working in concert to evangelise the young person. It is recognised however that this ideal is not always realised in practice. Recent documents from the Congregation for Catholic Education have acknowledged the widespread tendency in the current age for parents to delegate the unique role that they have in the evangelisation of their children. In this context schools are increasingly challenged to devise programs and initiatives that encourage and support the role that parents play in the evangelisation process (for example see: The Catholic School on the Threshold of the Third Millennium, n. 20; The Religious Dimension of Education in a Catholic School, n. 43).
In regard to the partnership with the parish, the latest figures from the National Church Life Survey indicate that less than one in ten Australian Catholics between the ages of 15 to 19 attends Mass in a parish on a Sunday. Serious and basic questions need to be asked about the causes of this haemorrhage of people from the Catholic Church. The recent Oceania Synod made the following observation about the call to mission in Oceania at this time: ‘This call to mission poses great challenges, but it also opens new horizons, full of hope and even a sense of adventure’ (Ecclesia in Oceania, n. 13). The Bishops at the synod noted that the Church is seen by some as presenting a message which is irrelevant, unattractive or unconvincing. In this context it is hard not to agree with those bishops at the Synod who expressed the view that the Church is at a crossroads, facing great challenges which require important choices for the future. One of the most pressing tasks is for a new outreach based on new ways and methods of evangelisation (Ecclesia in Oceania, n. 18). Questions of a fundamental nature need to be faced with courage if the Church is to rise to the challenges posed by the Synod. We are far from the remote village in Saudi Arabia mentioned earlier and structures and strategies appropriate for the Australian context need to be formulated as a matter of urgency to include young people more effectively in the communities of the Catholic Church at the local level.
New Evangelisation
A new situation for evangelisation has been described at the highest levels of authority in the Church. The emergence of this new situation is deeply significant for the methods used in Catholic schools to evangelise the students.
Up until the 1980s, two basic situations were depicted in the Church’s reflections on the evangelisation process: the situation of the established ‘mature’ Church, and the situation of the mission ‘ad gentes’ to peoples or groups who do not believe in Christ. This two-situation paradigm is evident for example in the Vatican II Decree on the Church’s missionary activity – Ad Gentes Divinitus. In the mission ad gentes, the task for missionaries is to translate the texts and beliefs into terms that are faithful to the received tradition at the same time as they speak meaningfully to those in the receiving culture. In the second situation of the established Churches, the potency of traditional symbols, rituals and doctrinal formulations was taken somewhat as a given, and the need for translation or inculturation was less emphasised.
At least since the 1987 Synod of Bishops, the Pope has been speaking of a third intermediate evangelisation situation called ‘New Evangelisation’ (Christifideles Laici, n. 34). New Evangelisation is necessary when entire groups of baptised people lose ‘a living sense of the faith’ or perceive Christian beliefs and practices in a superficial and exterior way (Redemptoris Missio, n. 33). In the intermediate situation of New Evangelisation, watertight distinctions can no longer be made between the mission ad gentes and the evangelisation of those who are already baptised (Redemptoris Missio, n. 34). The subjects of New Evangelisation are people who, despite being sacramentally initiated into the Church, do not make connections between what matters most to them – ‘the great moments of birth, suffering and death’ – and the symbols, teachings and rituals of the Catholic Church (Christifideles Laici, n. 34).
New Evangelisation strategies are aimed at people for whom the tradition has become drained of meaning. Those who would engage in New Evangelisation begin by attending deeply to the questions that come from people’s hearts and to the values that come from their culture. The task of New Evangelisation is to draw out from the tradition genuine responses to the real questions of baptised people. In this sense, New Evangelisation echoes the sensitivity Paul VI called for some decades ago when he exhorted evangelisers to listen not only to what people say, but ‘what they have it in their hearts to say’ (Ecclesiam Suam, n. 87). More recently, the Pope has called for ‘a spirituality of communion’ as the basis for responding to the world’s deepest yearnings:
… We need to promote a spirituality of communion, making it the guiding principle of education wherever individuals and Christians are formed. A spirituality of communion … makes us able to share their joys and sufferings, to sense their desires and attend to their needs, to offer them deep and genuine friendship (Novo Millennio Ineunte, n. 43).
The emphasis on listening, dialogue and communion does not necessitate a watering down of the claims of the tradition. True dialogue does not only involve a preparedness to listen, it presupposes that the dialogue partners actually have something to say to each other. Any form of evangelisation ultimately seeks to proclaim Jesus Christ in the Gospel spirit of dialogue (Dialogue and Proclamation, n. 77). Some of the characteristics of New Evangelisation as proposed in these reflections are discussed at greater length in the Pope’s apostolic letter after the recent Jubilee year: a respect for the circumstances of each community; a more effective response to the need for inculturation; taking into account each person’s needs in regard to their sensitivity and language, but not hiding the radical demands of the Gospel; a spirituality of communion and a desire to explain properly the reasons for the Church’s position, rather than seeking to impose a vision based on faith during the evangelisation process (Novo Millennio Ineunte).