A
Catechumenal Model for Confirmation
By Fr. Tom Washburn, O.F.M.
[The Living Light,
Spring 2002]
Many in religious education
circles are perplexed when it comes to effectively evangelizing and catechizing
adolescents who often on the surface appear disinterested when it comes to
faith and Church membership. Can it be possible that working with adolescents,
preparing them for Confirmation, involving them lifelong in the Church may be
easier than we assume? The answer is
yes. When today’s parents were just
children themselves, the Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et
Spes recognized the need for a church that was attentive to the
signs of the culture around them and sought a way to communicate the life
saving Gospel of Jesus Christ in a way that each culture and each age can
understand and make their own.
The answer is right in front
of us. The Order of Christian Initiation
of Adults is excellent in its realization that people do not come to faith
through a learning that is akin to the academy, but rather through a personal
experience of encounter with people who are excited about faith and want to
invite others into an experience of that exciting faith. Adolescents too need see that faith is
something relevant and helpful to their lives. By modeling adolescent
catechesis on the O.C.I.A. model of invitation, inquiry, illumination and
sacrament, Confirmation can become a new beginning for this young generation.
At 1995’s World Youth Day,
Pope John Paul II said, “What is needed today is a Church which knows how to
respond to the expectations of young people.
Jesus wants to enter into a dialogue with them and, through his body
which is the Church, to propose the possibility of a choice which will require
a commitment of their lives. As Jesus
with the disciples of Emmaus, so the Church must become today the traveling
companion of young people.” (Youth: Sent to Proclaim
True Liberation, World Youth Day 1995, Philippines)
U.S. Bishops responded with Renewing the
Vision: A Framework for Catholic Youth Ministry (1997) which
outlined the challenge: (1) to empower youth to live as disciples of Christ in
today’s world; (2) to draw young people to responsible participation in the
life, mission and work of the faith community; and (3) to foster the personal
and spiritual growth of young people.
Today’s youth grow up in a religiously plural
environment with an a la carte approach
to their spiritual lives, willing to take whatever they come across that seems
of value. Too often on the parish level
young people go through the sacramental conveyor belt. Once the Sacrament of Confirmation has been
administered they are absent from the Church until another sacramental “moment”
– usually marriage or the baptism of a child.
A great opportunity is missed. The current generation
is hungry for meaning, hungry to be agents of positive change. Nothing meets this hunger better than faith
in Jesus and full and active membership in His Church. In the Pope’s recent document, Novo Millennio Inuente,
he challenged youth to preserve our faith into the third millennium:
“Young people…have a profound longing for
those genuine values which find their fullness in Christ…If Christ is presented
to young people as he really is, they experience him as an answer that is
convincing and they can accept his message, even when it is demanding and bears
the mark of the Cross. For this reason, in response to their enthusiasm, I did
not hesitate to ask them to make a radical choice of faith and life and present
them with a stupendous task: to become "morning watchmen" (cf. Is
We need to work outside of traditional religious
education structures and employ new approaches to reach adolescents and
effectively invite them into full membership in the Church community. We must find ways to communicate the Gospel
to a community that has in effect never heard it. We can’t assume there is a base of shared
religious knowledge received from parents, other family and Church. We must share the message of Christ as
though it hasn’t been heard to a community that listens very differently than
in the past. Renewing the Vision recognizes
the changing needs and approaches to catechizing and evangelizing youth.
The key to greater effectiveness lies in moving from
programs to people. Adolescent
Confirmation is often misunderstood as
Today’s adolescents, called Millennials (b. 1981 –
present), are products of postmodern culture.
Author Leonard Sweet describes post-modern culture as EPIC:
Experiential, Participatory, Image-Driven, Connected: “Experience is the currency of postmodern
economics. In the last half century much
of the world has transitioned from an industrial economy (driven by things) to
a knowledge economy (driven by bits) to an experience economy (which traffics
in experiences).” (p. 33) How
responsive are most programs to this style of learning? Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes reminded us, “The Church
has always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of
interpreting them in the light of the Gospel.” (no. 4) Yet in response to these
words we have continued by and large, the same one-dimensional learning styles
that bore adolescents right out of the Church.
Sweet writes, “Postmoderns want to experience what life is,
especially experience life for themselves.”
(p. 34) Traditional classroom structure doesn’t encourage membership in
a community. To truly invite adolescents
into a community, faith must be tangible, community must be experienced and not
mere words in a textbook.
This approach isn’t new in the Church. Long before the
textbook, the Church taught its catechism in an experiential way through the
images on the walls of the Church, the scenes depicted on the stain glass
windows, the statues in city squares, the blood of the martyrs, and the praxis of the community.
Today the technology has changed, but the concept remains the same. As
humans we must enter a story to fully understand it. Perhaps that is why Christ gives us a model
of initiation with his own disciples that is based on much more than teaching,
in fact his disciples regularly fail at the teaching and learning part. Jesus told us time and time again that “the
In 1986, the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry
highlighted the need for a stylistic change in adolescent initiation. “The primary aim of adolescent catechesis is
to sponsor youth toward maturity in Catholic faith as a living
reality…Adolescent catechesis is the process of journeying with young people
toward increasing maturity as Catholic Christians.” (The
Challenge of Adolescent Catechesis, p. 1) We must apply to
adolescent catechesis the same lessons learned from the highly successful
restored Order of Christian Initiation of Adults which creates a sense of
membership in the Church personally, catechetically, spiritually and
liturgically. Faith sharing, interactive
and engaging catechesis, a life connection – these all work well with
adolescents.
The Pope said, "This is what is needed: a Church for
young people, which will know how to speak to their heart and enkindle,
comfort, and inspire enthusiasm in it with the joy of the Gospel and the
strength of the Eucharist… which does not fear asking from young people the
effort of a noble and authentic adventure, such as that of following of the
Gospel.” (World Youth Day of Prayer for Vocations, 1995).
The challenge is to bridge the gap from what is to what is
hoped for. The desire to have programs
that can be clearly judged by objective standards such as requirements
fulfilled, papers written, books read, is much safer ground than one that seeks
to discover if someone has set foot on the journey of life with Christ. The criteria for that assessment is
subjective, but I think, ultimately a more worthwhile criteria to pursue for
the faith lives of adolescents.
The parish of St. Thomas
Aquinas has over 10,000 members on its roster.
The religious education program serves 1,200 young people annually with
200 catechists. In addition to catechetical
programs,
We shifted our understanding
of this task as part of a “program” run by “teachers” for “students” away from
the academic model to a formation model that speaks of religious formation (not
education), faith-seekers (not students), and catechists (not teachers). Never underestimate the power of our
words. We looked at active adolescents
to see if there was something common to their experience. We have many adolescents active in the
liturgical assembly as lectors, eucharistic
ministers, music ministers, servers, masters of ceremony, leaders of our
children’s Liturgy of the Word, members of our parish Liturgy Committee,
etc. They are ministers serving their
peers alongside qualified adults. They
are religious formators to younger children. They
train new altar servers, work in outreach programs (serving dinners to the
HIV/AIDS community, the soup kitchen, or summertime meals for migrant
workers).
Active adolescents shared a
few characteristics. They experienced themselves as members of the community -
almost always through personal connection.
Someone of faith made a difference in their lives that connected them to
the community. Most had attended our
Teens Encounter Christ (TEC) retreat.
Most had been invited by parish leadership to use their gifts in the
community.
We evaluated our program in
light of RTV, “All ministry with adolescents must
be directed towards presenting young people with the Good News of Jesus Christ
and inviting and challenging them to become disciples.” (p. 10) We identified
areas of concern like the lack of integrity of the sacrament of Confirmation
acting as though it is more important to Confirm young people (conveyor belt)
than it is to challenge youth to discipleship.
When this great event of full membership in the Church is populated by
strangers, it loses its symbolic and sacramental value.
We agreed that not everyone must be confirmed at the end of the program. Instead, only those who desire Confirmation
receive it. Easier said than done.
Anyone who has encountered parents only concerned that their child be married
in the Church while not being particularly interested in whether or not they
participate in their faith can understand the dilemma. This required a great deal of education of
the parents as well. A re-orientation of
our catechists also needed to take place.
Somehow Confirmation had become a rite of graduation from the church not commencement into fuller
membership in the Church. Confirmation
was a fond farewell to those whom we barely knew.
We focused on trying to recover a sense of Confirmation as
intrinsically tied to the process of initiation. Most parishes have experienced the success of
the O.C.I.A. and yet failed to apply those lessons to other initiation
programs. “As our vision of religious
education becomes more holistic, our approach to it becomes more pastoral. We realize increasingly that our efforts on
behalf of religious education should be less fragmented, more global, more
coordinated and comprehensive; they should bring about more cooperation, more
sharing of ideas, responsibilities and resources,” according to Francoise
Darcy-Berube (Religious Education at the
Crossroads, 1995, p. 19). The
model of our programs should develop informed disciples whose lives are formed
by the Gospel, whose parents have a role in the formation process and are
integrated into the life of the community.
The quote from Luke’s Gospel quickly came to mind as the goal
of our new vision. “Were not our hearts
burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening
the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24.32) This
is the experience of discipleship that we wanted to strive for rather than
merely being able to show in our files that young people had turned in the
requisite paperwork and attended the correct number of classes. We want young disciples!
In the new program, aptly
called Burning Hearts, Confirmation is viewed
as part of the Sacraments of Initiation.
It is a good chance to make young people feel like members of a
community of believers, to light a spark of faith in their lives, to invite
them into the mystery of God’s love for them, and to help them embark on a
life-long journey of faith growth and exploration. If there is an overarching theme to this
program it is community. Young people will enthusiastically enter full
membership in the church if they see that they are welcome and that this faith
can change their lives. Once that goal
is accomplished they will want to know more about our faith and so
post-Confirmation catechesis (mystagogia)
is another important element in this program.
Like the Order of Christian Initiation (O.C.I.A.) we seek to first
invite, and then allow for a period of inquiry, a period of catechizing, a
period of purification and illumination, a completion of initiation
(Confirmation) and a life of continued involvement in the community.
While still holding true to the
requirements set forth by our diocese, Burning Hearts seeks
to adapt and present the process of preparation for Confirmation in a way that
the youth can apprehend and make their own.
The program is focused around three areas: worship, service, catechesis. All three of these foci orient the youth
towards community. The first adaptation
is that all events happen within the context of the parish. In the past, religious education students
would do things like hold separate prayer services, do individual service
projects, spend a lot of time in isolated learning. These are not bad things in and of
themselves, but they don’t serve the goal of membership in the community.
In terms of worship, it is
an expectation that youth attend Mass weekly as well as make an attempt to
foster their own prayer life and spirituality.
Youth also sponsor worship events for the parish during the year ranging
from evenings of Eucharistic Devotion to Lenten Stations of the Cross and other
ideas that they may bring to the community.
They also attend a retreat each year.
Similarly with service projects, many of the
same projects still exist, but instead of doing something separated from the
community, youth invite others to join them in a service activity as well as
participate in service activities that are being offered by the parish. The effects of young people doing service
side-by-side with older members of the community is a beautiful thing to watch
as one generation comes to realize and support the faith of the new generation. They come to know the type of service that
their faith community engages in.
Catechetically, the content
is the same, but the context is radically different. Catechesis takes place in a more interactive
and engaging environment. The new
approach builds in greater flexibility.
The curriculum is divided topically and offered in four week blocks at
different times on different days to work with the life of youth. This has also increased the number of adults
involved as many people can commit to a four week mini-course who could not
commit to a two year program. When
presented in a format that youth can understand, it is always satisfying to
watch the young person come to the realization that these are the words of
life. Context is everything.
Another area of change
surrounded the traditional confirmation interview. The Diocese of Manchester asks that each
young person being confirmed meet with a member of the parish staff prior to
Confirmation. We quickly eliminated the
staff interview in its former form.
Instead of the individual session, we developed communal sessions. Over the course of four evenings, we invited
groups of 20 youth along with catechists, members of the parish staff and one
or two confirmed youth into the rectory for prayer, conversation and
dinner. These sessions began with prayer
– lead by the young people - followed by introductions, a basic sharing by the parish
staff on our hopes and understanding of this moment and then a chance for
genuine conversation to begin. Halfway
through we broke for pizza and soda.
Without exception, each of these sessions was effective modeling a
greater sense of community and connectedness.
The atmosphere was more engaging and less intimidating. Adolescents were
encouraged to share, discuss and ask any questions that they might have as they
approached this faith moment.
We developed an explanation
of Confirmation that was more helpful to the lives of young people - Gifts of
the Holy Spirit: A Tool Box for believers.
Here is a basic recap of what we shared with the youth: Our lives of
faith are difficult. Our world
challenges us all the time. How will we
be up to the challenge and strengthen our faith? God gives us some gifts -
Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, Fortitude, Counsel, Piety, Fear (Awe) of God.
We always have a choice to use gifts or not.
If we don’t use them, they can’t strengthen us. Just because we’re given
gifts, doesn’t mean we know how to use them. We are part of a community of
believers so that together we can learn to use them and strengthen our faith
lives. When we think of the challenges in our lives, the gifts of the Spirit
are really those things that help us meet the challenge. Wisdom – the ability
to know what God wants you to do.
Understanding – helps you know what God has revealed to human
beings. Knowledge – gives you the
ability to understand and accept things as they are. Fortitude – provides you with special
strength and courage to deal with life’s trials. Counsel – helps you to decide what to choose
and what to do in touch situations.
Piety – helps you to honor God as a good and loving Creator. Fear of God – gives you power to love and
show reverence to God in all you do. These gifts must be learned and lived in
community.
We stressed the prayerful
and the service nature of the Church and the need for these Confirmed youth to
see the Sacramental event as a starting point.
A primary question to the youth was: Where will you fit into this
community after Confirmation?
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