Overview/introduction
Fr. Pat Apuzzo

Today’s momentous gathering takes place on the Feast of Saints Marcellinus and Peter. The former was a priest; the latter an exorcist.

I begin this introduction by stating emphatically that no parish can make the paradigm shift to whole community catechesis without both – the priest and a whole lot of exorcists.

The parish priest, the pastor is crucial. That’s not a clerical statement. It gets to the point that whole parish catechesis is not religious education (something no respectable pastor ever meddles in) with a new name or even done by a new method. Whole parish catechesis is an original way – as in going back to how it was done in the first place – for us to pastor the parish community.

The parish priest cannot, by definition, be a bystander to something like this. He must, again, stand at the crossroads of it, providing his unique share of the fuel to get it and keep it all going.

The exorcists are necessary to subdue, cast out and vanquish a whole legion of deeply rooted perspectives, mindsets, presuppositions, habits, impulses, terms, techniques and approaches. All of them slip out of you, or tug at you or throw themselves down in front of you as you take the first bold steps into the adventure of whole community catechesis.

Saints, priests and demon slayers aside, the aim of today’s gathering is to provide an opportunity for all of us to make a contribution. When a handful of us, from a few parishes, first sat together many months ago, we had no idea how much we held in common. The more we talked, and the more we shared our experiences, the more we realized that whole community catechesis is a tapestry we are going to fashion together, from all of our many stories, convictions and visions. We wanted more to come and be with us, more to bring their share of richness to this growing treasure. And so we invited you here today.

I’m thrilled so many of you have come with interest and with ideas. I’m delighted that people from the Christian Formation Office have worked with us, and are here to participate as well.

Someone from each of the planning parishes is going to say a little now about where their community is at with whole community catechesis. Before they do, let me welcome you in their name and in the name of Saint Gabriel Parish.

As the day progresses, I know something will become plain. It is that our work is not to catechize whole parishes anywhere, but to lift up the people in every parish to catechize one another.

Presentation and Testimonials
Fr. Pat Apuzzo

The thing never to forget about catechesis is that it’s all about modeling and imitation. When we say, from the RCIA, that the whole community takes part in forming the catechumens, what do we mean practically? (Here’s where we’ve got to watch out for those demons!)

Our tendency is to say, “Well, we don’t really mean that literally”. The fact is we have RCIA teams; they are the catechists who teach the catechumens what it means to be Catholic, isn’t that right? Let’s say, well, that the team represents the whole community here; the team takes the community’s place, so to speak.

Let’s not say that – or anything like it, ever again; do we have a deal?

What it means to be Catholic, bottom line, is to believe Jesus. We take Jesus at his word and we take up the way he practiced what he preached as a model for our own living. This is what catechumens are doing from the moment they become catechumens. They are imitating Christ. This holds forth Jesus Christ, then, as the primordial catechist (or, as the Italians would say, the “catechist of catechists”).

That holds us forth, all of us Catholics, as both imitators of Jesus Christ and models of Jesus Christ. We are both catechumens and catechists – we live a lifestyle of faith and model that lifestyle for others to make their own.

Your minds are probably stumbling over the use of the terms “catechumens” and “catechists” in such a broad and expansive way. We’ve let happen to our religious vocabulary what we once succumbed to with our liturgical symbols: I’m going to call it shrinkage. Things that are truly big and important are experienced as small and insignificant.

We do it all over the place. Bill Huebsch talks about how we do it to this day with our concept of “the parish church”. Ask someone where Saint Gabriel Church is at and they’ll send you to Map Quest. You’ll be looking for the location of a building. In reality, though, it’s a whole myriad of buildings, inhabited by every variety and combination of dwellers, that are where this parish is, and where yours is.

Getting our minds around that reality involves much more than deciding to “go intergenerational with our programs”.

When we first ventured as a staff into whole community catechesis here at Saint Gabriel’s, we spent full days together, many days in a row sometime, for weeks and months on end. We pulled terms and concepts apart, tossed them out, dragged them back in, squabbled over them, raised our voices defending them or trashing them, or trying them out in a new or different context.

Also, we wracked our brains to put words and definitions and descriptions to where we found ourselves going. It was a moment long in coming, and not easily reached, when we finally could become quiet and peaceful and let what we were discovering wash over us and through us.

It was the moment – more honestly a combination of moments – when we understood that things were shifting. The directions were changing: from handing out to drawing out, from pushing to appealing, from dashing ahead to walking beside, from replacing and standing in for to inviting back in, affirming and reinstating.

Many thought we had called our monthly gatherings “The Feast” because a meal was provided. Originally, that was part of the play on words. Now that it’s in full swing, the name better relates to the smorgasbord of folks and characters who are serving up to one another a feast of faith experiences.

And it is a moveable feast, or maybe better a multi-stational feast. It does not happen just once a month or in any one set of events. It shows up and springs up or is found quietly tucked away here or there and in so many places, places often which we least expect.

We took the risk. We held in check that rascally inclination to mother (and father) the people. And we have been astonished.

We didn’t find anybody’s stomach growling from that now clichéd “hunger for faith” that everyone keeps saying is so prevalent in our society. Instead, we struck gold as we tapped into a different and a real hunger among the people. It is a hunger, hesitant and even reluctant at times, to be approached, fostered, nourished, equipped and called out from the sidelines as people already endowed with faith – not by us, but by God in Christ Jesus.

Doing whole parish catechesis means waiting and working together for the day when all the people of our parishes will know themselves that way. It is a vision that looks to see our people not as needy and deprived of faith, but unsure and faltering, perhaps, yet quite able to grow and become secure in their faith. It is a commitment to provide opportunities and to help people fine-tune their natural abilities to recognize, to encounter and to grow close to the Lord in the ordinary as well as the extra-ordinary happenings of daily life.

Whole community catechesis doesn’t involve flushing doctrine down the drain. But, it provides for the facts of faith an environment of fresh and vibrant air where it can crack open its cocoon, spread its wings and give flight to living and active faith.

So, our religious instructors won’t have to go looking for day jobs. The textbook publishers won’t be filing for bankruptcy as we move forward.

At the same time, whole community catechesis doesn’t call us to convert Sunday Eucharist into an hour-long catechism class, with a few songs, a little prayer and some sacramental matter and form thrown in to ease the boredom. It doesn’t mean that all those who do the works of charity and social outreach have to give up the soup kitchens to form a prayer group, or that they need to come in from the streets to ponder the question of the week.

But it does mean that we need to unchain catechesis. We need to release it from all the tiny little pieces of turf where we, all of us, have tied it down. We need to let catechesis roam freely and unbridled throughout the whole Church.

Whole community catechesis means, finally and ultimately, letting our ideas about catechesis expand and become bold. Catechesis is bigger and broader than any of us have yet known it to be.

We have to pull and stretch our ideas to let catechesis become the skin that holds together, and gives shape and form to all the flesh, bones and muscle that make up being the Church – so that catechesis can provide us, the Church, that outward identity where we encounter and touch the world, and where the world sees and knows us as a people of faith, sisters and brothers of Jesus, sons and daughters of the King.

I now want to introduce two people from two of the planning parishes. They are going to speak to you about the effect that whole community catechesis has on them and in their homes.

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