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Slide 2 Savoring the Mystery: Liturgical Catechesis and the New Evangelization Slide 3 The Church Today Slide 4 The Sacraments and the Church Today Sacraments1965 (48.5 million)1990 (62.4 million)2014 (66.6 million) Infant Baptism 1,310,000986,308713,302 First Communion NA849,919758,034 ConfirmationNA491,360568,344 Marriage352,458326,079154,450 Mass Attendance 55%39%24% http://cara.georgetown.edu/caraservices/requestedchurchstats.html Slide 5 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) Slide 6 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? Slide 7 Six Obstacles for the Liturgical-Sacrament Catechist 1.Closure of the Theological Imagination 2.Clashing Expectations 3.The Vigil of Consumer Desire 4.The Technological Savior 5.The Isolation of the Individual 6.A Misunderstanding of Full, Conscious, and Active Participation Slide 8 Closure of the Theological Imagination Slide 9 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 incivilityThere 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) Slide 10 The Effects of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism Slide 11 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 Slide 12 Clashing Expectations Slide 13 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 atheismOne 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 orderof the established order, that is, of a meditation of conformity to the dominant value system (Louis-Marie Chauvet, The Sacraments, 176) Slide 14 The Vigil of Consumer Desire Slide 15 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 objectsSeduction 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). Slide 16 The Technological Savior Slide 17 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) Slide 18 The Isolation of the Individual Slide 19 False Understanding of Full, Conscious, and Active Participation If the various external activitiesbecome 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). Slide 20 Exercise 2: Re-Assessing Liturgical Challenges How does this resonate with your own ministry? What might you add? Take away? Slide 21 Liturgical Catechesis and the New Evangelization Slide 22 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. Slide 23 Evangelization and the Liturgical-Sacramental Celebration Slide 24 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 uniquenessinto the unity with God that is his eternal future (Joseph Ratzinger, The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence, 163). Slide 25 The Pastoral Interview and the First Kerygma Slide 26 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). Slide 27 The Liturgical and Sacramental Kerygma Slide 28 An Aesthetic-Contemplative Pedagogy Slide 29 The Technology of Practice Slide 30 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 familys 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) Slide 31 Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults Slide 32 Young Adults and the Eucharistic Vocation Slide 33 Liturgical Catechesis and Aesthetics Slide 34 Conclusion 1.What is one insight that youve had today about the work of liturgical catechesis for the new evangelization? 2.What is one question that youre 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?