Doctrine, Conscience Central to Reach People amid ‘Catechesis in Crisis’

A recent 2019 Pew Religion Survey found that two-thirds of church-going Roman Catholics don’t believe that the Eucharist is the true body and blood of Christ, a key and distinctive belief of Catholicism. An earlier Pew Survey as part of the organization’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study found that only 39% of self-proclaimed Catholics go to weekly mass and only 30% of Catholics believe that religion is the source of guidance on what is right and wrong. 

Why does this data paint such a grim picture for the Catholic Church? 

Dr. Jared Staudt recently gave a lecture titled “Catechesis in Crisis” hosted by the Institute of Catholic Culture that diagnosed the internal issues within the Church, the external cultural issues contributing to the internal crisis within the Church, and what can be done to fix this crisis. 

Staudt believes that the internal issue of the church is a crisis of catechesis; defining catechesis as the “transmission of faith to the next generation.”

While catechetics has been a focus in the Catholic Church for centuries, recent attempts at catechesis on a church-wide scale have been “watered down” and without “doctrine or conversion,” according to Staudt. 

However, for people to be receptive to the doctrine and the orthodoxy which they have been conditioned by culture to view as restrictive, they need to experience and see others have a personal and relatable relationship with Jesus Christ. In the 1950s and 60s, as Staudt pointed out, the Catholic Church had the opposite problem the Church has today: there was external conformity, but no one was talking about their prayer lives or relationship with Christ. 

This closed people off to the faith as they struggled to relate to a faith they simply saw as a set of restrictive rules and opened the doors for many young people to be drawn to secularism. 

An emphasis on personal faith with Jesus Christ, the doctrine of the magisterium (the Church’s teaching authority), and aligning one’s conscience with the teachings of the Church and not one’s own beliefs, has been discarded for a catechesis based on personal autonomy and one’s own moral truths. This is symptomatic of a larger external problem with the secular American culture that redefined freedom and truth to be oriented toward a radical individualism and away from the authority of the Church.

“When self-proclaimed Catholics reject the teachings of the Church [they] think [they] are bigger than God,” Staudt noted. “We can’t say that our conscience is in conflict with the one who made it unless we are poorly informing our conscience.”

In a time when young people were being introduced by the social movements to radically new ideas of freedom and truth, the Church didn’t successfully go out into the modern world and shared the good news of Jesus Christ as Pope John XXIII called for during the Second Vatican Council. The church and its congregants passed up their opportunity to present young people with the right definition of freedom. The correct notion of freedom is the freedom to live a life of virtue and excellence, not the freedom to live a life devoid of tradition or authority. 

Staudt didn’t just fixate on the issues he described. He also gave solutions. The solution to the crisis of catechesis rests on an active reception of the faith. To do this, churches, religious education programs, and individuals need to first evangelize through “informative and performative” measures because as Staudt astutely pointed out, one’s faith can’t deepen if they have any in the first place.

After evangelization, Staudt listed three steps that more often than not lead children to practice their faith into adulthood: mentorship (with the best mentor being a family member), doctrinally sound religious education programs as a supplement not a replacement of mentorship and integrating faith into people’s everyday lives. For children to be properly catechized, the adults catechizing them need to be properly catechized as well, which entails forming strong parish communities, placing an emphasis on small groups, and living out the Catechism as an example to young parish members.

Like the Second Vatican Council called for and as Staudt eloquently noted “we need to return to orthodoxy…but we need to really encounter the realities of faith…” To do this, practicing Catholics need to heed the advice of John XXIII and communicate orthodox doctrine more effectively and actively. They also need to engage the modern definition of freedom and use Catholic doctrine to guide young Catholics to true freedom. Catholics need to present freedom not as restrictive but as liberating, not as blind obedience to a set of rules but the engagement of reason to acquire virtue. 

“We have freedom because we are made in the image and likeness of God” not because of a man-made conception of personal autonomy, Staudt noted.