An Assessment of Present Day Catechesis

by Most Rev. Austin V. Vaughan, D.D.

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The topic as given to me is entitled "An Assessment of the Contemporary Teaching of Catholic Doctrine in the United States." The subject presents something of a problem for me since, at the present time, I am not a formal teacher at any level of Catholic education. I am also not a sociologist doing studies of where Catholics are, catechetically-speaking, at the present time. Neither am I a Superintendent of Schools, Director of Religious Education, not the Ordinary of a diocese—all of these situations that normally would give me direct responsibility for a group of the faithful.

What you will hear, then, from me today are impressions—some very deeply held—but ones which you as an audience are free to question if you are so inclined.

Let me begin by saying that I do not think we are teaching Catholic doctrine sufficiently well or thoroughly. Recent catechisms are a little better than they were twenty years ago, but they are still very weak in various areas, and especially so when teaching about sin. The general weakness of our teaching, moreover, can be illustrated on all levels of schooling. I find my own associate priests complaining that youngsters in elementary schools do not know what we once considered the basic vocabulary of the Catholic faith. Ask an eighth grader almost anywhere what the Incarnation means, and you are likely to receive a blank stare as an answer. Such ignorance is not the end of the world, but it does indicate a substantial catechetical failing.

The instances of failure in our passing on of the faith abound. Around ten years ago evidence indicated that about six million baptized youth never received formal instruction in the faith. Somewhere between the baptismal rolls and the CCD/Catholic school rolls, they "disappeared." I do not believe this unfortunate situation has improved. And when we do get them enrolled in catechetical programs we often fail them. Pro-life advocates tell me that in many Catholic high schools there is practically nothing being taught on pro-life issues. When they approach the authorities they are often told that these matters are covered in class, but these dedicated Catholics, with their own children in the very schools in question, know that the life issues are not being addressed adequately. Another example: This very week a priest who has taught Catholic college courses for almost fifteen years announced triumphantly that finally he has received permission to introduce a course on Catholic fundamentals. The administration scheduled this class at supper time, but the priest was elated that it was introduced at all. I am speaking in this case of a Catholic college, and I do not think that the priest's experience is totally atypical.

On a different level, it must be said that the some of the theological societies in our country leave much to be desired. A personal experience may help to illustrate this. When Fr. Curran was declared by Rome unacceptable as a Catholic theologian, I received a letter signed by seven other former presidents of the CTSA protesting the procedures of the Holy See. Because they were not experts in moral theology, the theologians in questions declared that they lacked the competence to deal with the issues involved in the Curran case. Yet if you examined the exchange of letters between Cardinal Ratzinger and Father Curran, one thing was clear. Unlike other theologians who claimed that Rome had misunderstood their writings, Curran said flatly that the Church's teaching on sexual morality is wrong. Seven former presidents tell me that the dispute is too abstruse for a nonexpert to adjudicate. Yet a second year high school student could understand the nature of the conflict. I regard the theologians' response as fundamentally dishonest. The removal of Fr. Curran from the faculty of Catholic University was strongly protested in 1989 and thereafter. Such protests are disturbing. What is more disturbing, however, is the fact that for twenty years he was allowed to teach the things that he did in a university owned by the bishops, and that when he was finally removed, he was not removed by them, but by Rome.

The disarray in theological circles has affected our pulpit preaching. Our parish preaching on doctrinal matters is weaker than it once was, and has been so for fifteen or twenty years. The reason is that the priests themselves are less sure of what they have to propose. I am not saying that past preaching was ideal, but priests then were not afraid to preach what the Church taught. Now they are afraid that somebody will say, "That contradicts what I learned in school," or, "I don't accept that."

On a level higher than that of the parish pulpit, it must be noted that an inadequacy in teaching Catholic doctrine is found in the National Conference of Catholic Bishops whose pastorals do not touch the critical problems facing believing Catholics. I am not saying that the existing pastorals are all bad. The failure is often by way of omission, rather than commission. To be noted, however, is that nobody is seeking to write a pastoral on religious education. Nobody is saying much on salvation. Nobody suggests a document on religious life. The letter on "Women's Concerns" has been postponed indefinitely. (This may not be a bad thing, considering the content that was being proposed, but the feminist issues are still there and are not being faced.) Almost never would you find a document on medical ethics originating in our Conference; almost nothing, as well, deals directly with materialism or individualism, or with pro-choice morality. Teaching on this last item, that is on the questions concerning Catholics who condone or advocate abortion, is badly needed. Indeed the failure to educate our people about abortion is astounding. At the last meeting of the Administrative Board of the NCCB, members received a brief report on the survey by Hill and Knowlton relative to public information on abortion. Even though I have been deeply involved in this area during the last two years, I was startled to learn that over thirty per cent of the people in our country believe that the number of babies killed by abortion each year is under a hundred thousand. The percentage of the population which believes that the figure is between one and two million is eleven percent. Almost ninety per cent of the American people, therefore, are radically misinformed about the carnage taking place. This startles me, especially because I presumed that the public knew—based on authentic data from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta— that for sixteen years more than 1,500,000 unborn babies have been aborted each year.

The failure in teaching touches all levels and all issues, but, for me, the most important issue of all, doctrinally-speaking (and this is true for our own country and other parts of the world as well), is the general neglect of the importance of being saved. This negligence includes the whole subject of hell. Is hell a reality for people? Most people, I guess, imagine it to be a place for Hitler and Adolph Eichmann, perhaps, and maybe for a few others. Everybody else is guaranteed heaven, if for no other reason than the Lord's mercy. A position like this was even proposed by someone who was certainly an orthodox theologian in most things, Hans Urs von Balthasar. Nobody, he opined, was going to wind up in hell.

Five or six years ago a member of the International Theological Commission spoke to me before the Synod of 1983. When I mentioned that I intended to bring up this matter of the neglect in preaching about hell—and of the eschatological truths in general—he expressed the hope that I would not raise the question. If anybody actually went to hell, he said, the Gospel would not be Good News. Now the theologian who said this is considered relatively "conservative." Silence on matters such as this becomes another element in the confusion in presenting Catholic teaching in our own day.

The vagueness about the reality of hell and the need for salvation affects our moral teaching. Often without any formal denial, many people question the significance or the importance of the Commandments of God. On my rectory wall, placed there by a priest long since gone home to God, is a sign which says, "God did not call them the Ten Suggestions." Nonetheless, many of our people have been led to feel that God "understands" them, in the sense that "He would not hold me to this under my circumstances." Obviously, if this represents a common attitude toward the Commandments of God, it is much more true of the response to the Commandments of the Church, e.g., the observance of the law which normally requires that a Catholic be married "in Church" before a priest or deacon and two witnesses. More and more frequently, even practicing Catholics do not give a second thought to the problem of invalid marriage. It no longer seems that important to them.

One can push the matter beyond particular examples. Whether or not serious sin exists in practice is now a dubium for many, although the issue is rarely directly addressed. Theologians can be found who say that the average person might possibly commit serious sin only five or six times in a lifetime. Are we now operating on the principle that mortal sin involves an act so rare or so difficult that it is almost impossible to commit? Or is the possibility of committing mortal sin something with which we must cope each and every day, the way we have to face the fact that we will starve unless we eat regularly? I brought this matter up at the 1983 Synod of Bishops, and it was not even discussed. Even yet the matter is not being addressed.

There is a further aspect to this question about hell and the need to be save. It is the doctrine about the necessity of the Church for salvation. In practice few now believe that the Church is necessary for salvation. I do not suggest that many would contradict past teaching directly. However, whether you belong or do not belong to the Catholic Church does not make that much difference for a large segment of our Catholic population. More than the necessity of the Church is questioned moreover. It is even becoming more common for theologians to question the uniqueness of Jesus as a redeemer and whether or not it is important in any sense to accept Him as the unique Savior.

This lack of belief in the necessity of redemption or of the need for a Savior has already had a gigantic impact on the Church in our country, and a large impact in other countries as well. The Church's missionary endeavors have been affected radically since the sense of supernatural urgency in bringing Jesus' message to others has been diluted. The importance of bringing people into the Church and to salvation is no longer dominant. Since everyone is going to be saved anyway (so it is reasoned), human development (i.e. humanizing the lives of people oppressed by poverty) becomes a dominant motive for going to the missions. Evangelization and human development, the subject for the World Synod of Bishops in 1974, resulted in Paul VI's apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Nuntiandi, often praised as one of the major papal documents of this century. Yet it is a document almost constantly cited by priests and religious who have no thought of bringing salvation to others because, in their minds, the need for salvation does not exits. The sections of the document favored by this school of thought are those which indicate how Catholics should contribute to human development, the sections on how to help people materially or culturally and the like. A knowledgeable priest recently told me that most of five thousand or so missionaries in the field are now over sixty years of age. Fortunately, mission societies in Mexico, in Poland, and other places are healthy, so Catholic missionary work will go on. But what happened to the vast American input of a generation ago?

It is within this same context of the proclamation of the need for salvation that we must examine the worry found among Catholic leaders concerning the proselytizing tendencies of Evangelicals and the success of these groups in converting Catholics, especially Hispanics. I have had a fair amount of contact with a number of Evangelicals through the Rescue movement, many of whom were people who left the Catholic Church in their teens because "everybody" was "dropping out." During a period when almost nobody their age was a regular Church-goer, they simply disappeared. Then, during their twenties, perhaps through a girl friend, they suddenly were recruited into a community that speaks to them strongly about the importance of salvation. To save their souls, they came to believe, is the important reality, and one chief way to save their own souls and help others save theirs is to defend the rights of the unborn through Operation Rescue. Nobody ever before had made them feel how significant personal salvation was. Evangelicals such as these are not hostile to Catholics, but they are a reminder of our own failures. (It is a little bit hard for me, therefore, to share the resentment against Evangelicals. I am not speaking here about the Jimmy Swaggerts and their like. I refer to Evangelicals who are young, open, honest, sincere, and who have been attracted away from our Church by their felt need of salvation.) In an age when there is almost no sense of the supernatural, or where authorities convey the impression that salvation is of less importance, religiously inclined people are very likely to move away from the Church.

The fundamental question for Catholics remains to be answered properly; Do we accept the priority of heaven and the next life? In terms of our practical teaching and our recent behavior, the implied answer is no. We do not lay emphasis on the subject matter at all. If that question is not properly answered, then our teaching on the need for redemption is lost. St. Paul preached that the reason for the Old Testament was to convince the Jews, and their neighbors, that they needed redemption. We have permitted that subject to recede in catechesis.

I received more publicity than I needed when my remark, from an Albany jail, that Governor Cuomo ran a serious risk of going to hell was widely reported. Cardinal O'Connor later said to me, "That's the first time that hell got on the front pages of an American newspaper in twenty years." Many readers thought I was joking. Nobody believes in hell, they assumed; hell does not exist. Others objected that the Church was jumping into politics again, that in the American system bishops should stay on the sidelines with their exercise of clerical muscle that belonged more to the Middle Ages. Governor Cuomo the next day claimed that every reliable theologian he knew supported his position on abortion. When a New York Post reporter told me that, I replied, "Did you ask him who they were?" The man said, "Oh, no, but his press secretary was to get me their names." My final word was simple, "O.K., just don't be hanging until you get them." He has not gotten them since then, and there is no way he will get them. More interesting, perhaps, was the Governor's interview for the Gannett newspaper chain which printed two pages on his three-hour interview in its Rochester paper. In that interview, the Governor said explicitly that he thought Vatican II had done away with hell. This kind of "theologizing" by a supposedly well-informed Catholic is frightening. Vatican II said nothing that derogated from the Church's traditional teaching about hell. Nonetheless, propaganda to the contrary has equivalently wiped hell out of the perspective of most people, hell is gone, then heaven becomes vague, something people hope for or expect, but not with a sense of what heaven truly means.

The problem also manifests itself in our funeral liturgy. When one reads that four suicides have occurred to youngsters who have used drugs for a long period, one recognizes the tragedy. And the funeral scene too is tragic. However, the remarks of a priest proclaiming that the dead are now at peace is equally tragic. It seems to me that there is more reason for a priest to ask family and friends to pray intensely that God in His love may have found a way to show mercy. As Christians, we should not presume that everybody is saved.

The example of funeral liturgies and how they are conducted brings to mind the question of purgatory, which is almost never mentioned by priests. I used to be asked often whether the Church still believes in purgatory. Actually it is a defined Catholic doctrine, taught as such by the Council of Trent. More than a defined doctrine, it is an important and an integral part of the daily spiritual life of Catholics. It is God's way of making it possible for us to reach across the grave to the people whom we were never able to sanctify in their lifetime. Prayers for the dead and masses for the dead have not disappeared, but they are much less frequent than in the past among some people.

Like purgatory, indulgences, too, are rarely if ever spoken of. The Holy See issued a document on indulgences right after the Council, but it might as well have said nothing. Indulgences are not even mentioned in catechisms any more; most children would not know what they are. In a world where salvation is presumed to be universal, graces such as indulgences appear to be useless.

Obviously vocations have been affected by this lack of clarity about the need to be saved and to help save others. About twenty years ago Brother Gabriel Moran wrote Experiences in Community, a book that perhaps had more impact on nuns in our country than any other of its time, an influence which on the whole was bad. The first chapter alleged that most priests and religious of an earlier generation entered Church service to help people to save their souls. This no longer was a compelling motive, Moran asserted, because now we know that people save their souls wherever they are, as Buddhists, Moslems, or as unbelievers. To justify religious life anew, Moran proceeded in following chapters to search for that justification. Was it poverty, charity, obedience, he asked, or community living, or prayer? In the process he was highly critical of religious life, but when he was done he had developed no answer to his question. It was no longer important for someone to become a religious to help anybody to save his or her soul, but neither did he provide any other reason for religious life as the Church defines it. The consequences of such thinking are readily seen. Most of the major religious communities of women in our country are on the verge of disintegration. When one finds communities where the median age is 69, with virtually no religious in the community less than twenty-five years of age, it does not require a statistician to estimate the future of religious life in the United States. And a fundamental reason for this tragedy is the loss of awareness of our need for salvation and the obligation to serve others by helping them achieve their salvation.

An additional question worthy of thought is the attitude of young people toward the prospect of martyrdom. In our age most people seem to feel that there is almost nothing worth dying for, with people engaged in apostolates like Operation Rescue being the exception. Currently three men in Atlanta have sworn to stay in jail until abortion stops in our country. As soon as they come out of jail, they are going to participate in another rescue and be put right back in again. This is not necessarily an absolutely ideal way to proceed, but obviously these men are convinced that there is something that is worth their life's blood, if need be. Their dedication reminds us of another part of our vocation problem—the diminished sense that there is something important enough for which to devote a life. All this, of course, leads to a more profound question yet. Is the way of the cross the path to the fullest kind of human life? The world's answer is "no," and, in practice, the present answer of certain Church leaders is also "No, those things are not that important." We should indeed lay as much stress on the positive as we can, but if stress on the positive is based on the fact that there are no such things as capital sins, or that following Christ Crucified no longer is a pattern for our life, then we are not dealing with reality.

An exception to the reluctance to devote oneself selflessly to a cause can be found, it is true, in the case of the environment and ecology. And such dedication is fine as long as what we are advocating is stewardship of the world, and the avoidance of waste. However, when lesser creatures of our universe become more important than human beings, our human values have been inverted. Very few opinion molders have attended to this inversion. The so-called "creation spirituality," popular with some Catholics, emphasizes how we should appreciate the good in the world around us. That too is fine. However, this is still a world tainted by sin. And if you have any doubt about that, all you have to do is read a front page of any newspaper day by day. We should not try to leave the world, but we should not imagine that everything here is beautiful or wonderful.

In short, we are living through a period where there is a serious risk of the Church adopting what is often the attitude of secular society: "I'm O.K, you're O.K." To shore up people's sense of self-respect or self worth has merit indeed. But it is not the end-all of the Church. A prominent bishop sermonizes to the effect that his hearers are better than they think they are. "Deep down," he avers, "all of you are saints." I do not think that this is the message that Jesus gave, although it is a message that strikes a responsive cord today. Audiences like to hear this, especially those who feel, "I'm worth nothing, I'm just slime and I can't do anything; I can't accomplish things." It seems to me that sometimes efforts to counteract such notions by boosting the spirits does some good, but we should worry if the long-range lesson is: "Don't worry. You don't really need redemption. You're doing well enough as it is. You're better than you think you are." I do not think such remarks are generally true of any of us, including myself. And the consequence of such an approach is that the value of penance within the Church has almost disappeared. Indeed the word itself has partly disappeared from the common vocabulary. I would say some blame for the laity's fuzziness in this are on Church authorities. The new rite for the sacrament is entitled Ordo Poenitentiae, but it is often translated "the Sacrament of Reconciliation." Reconciliation is a good thing, but it is not quite the same thing as saying, "I have sins for which to atone."

I would like to conclude with the thought that most Catholics still believe that God has the whole world in His hands, that He has the power to take even failures, errors, mistakes—as He did with the crucifixion—and turn them into blessings. He does this steadily and constantly. Some of the difficult things done or permitted by God do not look so bad even to us twenty years after the fact. But other things still do look bad. One thinks of the dissent by several episcopal conferences from Humanae Vitae. It was and continues to be scandalous, but so was the lack of reaction from the Vatican. The Holy See did not like the dissent, but no visible steps were taken at the time to try to restrain or control it.

Nonetheless, one sees God's providence. It is a lot easier today to defend Humanae Vitae than it was in 1968. Paragraph 19 of that letter foretold the evils that would follow widespread use of contraception: licentiousness in sexual behavior, the demeaning of woman and her role, government efforts to control procreation. During a panel discussion in Toronto in that Summer of 1968, four of the five priest participants were procontraception. At the same time wives of college professors wondered aloud about the competence of aging celibates like the Pope, or me, to discuss the subject at all. They insisted it would be more demeaning for women to follow a natural family planning method than to use contraceptives. Twenty-five years later those wives cannot be so sure. We witness widespread AIDS and syphilis and pelvic inflammatory diseases. We live in a society of "single parents," multiple divorces, wife abuse, child abuse, and so forth. These things are the seamy side of the sexual revolution that the public, including public officials, will not face. But common folk, those that is with common sense, realize that not everything is fine now that contraceptive intercourse has become customary.

From all such circumstances the Lord can bring good, drawing things to a good end. Jesus in the tabernacle is an assurance that He continues to be present in our lives, He Who in the Mass makes Calvary real to those who believe. Jesus is also still present in the Scriptures, speaking individually to us, inspiring us with the words written two thousand years ago because God wanted them preserved so that we could grasp their meaning and live by them. Jesus is present in those who teach in His name, and in those who pray in His name whenever two or three are gathered together. He is present too in those who change bread and wine into His body and blood. For not without reason is the priest called another Christ, one who is at the service of those who are members of Christ's Body, at the service of the poor and the needy. Christ is with us, and in the end we cannot fail because He is with us. But we have a lot of our own work to do in His name.

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