NCEA Convention

Experiencing the risen Lord: Bishop urges Catholic educators to help youths embrace their faith

Bishop Blase J. Cupich of Rapid City, S.D., gives a keynote address on March 26 at the 2008 National Catholic Educational Association’s annual convention in Indianapolis. Bishop Cupich spoke to approximately 1,000 convention participants about ways to address a decreasing participation in the life of the Church by many youths and young adults in a presentation titled “Taking Proven Pathways to Face New Challenges.” (Photo by Sean Gallagher)

By Sean Gallagher

Passing on the faith is a primary task for the more than 7,000 educators who were in Indianapolis from March 25-27 for the National Catholic Educational Association’s annual convention.

The current challenges in passing on the faith are arguably some of the most difficult faced by the Church in the United States in the more than 100-year history of the NCEA.

But there are effective ways available to Catholic educators in the Church’s tradition that can help the young people they serve embrace the faith with passion.

This was the message that Bishop Blase J. Cupich of Rapid City, S.D., gave in a keynote address to approximately 1,000 convention participants on March 26 at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis.

Bishop Cupich began his remarks by citing the recent release of a study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which stated that 33 percent of all Catholic Americans have left the Church, 10 percent of all Americans identify themselves as former Catholics and 25 percent of all Americans between 18 and 29 have no religious affiliation.

He said the study also showed that those who left the Church did so mainly from an apathy “that stems from a lack of knowledge about the faith.”

“As a recent editorial in America magazine concluded, ‘a number of Catholics, it seems, have left, not because they’ve not believed, but because they don’t care,’ ” Bishop Cupich said.

The question raised by the Pew study for Catholic educators, Bishop Cupich said, is clear.

“How can we pass on the faith in a way that gives the children and grandchildren of today and tomorrow the same experience of God and of Christ and of the Church that shapes our hearts, that enriches us and the lives of our parents and grandparents?” he asked.

“We need to capture, once again, [the fact] that at the heart of what we do is a sense of mission, a mission that is driven by our own experience of the risen Lord.”

Understanding the challenge

Quoting such current Catholic American scholars as R. Scott Appleby and John Cavadini, Bishop Cupich said that many of the teenage and young adult children of Catholics of the baby boomer generation suffer from a vast religious illiteracy.

This has come about, he said, because of factors in the internal life of the Church, such as the “collapse of the catechetical infrastructure” that, in the past, relied on women religious to pass on the faith in parish schools and religious education programs, “naïve assumptions” about how members of the laity could take their place, and difficulties of publishers to produce textbooks that harmonize both the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and the Church’s broader traditions.

External factors also have played a role.

Technological developments in fields such as transportation, communication and medicine have created the “illusion of autonomy,” he said, that has led people to see religion as one more consumer item whose acceptance or rejection can be based solely on one’s personal preference.

Bishop Cupich also said that people nowadays form their identity more and more by what they take in from the marketplace and the media than from their religious traditions.

He humorously illustrated this fact by recounting the story of how a 5-year-old niece took 15 prayer cards from his episcopal ordination to her preschool for show-and-tell.

The prayer card showed Bishop Cupich wearing a miter and a chasuble and holding a crosier.

His niece asked her classmates who the person was on the card.

“Very quickly, their fertile little 5-year-old minds came to a consensus,” he said. “I was a ninja warrior.”

Bishop Cupich also said our consumer-driven culture has led many youths and young adults to want a “satisfaction-guaranteed, … consumer-friendly religion.”

“Those are factors that we have to take into consideration to try to understand how we got to where we are,” he said. “The real task, then, for us is to translate the ancient faith into a language that has meaning and yet has not been compromised by the dominant culture.”

Mining the tradition

Bishop Cupich said we can face the daunting challenge of effectively proclaiming the faith in this cultural context by “mining the tradition” of the Church.

He did this in his address by looking to St. Augustine.

Bishop Cupich noted how the late fourth- and early fifth-century North African saint advised bringing those unlearned in the faith to a personal encounter with Christ before explaining Church doctrine to them.

“It’s when we begin to do that [evangelizing] that a number of other things will fall into place,” Bishop Cupich said.

St. Augustine, Bishop Cupich noted, also said that what drives the process of teaching the faith in others lies in the students and not the teachers.

“The ache for God [in students] is the teacher’s greatest resource,” Bishop Cupich said.

He emphasized that Catholic educators need to show how the faith is rooted in ancient stories, but that their protagonist—Jesus Christ—is still alive here and now, and that they need to place themselves in that story.

Bishop Cupich illustrated this by noting that in the Church’s rite of confirmation, the sacrament is celebrated after the proclamation of the Gospel but before the homily.

Those to be confirmed are “a part of the story. They’re the newest chapter in the Good News. I can’t preach the Good News until their names are announced.”

“We need to do that in many different ways with young people,” Bishop Cupich said, “to let them know that they’re continuing the next chapter of this wonderful story in the history of salvation in which Christ brings about his redemption.”

Concluding his keynote address, Bishop Cupich exhorted his listeners to imbue all of their efforts to pass on the faith with cheerfulness and their deep love of Christ and the faith.

“If we begin with that and rekindle that sense of mission in what we do, there will be no challenge that will be too daunting for us, even if we’re placed in the position of explaining to a 5-year-old why I’m not a ninja warrior.” †