Latest / Mentoring In Ministry / S1E11: Dawson, Culture & Catechesis Part 3

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S1E11: Dawson, Culture & Catechesis Part 3 · Mentoring In Ministry

0:02
Welcome to the Mentoring in Ministry podcast. In each
0:04
episode, we approach various catechetical
0:06
topics from different perspectives.
0:10
Jim, we've been looking at a number of relationships
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between catechesis and culture. And one of
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the keys, one of the real essential elements within this
0:18
relationship is inculturation.
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So that, for example, in catechesis, the only way that
0:23
faith really can be transmitted,
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really handed on in a way that's lasting,
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in a way that's meaningful, both in life,
0:30
etc. , is if it happens within the context
0:34
of a community, if it's the whole community,
0:37
the whole culture which is really living, handing on,
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intentionally, conveying to the
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next generation what it means to be authentically Catholic.
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And this really seems to be one
0:47
of the key points at the heart of Dawson's understanding of
0:50
education and Christian discipleship
0:52
as well.
0:53
Yeah, well said, Scott. I think we could
0:56
fairly easily suggest that Dawson follows,
0:58
in the sense, Aristotle, that man is by nature a social
1:01
being. We can't perfect ourselves
1:04
without others. And this obviously plays beautifully into
1:07
God's ultimate plan that we need discipleship.
1:11
We need to pass the faith on to each generation. But before
1:15
we get quite to that, it would
1:17
be good, I think, to go back over the notion of
1:19
inculturation one more time. It's so essential
1:22
to so much of what Dawson teaches us and so much of what
1:25
the church does. We're focusing
1:27
on the notion that culture is a common way
1:29
of life and that the individual has to be
1:33
organically related to this culture. As cultures develop
1:38
and as they proceed through time,
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each generation must be introduced into
1:42
that culture. That is the most important thing.
1:44
If a given generation, a person, is not so
1:48
introduced, if that culture is not handed
1:50
on and acquired by that individual, they
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become alienated, dysfunctional, confused.
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It's almost in the sense of taking a 500- page novel and
2:01
starting to read on page 400. You
2:04
don't know from whence you've come where
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you're supposed to be generally going as far
2:08
as you can see. You don't know the players
2:10
and the plot and you don't know the conflict.
2:13
So without inculturation, an individual becomes alienated
2:18
from the culture. And I would suggest
2:21
obviously the same thing as
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regards to the church, hence Catechesis.
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This might be a good time to point out that
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I was actually, blessedly and wonderfully,
2:30
one of your students in the degree which you yourself
2:32
started and which has been very successful
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and we'll talk about down the road here within this
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interview, the humanities and Catholic
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culture major here at Franciscan, which is
2:39
both incredibly popular and a very intense
2:41
academic formation. When I went through
2:43
that degree, I came out changed. And the reason
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that is is because in order to understand,
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have some sense of who I am as Scott Sollom,
2:52
I had to have some sense of where we've been. And by we, I
2:54
mean the culture, I mean Western
2:56
civilization, I mean what are the philosophies and
2:59
theologies that have informed each given
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epoch or era, what was handed on, what was
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left behind. So that as we investigated and
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looked at the cultures anywhere from ancient to medieval to
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enlightenment all the way through
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the 20th century, there was a way in which
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I had a context for life, which I'm forever
3:16
grateful to you for. That context is something we're
3:19
missing today. That's the context, as
3:22
you say, we're jumping in the middle of a novel. And so we
3:24
have people who find themselves
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isolated, who find themselves alienated, who don't
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understand that they're part of a larger
3:30
picture, that there's actually meaning which can be
3:32
gleaned, needs to be understood, which
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informs their lives. And it's really in a sense,
3:36
despairing. Whereas I suppose the promise
3:38
of modernity and even post-modernity is that it's just you
3:41
yourself and you. When people
3:43
actually try to live in that way, they find it completely,
3:46
utterly unfulfilling and it leads
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really to despair. And this is why catechesis is such good
3:51
news because there is meaning to life.
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God is and has been present in and through human history,
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through the church, through the saints,
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through holiness. And we can know him and we can know more
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about who we are in a particular way by
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understanding and being privy to a certain Catholic
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culture. Unfortunately today, it's hard
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to find an authentically lived Catholic culture. And the
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role it seems to me, one of the most urgent
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immediate roles for the Christian today is to be a leaven in
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society, to be a leaven in culture. It strikes me
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that--. But how can you be a leaven if you don't understand the
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culture? See, this is part of- -.
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It works both ways. There's kind of this mutual causality.
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I'm meant to be a leaven in the culture and
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help the culture become incarnational. And yet I can't do
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that unless I have this a certain basis,
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a certain foundation, a certain impetus from the culture
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itself. So we're really, we're in a sense,
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there weren't some dire straits. As you may recall Scott,
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over the years ago, a number of lectures I
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gave, I tried to make the case of just simply for
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understanding the break with post Vatican II. So
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many changes occurred. I'm not suggesting they were wrong.
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I mean, that's not the subject before us
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today. But what happened to post Vatican II when we, for
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whatever the reason, started to move beyond
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a number of traditional teachings or traditional practices
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and pastoral modes and catechetical
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approaches. And even as we began to see the fading away of
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the old Catholic ethnic cultures in the
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United States, we ended up, and myself to some degree in
5:20
the 70s, ended up disconnected, if you
5:24
will, from the tradition of the church. And so many of my
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friends in the 70s left the church
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because it became simply an extensive preaching without any
5:35
context. Or there was too much context,
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too much cultural horizontality and not enough verticality,
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incarnationalism, that they would
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go to the Protestants and seek some morally persuasive
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authoritative teaching. What I'm
5:53
trying to suggest to you is we need both of these worlds.
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The church is incarnational, it is
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spiritual, but there's also a dimension of culture, of
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horizontality, of the living out of the faith in
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our everyday lives. And if that's not conveyed and a
6:08
context is not given, then what happens is so
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many of us, including you and me, in post World War II
6:15
period, we end up confused that unless we
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are lucky enough to come across someone like Dawson or an
6:20
HCC program who, in some sense,
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somebody stops and says, these are the important things.
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This is Christ's great teachings. This is
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the reality of the faith. Here's how it's developed through
6:32
time. Here are the issues. Let's focus and
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see and find your place in it so it becomes personalized
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and not overly subjective, but
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personalized. Without that, it just doesn't cohere.
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Let's talk about this. This perhaps coming out of Vatican
6:47
II, misperceiving it, perhaps using a
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hermeneutic of discontinuity regarding the
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teachings of the church, the meaning of the
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church in the life of the people, interpreting, therefore,
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a really false interpretation of
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looking at the documents and what they said without seeing
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them in the context of the ongoing,
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unchanging reality of God revealing himself in and through
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the church. With this hermeneutic of
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discontinuity, as you mentioned, we've been disconnected
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from our own culture, from our own
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really, in some ways, from our own heritage, which
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certainly wasn't the intent of Vatican II, but it
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did play out, so to speak, according to the spirit of
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Vatican II in some circles, which brings us
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back, I think, very importantly to inculturation, which is
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this specific point. inculturation requires
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a real discernment for handing on the faith, as I mentioned
7:34
a couple times now, the importance of
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taking into consideration who your audience is and how to
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convey these unchanging truths to that
7:40
audience. There's a certain discernment in
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recognizing in that audience some of those,
7:45
so to speak, riches, those gospel values that are already
7:48
there that really aren't meant to be left
7:50
behind, but really those are really, in a sense, seeds of
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the word, almost like, as some people
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have called nature, the book of nature by which we come to
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see some seeds of the word through
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creation. Certainly the creature, man, in his human nature,
8:04
lived out in culture. There's many seeds
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of the word in cultures. Me, myself, as the catechist, I
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need to be aware and really prayerfully
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discern which of those riches are compatible and can be
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taken up into the theandric. But at the same
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time, I think this is one of the difficulties with
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post-Vatican II catechesis and our understanding
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of culture and the rupture, which is there's going to be
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some things in various cultures that are not
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consonant with the gospel that need to be left behind, that
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need to be purified, transformed,
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or altogether rejected. What we have in catechesis is the
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sense that inculturation is only a one-way
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street. We show up the culture, whatever it is they're
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doing, we affirm it, we say this is good,
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we want to be all things to all people, and how dare us
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suggest that there's some kind of truth
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or reality that isn't already fully present in this
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particular culture. That's a real danger,
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because Christ himself came to penetrate, transform, and
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elevate humanity, not just a wholesale say,
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" Everything's fine. Go about your merry way. " This is a
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certain delicate balance for the catechist
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and for the cultural historian to understand where is God
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moving and what are the positive
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elements, but also where are the negative elements
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philosophically, theologically, etc. , that need to
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be left behind. Yes, very well said. It's easier said than
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done. But the important thing I think we
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want to convey to our viewers is the necessity of seeking
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to attempt to do it, so that if you're in
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a give and perish, it's important that the catechist not
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just become fluent in the catechesis,
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the content, but on the other hand, there is a certain
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heritage in a parish, in a town, in a
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neighborhood, and in an ethnicity. There's all kinds of
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contextual, cultural, geographical, and
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other things that all are part of the living of life of a
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human being. If we present the faith
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solely as a series of prescriptions or principles, and we
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don't flesh it, which is really what love
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is all about it, the individual can't become, they can't
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internalize it. If we don't find a way to
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open a door for a conversation with them, as you said, the
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job is not to find the culture and then
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kind of shoehorn or shoe-fit Christianity into it. The job
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is to preach the word and let the culture
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and help the culture figure out what's compatible with the
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word. But one has to be cognizant, aware
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that there is this interplay between the two. If it's not,
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then we end up with an authoritarianism,
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which most anybody will not want, or we end up with an
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excessive subjectivism. As you said,
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well, it's one of the great wonders of the church. It's a
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balance between these two worlds.
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I think there's a certain analogy to be
10:50
had here between theological anthropology and
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inculturation. What I mean by that is, of course, in
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theological anthropology, God's grace is meant
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to penetrate, transform, and elevate the human person.
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Grace does not mean something that really
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covers us up. The human person is so void of any goodness,
11:09
so irredeemable, that grace really just
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is like a nice white covering on top to make God kind of
11:14
feel good about us. But deep down, we're
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really simply grotesque, irreformable. On the other hand,
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it's not the case that, gee, you don't need
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grace. The human person in and of themselves is so
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wonderfully good that our job as catechists is
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merely to get them in touch with their own experiences, and
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through their own experiences,
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and their deep thought, and staring at their belly button,
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they will spring wholesale into
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their full self. These are two, so to speak, kind of
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extremes that we want to avoid. I think it's
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similar with inculturation, where the Christian is meant,
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on the one hand, not to avoid culture.
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It's so like human nature. It's so disgusting, grotesque,
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that I think I'll just build a fortress,
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one of the great throwaway lines. It's for Dawson. He has
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so many lines. This one is almost like an
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afterthought. When a man builds a fortress, he also builds
11:58
a prison. So, gosh, I think I'll just not,
12:01
I don't want to engage the culture, because it's not
12:04
worthy. But on the other hand, other people
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approach the culture as if, golly, these are humans, we're
12:10
all good, and therefore, the culture
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doesn't need to be penetrated, transformed. It just needs
12:14
to spring wholesale into the full societal
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goodness that God made it. But really, there's the balance.
12:18
It's grace, building up and perfecting
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nature in the culture. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, very well
12:25
said. Many people miss the important point that
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Roman Catholicism is the only truly transcendent religion
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in relation to culture. In other words,
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Roman Catholicism does not bear with it a particular type
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of food to be eaten, a particular
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dress to be worn, particular books that have to be read, a
12:44
particular language, etc. , etc. ,
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I remember years ago watching a parade of visiting
12:51
Catholics from various cultures, visiting, if you
12:54
will, John Paul II. And while intellectually I understood
12:57
this transcendence I'm watching on
12:59
EWTN at the time, I'm watching this one ethnic group after
13:03
another from around the world, all
13:05
Catholics, all dressed in entirely different clothes,
13:08
different languages. It's astounding.
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Every other religion that's truly a spiritual religion
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requires a conformity of cultural
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response. Think of any of a host of religions, Islam or
13:23
Taoism or Buddhism, almost everyone just
13:26
about has to wear the same clothes, eat the same food, etc.
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It's that Roman Catholicism is not that
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way at all. It's a belief, it's a relationship with God.
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It's a series of principles which we
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bring to people and their job is to remain faithful to
13:41
those, reflect upon them, internalize
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them and then ponder how can I, who I am, where I am in my
13:49
life and my culture move towards the
13:52
next stage of my perfection. So it's an internalized thing,
13:56
it's a self-aware thing, it's subjective,
13:59
but it's guided by the eternal, subspecies, eternity. It's
14:04
a beautiful point that you're making. The
14:05
church is Catholic, universal. It's not in that sense
14:10
monolithic, but rather there's a certain
14:12
genius amongst different peoples. There's a way in which
14:15
really, at least in my experience, as you
14:16
were wonderfully talking about with witnessing St. John
14:19
Paul II in that particular gathering,
14:21
there's a way in which being witness to and recognizing and
14:24
seeing the way in which other
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types of cultures celebrate, ritualize, bear witness to the
14:29
truth actually impacts and deepens
14:32
my understanding. I'm a Norwegian German from Minnesota. If
14:35
I travel, which I have to say to
14:36
Peru, Central America, etc. , and I witness and see the
14:40
various ways, for example, which our dear
14:42
mother, Blessed Mother Mary, is respected, is venerated,
14:46
that has touched me very deeply in a
14:48
way that I would actually have been able to witness in
14:51
Minnesota in my parish of St. Michael's,
14:53
that this genius of the people in a sense speaks to and
14:56
gives a greater efficacy to the living of
14:59
the faith for everyone else. Let me jump in on an important
15:02
point right following that great
15:03
observation and that's simply that Dawson is saying to us,
15:07
and he was so profoundly unique in this.
15:08
It's striking when you look back, it's surprising that
15:13
people before, scholars before Dawson had to
15:15
look to Catholic culture. One of the important points of
15:19
Dawson's work is simply to say to us
15:21
today, there was, for 2,000 odd years before us, a Catholic
15:26
culture. Why don't we go back and look
15:28
and see how people grappled with the challenge of living
15:32
the faith in their own time and place?
15:35
Why do we need to recreate the wheel every day? In other
15:39
words, why do we read the lives of saints?
15:42
Well, I think most of us for edification, but I think those
15:46
of us who are a tad more astute try
15:48
to find a given saint that might be similar to us. Maybe
15:52
it's a saint who had to grapple with
15:53
the recalcitrant students who didn't do their work.
15:58
Hypothetically speaking. Dawson said,
16:03
let's look to the past to see how the church has revealed
16:06
herself in the West. That's our
16:09
patrimony. Go back and learn from the past. We don't have
16:12
to recreate everything anew. You're
16:15
right on the money that it's so interesting to see how
16:17
Roman Catholicism flowers in other cultures.
16:20
It remains to honor its principles spiritually and
16:24
philosophically, and yet it takes on its
16:26
different cultural beautiful patterns. I remember one time
16:30
being in Jamaica years ago for a conference
16:32
and I went off to Sunday Mass and ended up at the cathedral
16:35
in Kingston. That was a magnificent Mass.
16:39
I've never partaken in quite the intensity of that cultural
16:43
approach, but these essential aspects
16:45
of the Mass were there. But the songs and the ancillary
16:49
prayers, the clothing, the whole
16:53
demeanor of the architecture of the
16:54
church was Jamaican and it was just beautiful.
17:00
Let me go back to this point that you're
17:01
making because it's really an essential
17:02
catechetical connection that our patrimony,
17:05
our heritage, that by looking to the past,
17:09
we can come to a certain understanding of who we were,
17:12
where we've been, and therefore where we are
17:14
and in doing that, we have a much better vantage point for
17:17
seeing where we're going from here.
17:19
That is, there's a relationship between on
17:21
the one hand our heritage and on the other
17:23
hand our inheritance. This is something I think Dawson was
17:25
particularly astute in observing that
17:28
Catholic culture is a culture of hope. It's
17:31
looking forward and it's based on a certain
17:34
inheritance, a certain sure knowledge of God's promise
17:37
being fulfilled, which is a quite
17:39
different view of history on many
17:41
different levels than some of Dawson's modernist
17:45
contemporaries, which is to say that he saw even deriving
17:49
from history, not some external way in
17:51
which he was trying to interpret history, but he saw within
17:54
history this incarnational movement,
17:56
the role of God making good on his promise and covenants
17:58
through the church, this incarnational
18:01
reality of history, which in catechetics, of course, it's
18:04
always wonderfully important,
18:06
whatever it is we're teaching, to place it, any doctrine,
18:10
to place it in the context of salvation
18:11
history, that there's actually God is holding us all in the
18:15
palm of his hand. God has a plan
18:17
and this divinely revealed reality that we're talking
18:19
about, whatever that might be, is part
18:21
of God's plan for you and is being worked out in history.
18:26
Can we move a little bit to Dawson's
18:28
perhaps understanding of history, which informs of course
18:31
his understanding of culture and cultural
18:32
renewal? We've talked about a lot of aspects of this
18:35
already, at least in principle. Trying to go
18:39
back over the history of the church as seen through
18:41
Dawson's eyes would be perhaps a subject
18:44
for another time. He's a very sweeping intellectual on
18:48
many, many levels, but maybe that could be
18:51
helpful to us in this regard, that God becomes in a certain
18:56
special fashion incarnate in time and in
18:59
history through the individual. In the sense that if we are
19:04
spiritually informed, trying to
19:07
live reasonable and rational lives, in other words, loving,
19:10
living the life we're supposed to live, then
19:12
grace perfects our nature. In that sense of the term,
19:16
history with Dawson would suggest to us,
19:19
and I'm sweepingly generalizing here, which suggests to us
19:23
historical epochs or historical
19:26
movements are really stories of the individual or groups of
19:30
individuals writ large. In other words,
19:33
if we have a period in the history of the church where we
19:36
do not have the intensity of spirituality
19:39
that might have occurred before, then there's going to be
19:41
ramifications. We see other types
19:44
of generic cycles of, so to speak, of spirituality and
19:48
culture. For example, it's interesting to us,
19:50
and points out that if you want to understand a certain
19:53
cultural period, pay attention to which
19:55
orders arise and what their charism is and why they sustain
19:58
themselves. Orders through time seem
20:01
to have key principles. Others that come and go over a
20:04
couple centuries might have been a calling
20:06
for a particular time and need. There's ways of seeing
20:10
things, but what Dawson's trying to convey
20:12
to us is lest we become overly, I'm not saying it's not a
20:16
proper subject for consideration,
20:18
but lest we become overly concerned with these sweeping
20:21
patterns, as interesting as they are,
20:23
what Dawson's trying to say is the room
20:25
Catholicism like culture is pretty simple,
20:28
in the sense of we have to pray and have a relationship
20:32
with God, and that should reveal
20:34
itself and influence how we think and how we teach that
20:37
praying and how we teach that God,
20:39
catechetics, and ultimately the reality of this must issue
20:43
forth, refine, and clarify in the way
20:46
we live. He's trying to convey that structure to us, and if
20:50
we hold that in our mind's eye,
20:52
I would submit to you that's a timeless series of
20:54
principles that any catechist, any human being,
20:57
any Catholic can keep in mind, and it'll help them to find
21:01
their way regardless of where they are,
21:03
or what stage of their life they find themselves. As you're
21:05
speaking, I'm thinking of one of the
21:07
pieces that Dawson has put forth, the Six Ages of the
21:10
Church. I'm bringing it up now, we don't have
21:12
to go into any of the Six Ages in particular, but he
21:14
basically talked about in a sense a cyclical
21:16
relationship where the Church has a certain ascendancy, if
21:19
you will, becomes, so to speak,
21:21
in the best sense of the term, accepted. In that
21:24
acceptance, the Church is there, it can inform,
21:26
it can be vibrant, it can be lived out in all its wonderful
21:28
cultural detail, and then there's the
21:30
downside where the Church perhaps is in the decline, it's
21:34
descendant, both in the holiness of the
21:36
individual and then writ large the way in which the general
21:39
population perceives Christianity or the
21:42
Christian faith, which seems to be where we are now, which
21:44
is on the very tail end of the Sixth
21:46
Age of the Church, where of course we are in a
21:48
de-Christianized, if not anti-Christian climate.
21:52
We're dealing with a number of people whose philosophical
21:54
understanding of Western education
21:56
is based on materialism, no capacity for the transcendent.
22:01
We've got an entire generation,
22:02
if not two or three generations, who
22:04
haven't had the faith handed on to them.
22:09
Again, it seems that we're in a place of difficulty, but
22:12
what you're saying, it seems to me, is that
22:13
holiness, beginning with the individual personal holiness
22:16
conversion, is not only essential for
22:19
catechesis because it's our life with Christ, it's also the
22:21
actual key and the answer for cultural
22:25
conversion. This might be a good point for us to leave off
22:27
and we'll come back on this point
22:28
for holiness when we return. Thank you for being with us
22:31
and join us back in a few minutes.
22:33
Thank you for listening to this episode of Mentoring in
22:35
Ministry. You can also find us
22:37
on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube @ the
22:39
Catechetical Institute or join our online
22:41
community of catechists at franciscanathome.com/guild.
22:44
Link to all of those in the
22:46
show notes. This podcast is an outreach of Franciscan
22:49
University of Steubenville's Catechetical Institute.