[This excerpt is from the article "The American Cinema's Challenge to Adult Faith Formation" by Guerric Debona., The Living Light Fall 2000, Vol. 37, No. 1. Subscribe to The Living Light.]
"Cinema has always been interested in God."—Andre Bazin1
In 1997, the U.S. Catholic bishops unanimously adopted a national Pastoral Plan for Church Communication that suggests "ways in which church communicators can respond to the increasingly complex communication situation in the United States today."2 In the statement, the bishops emphasized the value in using print, film, and television in the Church's evangelizing mission. They underscored the importance of deploying new technologies in order to bring the Gospel to a diverse, pluralistic modern world. The specific actions recommended by the plan included an examination of how media has influenced the "values, judgments and actions of U.S. society" (3). Because of media's effect on American society, it must necessarily affect adult faith formation. The bishops' 1999 adult formation plan Our Hearts Were Burning Within Us also recognizes the role of media in American society when it states, "Fidelity to the Gospel means engagement with the world, and so we begin . . . with a look at some of the concrete challenges and opportunities that we face."3
What are those concrete challenges and opportunities in the area of communication for adult faith development? In terms of popular media, nobody would question that the dark side of Hollywood film culture has often encouraged what Our Hearts Were Burning calls "secularism, materialism, atheism, ethical relativism, religious indifference" (11). But anti-religious cinema is not really the issue here; adult formation is. I would argue, therefore, that American film culture influences and forms values in much more sophisticated and subtle ways than those evinced in the thematic content of specific films. In fact, to investigate the historical relationship between Church and cinema in this country is to examine a long process of tension and negotiation.
Particularly in its early days, Hollywood borrowed traditional religious codes and symbols in order to attract an ever-growing and ever-diversified audience in America. Thus, the film industry has impacted adult faith development for one-hundred years; Catholics would do well to face the "concrete challenges and opportunities" beginning with a critical cultural analysis of the relationship between Church and cinema.
The thesis of this brief article is that media-driven, ideological conventions have had a substantial, formative relationship with film-going, religious immigrants in this country, and this experience poses questions for today's religious educator. I will suggest that early American film culture owes a lot to standardized religious conventions and that religious environments—together with a sense of community values and even the story of God—became highly successful secular sites for the burgeoning film business. My three categories of focus—environment, community, and story—are hardly exhaustive; they simply open discussion with religious educators about the way in which media, particularly Hollywood film culture, continues to negotiate important symbols and traditions for today's viewer, and thus pose a challenge to adult faith formation.
The Environment: Temple/Theater
Religious educators instinctively know how important the liturgical environment is in shaping and defining the Christian assembly; Hollywood production companies at the turn of the century also knew in a similar way that houses of exhibition would transform moviegoers. Early movie palaces functioned as divinized encasements for mass cultural spectacle. At their zenith, the grandest movie theaters would appropriately be called "cathedrals." Historically, long before the English Puritans closed the theaters in 1642, dramatic spectacle was indeed performed in the environs of churches themselves. On a more philosophical level, spectatorship hints at a kind of sacred, irresistible aura present in the transactional encounter between the viewer and the theater, which mass culture would only further accentuate. The famous closing sequence of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) seems to capture the essential and indeed quasi-devotional role that cinema had with its spectators when the doomed and aging vamp, Norma Desmond, faces the audience and tells us, "There's nothing else. Just us. The cameras and those wonderful people out there in the dark."4
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The Community: Saint/Celebrity
Early Hollywood production companies not only formed communities of film "believers" through this use of religiously coded, sacred space, they also influenced the moral behavior of religious immigrants who attended these films. By 1928, even before the wide use of sound or color, an astonishing sixty-five million attended movie theaters weekly. Diverse communities were formed in urban areas and elsewhere as the peepshows disappeared and public theatrical exhibitions became common. In addition to "sacred" theaters harboring a sanctuary for spectacle, the nascent film industry in America relied heavily on a cult of personality or celebrity to help mold its audience from a group of Victorian immigrants into modern cinematic consumers. Indeed, the film industry shaped moral and social behavior of community life in America through a highly publicized star system that effectively used religious language to describe the pantheon of Hollywood movie actors and actresses gracing the silver screen, as Charles Affron explains in a 1991 essay:
The women are goddesses, the men are matinee idols; they are all stars who command devotion and veneration. The reverential and celestial vocabulary has been consecrated by decades of usage and press agentry. The cliches' first connotations effectively separate public from performer by an expanse of astral geography. The gods reign on high, the stars blink in solar systems light-years away, and we mere mortals, worshiping at their shrines in blissful ignorance, celebrate the distance."10
The Hollywood star system probably has its roots in the practices of people like P. T. Barnum, who—with the help of photography, the penny press, and a keen skill for publicity— "became an international figure for the way he focused attention to create fame and illusion."11 The twentieth-century emergent cult of celebrity would grow up around the technology of film and its ability to access middle class ideation. Fan magazines like Photoplay, which began in 1910, helped to turn stars into consumable goods because, "like the new public-relations profession, the studios depended on manipulating not only attention but also belief" (Gamson, 27). Looking to the pantheon of the worldly blessed had important implications for the Church. Instead of relying on traditional methods of learning ethical behavior (i.e., the Bible and the local parish priest), film stars and the aura and status of celebrity would come to define for Americans the value of right and wrong.
According to May, the celebrity status of early Hollywood superstars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks would have a major effect in reorienting and recreating moral behavior in middle-class life: They modeled new images for the modern era. As audiences came to the movies (particularly after 1914, when producers began to draw featured celebrities from a large, ethnically diverse pool of Broadway players), "they carried with them the aura of upper and lower class styles that the bourgeois had previously avoided. Now marquee favorites might offer models for dealing with the questions of cultural mixing and sexual experimentation" (May, 100).
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The rise of the matinee idol in film culture, then, suggests the power of images to engage, educate, and shape an audience, even in moral decision-making. Seen from one perspective, the aura of stars in film culture was rooted in success stories of secular "saints." Contemporary journalistic accounts of actors like Fairbanks and Pickford read like modern hagiographies; they are "blessed" in their own way and serve as moral guides in a secular culture.
The Word: Sacred Story/Micro-Plot
The influence of the star system on the audience in early American film culture would extend well beyond the boundaries of advertising or fan mail. In a way, the audience's growing identification with and sympathy for its favorite stars reveal the tendency for modern Americans to move away from a grand narrative (a unified concept of salvation history, as presented by the Bible) and towards what author Jean Francois Lyotard calls "micronarratives."14 It is commonplace to say that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ushered into existence a preference for subjectivism, for values centered inside individual worlds. As more prose fiction began to concentrate on psychology and behavioral motivation, the overarching sweep of a large historical narrative became less important to artistic expression. James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) was the high-water mark in literary aesthetics because it parodied the epic (a grand narrative) by turning it into a day in the life of an ordinary man from Dublin. While the novels of Joyce and Virginia Woolf are the most famous examples of this, canonical representation of cultural formation was also beginning to shape popular, technologically driven mass media as well. Director Kevin Smith's religious satire Dogma (1999) articulates the problem of cultural subjectivism rather bluntly when the fallen angel, Loki, says to a troubled nun at an airport, "Organized religion destroys who we are. . . . Listen, my advice to you . . . find some man, find some woman that you can connect with even for a moment. 'Cause that's really all life is, sister: it's a series of moments."15
Hollywood has long emphasized the character-oriented screenplay, which could be self-contained and in which naturalistic psychology of an ordinary life could play a crucial role. Author Kristin Thompson has argued that forms of European positivism, particularly those witnessed by Zola's French fiction, came to dominate the Hollywood screenplay between 1909 and 1928: "A concentration on character psychology could provide the motivational material necessary to a unified work. The two main issues concerning character revolved around character development and psychology."16 In a general sense, Hollywood was providing Americans with a way to make sense of their lives through the little stories of other, idealized selves on the silver screen; all this was accomplished without recourse to the Bible—and continues to play that pedagogical, therapeutic role until the present day. We might recall that for centuries Scripture and Tradition were the most important catechetical instruments, but an evolving film culture and technology based on individual stories of people in struggle and conflict became like morality plays without the religious allegory or biblical instruction. For moderns, there is certainly less need to consult Sacred Scripture or historical memory when your favorite star manages to resolve his or her own problems on the silver screen.
Clearly, the movement away from sacred history to individual story was an intense compilation of cultural forces and occurred only over a period of many years. Early Hollywood agencies helped a Bible-centered, Protestant America move towards a more secular, character-driven ethic and epistemology. For example, Cecil B. DeMille, like D. W. Griffith, came from a religious background. The son of an Episcopalian priest, DeMille built his reputation on religious epics. In the hands of DeMille, the biblical genre in Hollywood combined a fascinating blend of history, biblical representation, and personal story. He created character interest within the boundaries of biblical history so that the audience could acknowledge their Judeo-Christian heritage while at the same time discovering a strong interest in character.
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A Proactive Approach
Film culture has a symbiotic relationship with popular religion and the faith development of millions of viewers. Throughout its early history, Hollywood clearly borrowed (and continues to borrow) themes, religious symbols, codes, and practices in order to make the film product much more palatable for consumers. So how do religious educators respond?
Our Hearts Were Burning recommends a proactive approach; it is the task of "the adult formation team" or the "catechist of adults" to address appropriate questions regarding religious formation in a complex, pluralistic culture. In regard to American film culture and its ongoing relationship with the Church, I recommend to religious educators the following questions:
- In the twenty-first century, how can ecclesial and catechetical leaders structure liturgical space to a media-savvy American populace (perhaps along the lines recently recommended by author Richard S. Vosko in Worship)?17
- What must be said about the status of celebrity as a teaching instrument?
- What is the impact of magisterial authority in a world driven by technology, glamour, and stardom? How can salvation history be made to carry significance for Catholics who appear to interpret their lives in light of a series of private moments as portrayed in sitcoms, talk shows, and movies?
- What are effective ways of teaching and preaching Scripture so that a culture dominated by subjectivism can access Christian liturgical and biblical history?
In short, the Church must take proactive, forward-thinking steps to renegotiate the place of worship, the dignity of a non-glamorized community, and the treasure of the sacred story so as to bring it back to the people of God. Will the Church take these steps? One would hope so, but these are no easy tasks.
Guerric DeBona is assistant professor of homiletics at St. Meinrad School of Theology. Fr. DeBona, OSB, is a member of the St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana.
[This excerpt is from the article "Does Catechetical Sunday Have a Future?" by Carol Dorr Clement, The Living Light Fall 2000, Vol. 37, No. 1. Subscribe to The Living Light.]
September 17, 2000, marks the sixty-fifth annual, national celebration of a day honoring those involved in catechetical ministry. An attractive four-color poster for Catechetical Sunday 2000 and an accompanying program kit have been created to celebrate this anniversary. The quality of these materials indicate the creativity and vitality of the kit's authors and of the staff at the United States Catholic Conference's (USCC) Department of Education and Office for Publishing and Promotion Services. Religious educators in many parishes across the country will use the kit (booklet, poster, prayer cards, and catechist certificates) throughout the year in the religious education of adults and children. However, the decreasing percentage of parishes utilizing the USCC's program materials compared with the increasing number of catechists in the United States signals that perhaps something is amiss in the traditional observance of the annual event.
According to USCC sales records, fewer than 50 percent of the eighteen thousand parishes in the United States purchase the Catechetical Sunday kit to plan and celebrate the day. In the past ten years, the USCC has experienced a 36 percent drop in the number of kits purchased, although the sale of prayer cards and catechist certificates has increased significantly. At present, the quantity sold is the only index available to indicate the number of dioceses and parishes that celebrate the day. While many parishes and dioceses do celebrate Catechetical Sunday, some do not, and thirteen dioceses and archdioceses in the northeastern United States now promote a separate catechetical week sometime in November.
These statistics call for a revisiting of Catechetical Sunday and raise a number of significant questions: Does Catechetical Sunday have a future? Is one Sunday too little or too much? Is it celebrated at the best time of the year or should it be shifted to another spot on the calendar? What will the celebration be like on its seventy-fifth anniversary?
Origin and Purpose of Catechetical Sunday
Three significant factors have shaped the history of Catechetical Sunday: (1) its beginning in a decree of a Vatican congregation, (2) its promotion by the national center of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) in Washington, D.C., and (3) the absorption of the CCD into the United States Catholic Conference.
Prompted by the desire to ensure religious instruction for children, young persons, and adults, and by the interest of Pius X and Pius XI in teaching the Catholic faith, the Sacred Congregation of the Council (now the Congregation for the Clergy) issued "On the Better Care and Promotion of Catechetical Education." The decree of January 12, 1935, suggested, among other things, that a catechetical day be established in every parish and stipulated that a "celebration of Christian Doctrine be held with as much solemnity as possible." The congregation acknowledged that the different needs and circumstances of each diocese would determine if and when such a day could be celebrated. Directed to the entire Church and universally known by its Latin name, Provido sane concilio, the decree also required bishops to submit a report every five years on various aspects of the "teaching of Christian Doctrine" in their parishes, including "whether and how the Catechetical Day is celebrated?"1
Well aware of the need for better catechesis for persons of all ages and animated by Acerbo nimis (the 1905 encyclical letter of Pius X), Bishop Edwin O'Hara organized the national center for the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) in Washington, D.C. With the help of an episcopal committee, O'Hara, then bishop of Great Falls, Mont., established the center as a bureau of the National Catholic Welfare Conference in May 1935.2
The national center staff worked through the summer to prepare for the celebration of a national catechetical day on October 30, 1935, in Rochester, N.Y. Delegates from around the country attended a one-day event that was later developed into an annual series of national CCD congresses. By 1942 the national center was distributing a small booklet to help plan the day. The Catholic News Service reported in August 1944 that 80 percent of the diocesan confraternities of Christian doctrine celebrated a catechetical day in the autumn of the year to coincide with the opening of the new school term. The remaining 20 percent held the day "either in February, to stimulate flagging interest in the middle of the school year, or in June to mark the beginning of the Religious Vacation School program."3
In its 1950 mid-century survey on the CCD in the United States, the national center reported that 78 (or 69 percent) of the 113 reporting dioceses (out of the 128 officially listed for the United States) celebrated an annual catechetical day. A speaker at the following year's CCD national congress urged the delegates to celebrate the event on a Sunday, preferably in late September or early October. By 1955 most dioceses celebrated the day on the third Sunday in September, but the national center stipulated that "where no date is set by the Ordinary, the parish priest is free to name his own date." Throughout its sixty-five-year history, the date for the observance has been optional, although there have been periodic efforts to standardize it.
A Synergy: CCD and Catechetical Sunday
Prior to its reorganization with the USCC in the mid-1970s, the national center gave both motivation and practical support to the observance of Catechetical Sunday. Its manuals for diocesan CCD directors stressed their role in the celebration of the day across the nation. Manuals for the parish CCD emphasized that "a Catechetical Day or Confraternity Sunday shall be celebrated annually as the feast of Christian Doctrine."
At the national level, the center organized annual CCD congresses until World War II. After the war, the congresses took place every five years until 1971, and the center coordinated Catechetical Sundays with them. During congress years, the center urged all dioceses to hold the event on the same day across the nation.
Center publications helped parishes to organize the day, and the center distributed "sermon helps" that addressed various issues relevant to catechesis. The center asked the CCD diocesan directors to report back on how their parishes commemorated the day, thus providing yearly data on parish involvement. Our Parish Confraternity, the national quarterly CCD newsletter, publicized the event and gave celebration tips. In 1975 another reorganization streamlined the staff and reorganized its tasks within the USCC's Department of Education. Despite its limited staff, the USCC then began publishing an excellent series of annual booklets for organizing and implementing the day.
USCC Catechetical Sunday Booklets
As they so often would do in years to come, the editors of the first Catechetical Sunday booklet focused on an important catechetical document of the U.S. bishops, in this instance To Teach As Jesus Did: A Pastoral Message on Catholic Education. Timeliness with regard to national and worldwide church events and documents is a usual characteristic of the annual booklets published by the USCC.
A team of writers produced this 1973 booklet. Its "modules" gave suggestions on composing the homily and general intercessions of the Sunday liturgy, on planning a meeting with parents in regard to religious education, and on initiating an adult religious education program for the year. The booklet also proposed a ceremony for commissioning parish religious education personnel.
According to records in the USCC archives, ninety-nine diocesan directors later evaluated the booklet and also indicated how they observed Catechetical Sunday. Twenty-three dioceses made an "all-out effort" to promote the day; thirty-nine gave moderate support, and twenty-five dioceses promoted the day "to some degree." Fifty-nine dioceses mailed the 1973 Catechetical Sunday booklet to their parishes. Eighty-two diocesan directors stated that a similar booklet for 1974 would be helpful, but some asked for more liturgical assistance or more material on adult education and high school catechetics. Others wanted posters or a more pastoral orientation. Some asked for a less expensive format, and several directors pointed out that the occurrence conflicted with planned programming in their dioceses. A few indicated that there was no need for Catechetical Sunday.
Responding to these 1973 evaluations, Carl Pfeifer and Janaan Manternach, then assistant directors of the National Center of Religious Education, prepared a bigger, more comprehensive booklet for 1974. In it they were careful to state that while the national celebration would take place on Sunday, September 15, "local conditions may dictate another date." Their work became the prototype for subsequent annual issues.
Booklets from 1979 and 1980 addressed and resolved two issues about Catechetical Sunday. First, apparently in response to the issue of liturgical appropriateness, the 1979 booklet argued that the designation "Catechetical Sunday" did not supplant or substitute the names or meanings of the day on which the community gathers for worship (the Day of the Lord, the Day of Resurrection, etc.). Rather, the special Sunday recognizes the community's role in handing on the faith. Second, the same booklet pointed to a trend in some parishes of splitting the single observance into multiple Sunday "observances" such as Youth Sunday, Family Sunday, Social Development Sunday, School Sunday, and Lay Ministry Sunday. This booklet called for a more holistic concept of ministry and the development of an overall pastoral plan for the parish. Editors of the 1980 booklet resolved the question of multiple celebrations, citing the 1971 General Catechetical Directory's definition of catechesis as a form of ministry of the word. Using this more comprehensive concept, the editors noted that "catechesis functions within the context of all parish ministries, to the extent that those ministries proclaim the Word through formal instruction and action." They declared that if the purpose of the commemoration "is to call attention to the parish's ministry of the Word, there is a need to celebrate it via a total parish approach."
Themes and Topics
During the next quarter-century, the booklets continued to be timely and practical. Anticipating the 1976 national bicentennial, the 1975 Catechetical Sunday celebration had as its theme "Liberty and Justice"; and for the first time, the USCC printed two editions, one in English and one in Spanish. A wall poster accompanied the booklets. Subsequent booklets contained essays on multicultural approaches to catechesis, on religious education for those with special needs or disabilities, and on the scriptural background for the Sunday homily. Well-known authors and catechetical leaders contributed essays on the Bible, liturgy, justice, stewardship, catechetical theory, the parish community, inculturation, and God's wisdom and mercy. Editors included quotations from recent church documents, prayers for catechists, practical tips for publicizing Catechetical Sunday, and model programs to promote religious education in the parish. Recent booklets have added suggestions for the spiritual formation of the catechist. Booklets for the years 1997-2000 have emphasized preparations for and celebration of the jubilee year. Another topic covered routinely is how to provide catechesis in Native American, African American, and Asian American cultures. During the last twenty-five years, the booklets have evolved into manuals that give theological and catechetical updates for diocesan and parish catechetical leaders. The materials also provide tools for them to use in their annual religious education programs.
Catechesis for Children, Youth, and Adults: A Constant Theme
Not to be confused with pedagogy for children, catechesis addresses itself to persons of all ages.4 Provido sane concilio asked the world's bishops to report on the catechetical instruction of both children and adults. Every five years the bishops were to answer the question: "What means according to the different circumstances of time and place are deemed most fitting to bring about a more fruitful religious instruction of adults?"
As early as 1942, in its first promotional materials, the CCD's national center proposed that the parish Catechetical Day program demonstrate an adult discussion club. The clubs functioned to help adults to discuss their faith and then, in turn, to help them act as instructors of the faith at home. National center bulletins often reminded parish leaders to develop other programs for adults. The USCC booklets have consistently featured articles on young adult, family, and adult religious education, some with these titles: "Adult Catechesis and Following in Jesus' Steps," "Getting to Know God's Many Faces," and "Involving the Family in Catechesis." However, the close connection between Catechetical Sunday and the beginning of school for parish children in the fall may have served to reinforce the misconception that education in faith is primarily for children.
Catechetical Week: A Once and Future Celebration?
Half a century ago, the national center suggested that the week following Catechetical Sunday be a time to promote and organize catechetical activities. Parish leaders attended a "Diocesan Confraternity Day" one week prior to each year's event. At that time, diocesan officials outlined the CCD program for the coming year, exhibited CCD literature, demonstrated various phases of the CCD, and promoted attendance at regional CCD congresses. Beginning on each Catechetical Sunday, parish leaders then sponsored a week of organizational, promotional, and spiritual activities connected with the CCD program. By 1960 the national center was asking parishes to hold a formal reception ceremony on the following Sunday for those new members of the CCD who had registered on Catechetical Sunday itself. Thus, in a loose sense, Catechetical Sunday took two weeks, one of preparation and one of implementation.
In order to promote "a greater appreciation of the total educational mission of the Church," the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) joined with the USCC in a September 1972 celebration of "Christian Education Week." Staff at the national level encouraged diocesan and school administrators to use Catechetical Sunday to reach those six million children and youth in public elementary and high schools and "another five million entirely untouched by religious education."5 The program for the final Sunday of Christian Education Week was to emphasize total religious education for "all the people of God." Both in the homily and in the Sunday programs, "the people should be alerted again to the crisis in Catholic education which follows hard upon a kind of crisis in faith."
In 1973, the Catholic schools, with the sponsorship of NCEA, then moved their Catholic Schools Week to February, thus beginning an annual and successful celebration for Catholic elementary and secondary schools. That same year the USCC suggested that Catechetical Sunday be extended over the following week to include "meetings with parents and . . . the continuing education of adults." The USCC also noted that "Catechetical Sunday has taken on new importance at this time of crisis for Catholic schools and the rapidly growing enrollment of Catholic youngsters in public schools." Annual booklets for the late 1970s sometimes referred to a catechetical week, presumably in September, and more recent books have suggested extending the day's theme throughout the year. In some parishes, the theme and kit will indeed inspire the year's activities, but in others the booklet may serve only to help parish directors of religious education (DRE) plan for just one Sunday in September.
The Catechetical Sunday celebration is often the responsibility of the DRE (or another specified leader), who is usually already busy in September with registering students, recruiting teachers, and organizing classes for the parish school of religion. Practically speaking, then, DREs find little time in August and September to organize and promote a week similar to that of the February celebration of Catholic Schools Week. Thus, the best-known aspect of Catechetical Sunday is often the commissioning of parish catechists.
Consequently, parish catechetical personnel might continue to commission catechists without purchasing the USCC kit every year, or they might under-utilize the kit. Certainly, many find it impossible to begin a parish program for the year while simultaneously conducting a September catechetical week.
Catechetical Week in November—A Grassroots Idea
Parish administrators in several northeastern states have found the month of November to be a more suitable time to tell the story of religious education in parishes and to acknowledge the work of parish catechists.
Several catechists in the Diocese of Worcester, Mass., asked Msgr. Louis Piermarini, diocesan director of religious education, if they could publicize the work of religious education in the parishes of the diocese. They wanted to develop a week comparable to Catholic Schools Week. The director endorsed the idea, and the diocese held its first religious education week in November 1997. The Catholic Free Press, Worcester's diocesan newspaper, published a special religious education supplement to recognize and thank the catechists and volunteers in the religious education programs of the diocese. Parishes included special quarter-page or eighth-page notices in support of their programs. Publishers of religious education materials, religious goods stores, and various diocesan offices and ministries also contributed advertisements. The supplement featured articles interviewing Bishop Daniel Reilly and Msgr. Piermarini, as well as features on parish programs.
As president of the New England Conference of Diocesan Directors of Religious Education, Piermarini presented the results of Worcester's 1997 experience, and by 1998 all ten dioceses and two archdioceses in New England celebrated a "religious education month" during November. They could choose one week during the month "to celebrate in a variety of ways the good work of our parish catechetical programs." Directors of the New England dioceses talked of a National Religious Education Week but agreed to a trial run in New England first.
Piermarini has emphasized that the week's purpose is to "set aside time to acknowledge the importance of what people are doing in their parishes," and this includes religious education for adults. The Catholic Free Press's 1999 religious education supplement emphasizes the work of adults in both learning about and handing on their faith. In its section devoted to Religious Education Month, Church World, the Diocese of Portland's weekly publication, discusses faith formation and family catechesis, describes the work of parish religious education, and runs essays by two national catechetical leaders. Newspapers for the participating dioceses have served a triple function in presenting the efforts of parish faith formation work, in recognizing catechists and volunteers in the parishes, and in educating diocesan readers about the theory and practice of religious education.6
In the meantime, not aware of the New England efforts, catechists of the Diocese of Brooklyn asked its Office of Religious Education to conduct a week for religious education that would be comparable to Catholic Schools Week. With Bishop Thomas Daily's approval, the diocese held its first catechetical week in November 1999. The impetus of the week was to inform the people of the diocese of the great work being accomplished by wonderful people. Parishes sponsored a variety of activities to recognize catechists and to publicize the work of religious education. Holy Family parish included a special luncheon for the grandparents of the children in the religious education program. Although most parishes participated, some were not ready in 1999 but promised to be so in 2000, while some others suggested that the week be celebrated at a different time of year. As part of Catechetical Week 1999, William H. Sadlier Publishers sponsored a dinner for almost three hundred catechetical leaders in the Brooklyn diocese.7
Commenting on the weeks in the northeast, Daniel Mulhall, assistant secretary for catechesis and inculturation in the USCC's Department of Education, commends them. Reflecting on such developments in a direct interview, he emphasizes that "whatever we can do to honor and support catechists and the work of religious education itself is praiseworthy. That includes fostering creative programs that strengthen catechetical ministry."
Catechetical Sunday—A Look into the Third Millennium
This brief survey of the sixty-five years of the observance of Catechetical Sunday indicates the strengths and possible future direction for the day's celebration.
With the leadership and support of the national center, Catechetical Sunday activities publicized and helped to organize CCD work in the parish, diocese, and nation. As such, the day has enjoyed the support of a relatively large and enthusiastic national center staff. In the years following Vatican II, when the bishops of the United States organized the USCC and CCD became part of the Department of Education, Catechetical Sunday underwent two major changes. First, the USCC began publishing an attractive and educational annual catechetical kit. Second, because of staff limitations at USCC, the responsibility for local promotion of the day devolved upon diocesan directors of religious education (formerly the diocesan CCD directors) and upon individual parishes (often the DRE or another catechetical leader in the parish). Dioceses no longer reported to a central office about their observance of the day, and a central office no longer could help them on a year-round basis. Autonomous diocesan directors are responsible for numerous aspects of religious education in their dioceses, and the USCC can only offer its Catechetical Sunday kit in support of their efforts. But the USCC could also serve as a locus for the beginning of a conversation on the future direction of the commemoration of Catechetical Sunday and/or a National Religious Education Week or Month.
The resurgence of interest in a catechetical week, as evidenced in New England and the Diocese of Brooklyn, suggests that a week of celebration and education across the nation is a sound possibility. Flexibility demands that dioceses and parishes be able to choose the proper time; a nationwide observance requires that the week be held within a small time frame or "religious education month" in order to focus interest and energy.
What would become, then, of Catechetical Sunday? If it remains in its present place on the third Sunday of September, where it marks the beginning of parish programs of religious education, a catechetical week could follow in late October or in November. Or the bishops of the United States might switch the day to one in October or November when a religious education week occurs. The latter seems more practical. The present "Rite of Commissioning" could continue to be held on a Sunday in late September, as parish catechists begin their new programs. Parish and diocesan leaders would then be free to publicize their efforts and explain their programs during a catechetical week later in the year.
The USCC theme for 2000 "A Year of Favor: Making All Things New" may be prophetic for Catechetical Sunday itself. Not in decline, but in transition, the day—and the week that it may inspire—promise new development, possibly before Catechetical Sunday approaches its seventy-fifth anniversary.
Carol Dorr Clement has been, until recently, DRE of St. Bernard's Parish in Riverdale, Md. Dr. Dorr is currently writing a history of Catholic religious education in the United States based on the lives of outstanding women.