Parish Examen Series (18): Can We Explain What We Believe?
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The previous post asked whether the parish is forming disciples: people who are genuinely being remade by the Holy Spirit into the likeness of Christ.
This one asks about the content of that formation.
Discipleship requires encounter, community, practice, and accountability.
It also requires knowledge.
A disciple who can’t explain what he believes, who can’t tell the story of the Gospel to a curious neighbor, who can’t respond to a child’s difficult question, or who’s never been taught the coherent story of salvation the Church has received and handed on is a disciple whose formation remains incomplete.
Teaching and catechesis address that need.
The distinction from the previous post matters because discipleship and catechesis are easy to conflate.
Discipleship is about being formed.
Catechesis is about being taught.
Both matter.
Neither is sufficient without the other.
A parish that forms people relationally without teaching them the faith may produce disciples who are sincere but inarticulate.
A parish that teaches the faith without forming people may produce Catholics who are informed but unchanged.
The two belong together.
But they aren’t the same thing, and they require different investments, different structures, and different kinds of honest assessment.
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The necessary outcome is straightforward:
Disciples should grow in a demonstrable understanding of God and His revelation and become increasingly able to articulate the central teachings of the Christian and Catholic faith.
Two parts of that deserve attention.
Demonstrable understanding
Not a general familiarity with Catholic things.
Not the comfort of having grown up in the Church.
Not knowing when to stand, sit, kneel, fast, or bring the children for religious education.
Those things may reflect belonging. They don’t necessarily reflect understanding.
Catechesis produces knowledge that can be expressed, explained, connected, and shared.
Someone should gradually be able to say who God is, what Christ has accomplished, what salvation means, why the Church exists, what happens in the sacraments, how Scripture holds together, and why the Christian moral life takes the shape it does.
Most parishes have never seriously asked whether their people can do this.
The assumption is often that Sunday Mass, childhood religious education, and basic sacramental preparation are sufficient.
For most people in most parishes, they aren’t.
The gap between that assumption and the actual theological formation of ordinary Catholics is one of the most consequential gaps in parish life.
Confident articulation
This exposes the problem even more clearly.
Not merely reciting a creed.
Articulating the faith means being able to explain, describe, connect, defend, and share it.
A Catholic may be able to recite the Nicene Creed and still be unable to explain what it means.
He may know the language of the faith without understanding the story those words proclaim.
He may recognize Catholic teaching when he hears it but be unable to express it in his own words.
That gap matters when a skeptical colleague asks why Catholics believe in the Eucharist.
It matters when a child asks why God allows suffering.
It matters when a friend questions the Church’s moral teaching.
It matters when someone’s own life falls apart and inherited religious familiarity is no longer strong enough to carry the weight of grief, doubt, fear, or loss.
People need more than Catholic vocabulary.
They need to understand the reality the vocabulary names.
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Five signs of health deserve attention because together they describe a parish that’s actually teaching the faith rather than assuming people will somehow absorb it.
The first is a coherent plan for teaching the faith.
The kerygma.
Scripture.
The Creed.
The sacraments.
Christian moral life.
Prayer.
Church history.
Catholic social teaching.
The great tradition of Christian thought, worship, holiness, and witness.
These shouldn’t appear merely as disconnected topics offered whenever a willing presenter, available curriculum, or enthusiastic volunteer happens to emerge.
A parish needs some sense of sequence.
What does a person need to understand first?
What builds upon that foundation?
How does someone move from an initial proclamation of the Gospel into a deeper understanding of Scripture, doctrine, sacramental life, morality, prayer, vocation, and mission?
The goal isn’t to force everyone through an academic curriculum.
It’s to make sure the parish’s teaching actually holds together.
Most parishes have programs.
Very few have a sequence.
The difference is the difference between a pile of ingredients and a meal.
Every ingredient may be good.
That doesn’t mean they’ve been arranged to nourish anyone.
The second is formation through every stage of life.
Children need catechesis.
So do teenagers.
So do young adults, parents, single people, married couples, ministry leaders, older adults, new Catholics, lifelong Catholics, and people returning after years away.
Adult formation isn’t an optional enhancement for the unusually interested.
Adults form children.
Adults lead ministries.
Adults serve on councils.
Adults make decisions about money, marriage, work, politics, family life, suffering, technology, sexuality, justice, forgiveness, and death.
Adults represent the faith in workplaces, neighborhoods, families, and friendships.
They’re also navigating a culture that’s often skeptical of Catholic belief and increasingly unfamiliar with even the basic Christian story.
A parish that invests heavily in children’s catechesis while offering little serious formation for adults has the investment backward.
It’s trying to form the next generation while leaving the present generation without the resources needed to hand the faith on.
Children don’t receive the faith from parish programs alone.
They receive it through the lives, words, habits, priorities, prayers, and decisions of adults.
When those adults haven’t been formed, the parish asks them to transmit something they were never adequately helped to understand.
The third is the formation and support of catechists.
The quality of catechesis depends heavily upon the people entrusted with it.
A generous volunteer isn’t automatically a prepared catechist.
Good intentions matter.
They aren’t enough.
Catechists need theological grounding, spiritual formation, practical skills, appropriate resources, ongoing support, and some form of coaching or feedback.
They need help understanding not only what the Church teaches, but how to communicate it to the people actually sitting in front of them.
A catechist teaching children needs more than a textbook.
A person accompanying adults in OCIA needs more than personal enthusiasm.
A small-group leader needs more than discussion questions.
A parent leading sacramental preparation at home needs more than a packet of instructions.
Formation, certification where appropriate, observation, encouragement, coaching, and continued learning aren’t bureaucratic obstacles.
They’re how a parish honors the people it has asked to teach.
A parish that hands someone a curriculum and considers the formation complete hasn’t formed a catechist.
It has assigned a task.
The fourth is actual evidence that people can articulate the faith.
Not an assumption.
Not an inference drawn from Mass attendance.
Not confidence based on the fact that people completed a program years ago.
Actual evidence.
That evidence might come through surveys, interviews, small-group conversations, OCIA outcomes, parent discussions, ministry-leader formation, or ordinary pastoral encounters.
Can people explain the Gospel?
Can they describe what Catholics mean by salvation?
Can they explain why the Eucharist is central?
Can they connect Christian morality to the life and lordship of Jesus rather than treating it as a collection of rules?
Can they speak about suffering, forgiveness, vocation, prayer, and mission in recognizably Christian terms?
Most parishes have never examined this honestly.
When they do, the results may be sobering.
That doesn’t mean the people have failed.
It may mean the parish’s teaching system never gave them what they needed to succeed.
The fifth is a clear movement from learning into life.
Catechesis shouldn’t end at the classroom door.
Formation should lead people more deeply into prayer, sacramental life, Christian friendship, service, evangelization, leadership, and mission.
A person who completes OCIA should know what comes next.
A parent finishing sacramental preparation should receive an invitation into continued formation and community.
A teenager who’s confirmed should be entering a deeper stage of discipleship, not reaching the end of parish involvement.
An adult Bible study should lead somewhere beyond the final session.
Knowledge that never becomes connected to worship, relationship, practice, and mission rarely endures.
It fades.
The person may retain fragments, phrases, and pleasant memories.
But the teaching never becomes part of the architecture of his life.
A formation program without a next step easily becomes another temporary parish experience.
Good while it lasted.
Largely disconnected from what follows.
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A consistent pattern appears across parish catechetical life, and it deserves honest attention.
Most parishes invest the majority of their formation resources in children and youth.
That’s understandable.
Sacramental preparation creates deadlines.
Parents expect programs.
Curricula already exist.
Schedules are established.
The parish has probably been doing some version of the same work for decades.
Adult formation is different.
It’s usually optional.
It’s often thin.
It’s frequently attended by the same small group of already-engaged parishioners.
And it’s rarely organized as a coherent movement from basic Christian understanding into mature Catholic faith.
Instead, it tends to be organized around what’s available.
A speaker series here.
A Bible study there.
A Lenten program.
An occasional retreat.
Perhaps a video series if someone is willing to lead it.
Each may be a genuinely good thing.
Together, they may still add up to something less than a system.
The result is a parish full of adults who received most of their formal catechesis as children and haven’t been seriously taught the faith since.
They’re now trying to raise children in that faith.
They’re trying to answer skeptical friends and colleagues.
They’re trying to interpret suffering, marriage, work, politics, sexuality, money, vocation, and death.
They’re trying to remain Catholic in a culture whose assumptions are often profoundly different from those of the Church.
And many are doing all of that with the theological resources they received at twelve or thirteen years old.
That isn’t a criticism of those adults.
It’s a criticism of a formation system that left them there.
The consequences are real.
A parent who can’t explain why the Eucharist matters will struggle to hand on Eucharistic faith to her children.
A parishioner who’s never encountered the Church’s understanding of suffering may have little to offer a grieving friend beyond generic sympathy.
A young adult who was confirmed but never formed theologically may be unable to answer the questions his friends are asking.
Eventually, they may stop asking him.
Eventually, he may stop believing the faith contains answers worth seeking.
Catechesis isn’t a children’s program.
It’s a parish-wide responsibility.
The gap between that truth and the way most parishes actually distribute their attention, staffing, money, and energy deserves to be taken seriously.
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When this discipline is neglected, four things tend to follow.
Religious illiteracy rises.
Parishioners become uncertain about central Christian doctrines.
The faith is handed on primarily as cultural practice rather than living knowledge.
People may identify as Catholic, attend Mass, observe major feasts, bring children for sacraments, and still be unable to explain what Catholics believe about God, Christ, salvation, the Eucharist, the Church, Scripture, or the Christian moral life.
This isn’t a marginal problem.
It’s close to the norm in many places.
And a parish that doesn’t address it isn’t protecting its people from a culture that will ask difficult questions.
It’s sending them into that culture unprepared.
They’ll still receive answers.
They simply won’t receive them from the Church.
Parish identity and unity weaken.
Without a shared understanding of the faith, the parish gradually loses the theological coherence that makes it more than a social community with liturgical habits.
Arguments about parish direction become increasingly difficult to resolve because they aren’t always arguments about strategy.
They may be arguments between fundamentally different understandings of what the Church is, what the parish is for, what salvation means, and what Christian mission requires.
One person understands the parish primarily as a community that preserves familiar practices.
Another sees it mainly as a provider of religious services.
Another sees it as a place of friendship and belonging.
Another sees it as a missionary community entrusted with forming disciples and proclaiming Christ.
Those disagreements can’t be resolved only by better communication, broader consultation, or more inclusive processes.
They require a shared theological foundation.
Without that foundation, the parish may keep using the same Catholic words while attaching very different meanings to them.
The capacity for evangelization shrinks.
Parishioners who can’t articulate the faith will struggle to share it.
Evangelization depends upon witnesses who know what the Gospel is and can explain why it matters in ordinary language to ordinary people.
This doesn’t require every parishioner to become a professional theologian.
It requires people who can speak truthfully and simply about the hope that’s in them.
Catechesis isn’t separate from evangelization.
It’s part of the formation that makes evangelization possible.
A parish that wants its people to evangelize but hasn’t prepared them to articulate the faith is sending them out without the most basic tools of witness.
They may be kind.
They may be generous.
They may serve faithfully.
But when someone asks why, they need language capable of naming Christ.
The pastor becomes the single point of failure.
When a parish has no real catechetical system, the homily becomes the only substantive formation most people receive.
The pastor becomes almost solely responsible for the theological understanding of the entire parish.
When he’s an excellent and consistent preacher, the parish may receive strong formation in certain areas.
When he’s stretched, reassigned, traveling, exhausted, or simply not gifted as a systematic teacher, formation thins or stops.
Even excellent homilies can’t carry the entire catechetical responsibility of a parish.
The homily has its own liturgical purpose.
It isn’t a substitute for sustained biblical, doctrinal, moral, and spiritual formation.
No parish should stake its entire catechetical life on one person’s Sunday preaching, however faithful that preaching may be.
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The central substitute is cultural Catholicism.
It’s the assumption that Catholic atmosphere, Catholic habit, Catholic identity, and regular Mass attendance will do the work of systematic formation.
That people will absorb what they’ve never been explicitly taught.
That the faith will pass itself on through osmosis.
Through the rhythms of the liturgical year.
Through parish customs.
Through childhood memories.
Through accumulated affection for the Church.
Some people will absorb a great deal that way.
They may have grown up in deeply Catholic homes.
They may read widely.
They may seek formation on their own.
They may encounter gifted teachers, pastors, religious sisters, mentors, or friends at decisive moments.
But a parish can’t build its catechetical life around the expectation that people will somehow find what they need.
Most people will drift toward the cultural average.
And that average is increasingly thin.
It’s shaped by assumptions that often contradict the Christian understanding of freedom, love, the human person, suffering, sexuality, authority, truth, and happiness.
Cultural Catholicism may preserve a lingering identity.
It can’t reliably sustain mature, articulate, missionary discipleship.
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The honest questions are these:
Does the parish have a coherent plan for teaching the faith at every stage of life, or does it have a collection of programs that happen to coexist?
Is adult formation treated as essential or optional?
Are catechists being formed, supported, and equipped?
Or are they recruited, handed materials, and left to manage on their own?
Does the parish have actual evidence that people can articulate the faith?
Or only the assumption that they can?
Does each formation experience lead toward a meaningful next step?
Does learning lead into prayer, sacramental life, community, service, evangelization, and leadership?
And what percentage of parishioners are engaged in intentional formation right now?
Not the percentage who are registered.
Not the percentage who attend Mass.
Not the percentage who once completed sacramental preparation.
The percentage who are actively and intentionally deepening their knowledge of God and His revelation through some sustained form of learning.
For most parishes, the honest answer will be a small fraction of the community.
That answer isn’t cause for despair.
But it is something the parish should take seriously.
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The faith isn’t self-explanatory.
It has to be taught.
Carefully.
Coherently.
At every age.
In every season of life.
Not because God needs our explanations.
But because the people He loves deserve to know what they believe, why it’s true, how it holds together, and how to speak about it when someone asks.
Next: forming a people who serve.
Not simply how the parish recruits and manages volunteers, but how it helps people recognize their gifts, take responsibility for one another, enter the work of the parish, and grow into a community in which the mission is carried by the whole body rather than the faithful few.
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