Tenison Woods and MacKillop Centre News: LIfe to the full

I am the living bread which has come down from heaven.

Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever;

and the bread that I shall give

is my flesh, for the life of the world.

John 6:50 - 51

For those of us who had the opportunity to listen to Richard Rymarz last week, we continued to explore our Catholic identity as schools. This conversation has been ongoing for some time. We have been privileged in being exposed to Therese and Jim D’Orsa’s seminal works Catholic curriculum and Leading for mission, and our own staff have spent critical energy making sense of and understanding about what it means to be Catholic schools.

Our one time colleague, Susan O’Donnell, in her 2000 doctoral theses on The phenomena of special character in New Zealand state integrated schools, wrote:

Under the Private Schools Conditional Integration Act, 1975, a Catholic school in New Zealand is a State Integrated school, providing an education with a Special Character. As such. it has both secular and religious purposes. As a State school, it delivers the New Zealand national curriculum in common with all secondary schools. As a Catholic school, its purpose is the development of the religious knowledge, faith and spirituality of its students within the specific context of the religious and educational tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. Under the Act, the maintenance and preservation of its Special Character is a legally binding responsibility for each school in partnership with the Crown.

Exploring the culture of each research school, this study examines those features that give rise to its distinctiveness and substance to its Special Character. It investigates the meaning attributed to the term 'Special Character' and considers issues arising from these perceptions. The process of Special Character transmission is outlined and its implications are discussed. These areas are explored through four major emergent themes, including cultural confluence, the significance of founding traditions, cultural transmission process and shared spirituality. Finally, in the light of the distinctive features that constitute the Special Character of the Catholic secondary school culture and the processes that both maintain and preserve it. A Grounded Theory of Special Character culture is proposed.

If we were defining the special character that distinguishes us from our local public schools, independent schools, we would need to seriously consider what that character might look like, how it would manifest itself. It has to be about our whole being. Just what is our whole ‘beingness’ as Catholics schools? The D’Orsa’s (2013:213) highlight our Archbishop’s Charter for Catholic Schools as being ‘one of the most complete attempts to address this challenge'.

David Tacey’s 2015 Beyond literal belief talks about religionless Christianity - he is an atheist but argues that there is no crisis of faith but a crisis of belief. He distinguishes between faith (‘The point of faith is that one is filled with a sense of the sacred that does not require evidence’) and belief (which are uncritical teachings, miracles, myths). But we must remain confident that the faith of our young people remains, ready to grow, ready to flourish. What we need to do, and with some urgency is to explore how faith transforms our human experience so that we seek to reach and touch the divine, through art, literature, music, architecture, scripture, the church and ultimately love.

What lies ever so deeply at the heart of what we are looking for is the person of Jesus who so generously and lavishly invites us into his hospitality – of breaking bread – so that we might have life, and have it to the full. And in offering it to all who come to and listen, it is truly catholic.

Peter Douglas

HEAD OF SCHOOL SERVICES, NORTH

Love Me Tender: The synod calls us to consider the vocation of the Christian family

Valerie Schultz

The tone of the working document released by the Vatican in preparation for the upcoming synodal assembly, entitled“The Vocation and Mission of the Family in the Church and the Contemporary World,” can be distilled into one word: tenderness. To say that tenderness can solve all our problems is an oversimplification, but truth is often quite simple.

The synod document is more complicated, of course. Its aims are lofty and comforting at the same time. We married folks are touchy about the way marriage is sometimes portrayed as a sort of consolation sacrament: the one you do when you have no vocation to the priesthood or religious life. But the document elevates the vocation and mission of the family and our sacrament of marriage to a refreshing equality of holiness. As couples, and as families, we too must discern our vocation, our part in offering the tenderness of Jesus to a wounded world. We too are missionaries to the people whom our lives touch.

We have an openhearted role model in Pope Francis, who embraces the world in all her tawdriness and tells her, sincerely and tenderly, that he loves her and God loves her. He reminds us that we all are capable of, and called to, great joy. Love first; ask questions later, he seems to say, which the document calls the pope’s “pastoral creativity.”

The document takes care to include the many configurations of the modern family. The Cleavers long ago gave way to the Simpsons, although I would note that the Simpsons are an intact family. Our families have always had skeletons. We have addictions, imperfections, mental illnesses, felony records, feuds, rivalries, mean streets, sketchy pasts. Our families include divorced and remarried members, gay and lesbian members, non-practicing and nonreligious members. Most of us are never going to be Ozzie and Harriet. To be honest, most of us would never want to be Ozzie and Harriet. And the church, rather than holding up an impossible paradigm, needs to say, “Come right in. You are welcome here. Because everyone here has all of those things, too.” We say in our handouts that God does not abandon anyone, but then we as church often do abandon those who threaten our sense of secure righteousness.

The document in many places directs the people of God to act with joy and tenderness towards each other, but people being people, the challenge is to imbue those who represent the church with this outlook. The faithful who work in our parishes, who attend Sunday Mass regularly, who publicly identify as Catholic, are the spiritual boots on the ground. We have the power to convert people and the power to repel people. I am thinking of a friend who left Mass near tears many years ago, because of the people in the pews who gave her the stink eye when her little girl, who had autism, made weird sounds. She has not gone back to that parish. Conversely, I know a priest who invited a man with limited mental capacity, who had been waving his arms fervently from the front pew during Mass every time the choir sang, to come forward and conduct the choir for the recessional. My friend was treated as “other.” The would-be conductor was treated as family. The latter is our sacred call.

An essential, lasting quality of being a family is that, in good times and bad, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, the family members have each other’s back. As the extended family of church, then, the question is: How do we have people’s backs? How do we welcome the many potential members of our family? Do we err on the side of love or on the side of the rules? Do we require people to jump through Catholic hoops, or do we accompany them on their walk, like Jesus with his loved ones on the road to Emmaus? We may need a radical change of mindset.

The world needs tenderness, which is the manifestation of selfless love, of self-giving, of sensitivity to the needs of others, of careful, mindful respect. The tenderness with which a parent loves a child is simple but powerful. The document understands the Christian family’s vocation and mission to be a tender balm to a world that is hurt and broken, rather than to add salt to the world’s wounds. Our tools are grace, the Eucharist, and the Holy Spirit. “Do we have the courage,” asks Pope Francis, “to welcome with tenderness the difficulties and problems of those who are near to us, or do we prefer impersonal solutions, perhaps effective but devoid of the warmth of the Gospel?”

Love me tender, says God. Take me to your heart.

Valerie Schultz is a freelance writer, a columnist for The Bakersfield Californian and the author of Closer: Musings on Intimacy, Marriage, and God. She and her husband Randy have four daughters.