The Diocese of Columbus and the Catechetical Institute of Franciscan University of Steubenville are joining forces in a program that will be the primary source of formation for catechists in the diocese.
“The diocese has been looking for a reliable partner in formation of missionary disciples as part of its Real Presence Real Future initiative for parish renewal,” said Father Adam Streitenberger, director of the diocesan Office for Evangelization.
“In the Catechetical Institute, we have a partner which has become one of the preeminent catechetical centers of the world since it was founded five years ago and is within a short drive from anywhere in the diocese.
“The institute has been successfully working with educators in diocesan schools for the past year and is inviting parishes to have Parish School of Religion, RCIA and adult education teachers, youth ministers, paid catechists and volunteers take part in its programs as part of their ministry certification process.
“Pope Francis established a new ministry of catechist for the laity last year, and the institute’s programs will be part of the requirements the diocese is working on for the ministry.
“The institute has developed 182 workshops arranged in 16 tracks of study, including three in Spanish, with more on the way. Pastors will be able to choose from those tracks to tailor their catechist formation programs to their parishes’ specific needs. That’s one of this program’s great advantages.”
When a parish signs up for the Catechetical Institute’s program there is a $300 annual fee. This year, the fee has been covered by the diocese and the institute together. Going forward, the fee can be waived in need-based situations for parishes. The institute charges nothing beyond that, no matter how many persons in a parish use its programs or how many workshops a parish offers.
Dr. William Keimig, the institute’s assistant director, introduced the program to parish leaders on Wednesday, Aug. 10 at Hilliard St. Brendan the Navigator Church. He said the institute is partnering with 107 dioceses in 35 nations, including 50 percent of the dioceses in the United States.
More than 4,500 parishes and schools are taking part, and more than 28,000 people involved in ministry activities are learning from the institute’s workshops and being mentored by more than 2,000 mentors.
He said the institute was the result of meetings over several years between Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, who assembled the Catechism of the Catholic Church; representatives of the Institute of Notre Dame de Vie in France; Barbara Morgan of Franciscan University; and Dr. Petroc Willey, director for 21 years of the Maryvale Institute in Birmingham, England and now a theology professor at Franciscan.
“Around the year 2000, Cardinal Schonborn noticed that the reception of the Catechism (which was issued in 1992) wasn’t very good in many parts of the world, including his own archdiocese,” Keimig said.
“There were some notable exceptions – Notre Dame de Vie, Maryvale and Steubenville – so he called representatives from those places together to talk to each other and see what was different about our approaches. Barbara brought me along.”
After seven years of intermittent discussion, Cardinal Schonborn asked the group to write a course for the RCIA program in the Diocese of Plymouth, England. Their continued collaboration led to Willey’s coming to Franciscan and ultimately to formation of the Catechetical Institute.
“We realized that in forming catechists since the 1980s, we were strong on teaching basic doctrine to large groups of varying ages and levels of experience, with paid parish staff members and volunteers mixed together, but we couldn’t deliver a methodology to go along with their doctrine. You could teach them something useful but not how to apply it to their particular needs.
“We were checking boxes, checking attendance and people were getting their certifications to teach, but there was nothing about someone’s personal faith experience and passing on that faith to others. We were strong on exhortation – the ‘why’ of what Catholics believe – but weak on enablement – how to pass on that belief in an effective way that would relate to daily life.”
With that in mind, the institute, with the help of more than 50 presenters from different walks of life, nations, ages and ministry areas, began assembling its program of workshops and course tracks focusing on long-term, in-depth formation for each niche of ministry.
The tracks and workshops are designed to be done in collaborative learning sessions with small groups. The number of groups is determined by the size of the audience at a session. Workshops take about three hours and are divided into six to 10 segments with a 10- to 12-minute video, followed by a specific task that includes multiple-choice questions but focuses on reflective questions encouraging participants to apply the content of the workshop to their daily lives.
“We don’t do lectures where the participants just sit and take notes, with some asking questions, then everyone goes home,” Keimig said. “We’re focused on forming people who then go on to form others.
“The mentorship model is the key to our programs. Mentors support, reinforce, refer back and refer people on to other workshops. They seek to listen, to take a sincere interest in someone else, enjoy achievements, believe in what others do, support their mission and help them through difficult patches.
“When I began as a religious educator at a parish in Maryland, I had to figure out not just how to run stuff, but how to build people in the faith. I found myself running into three barriers, which I found were common to others doing the same work: balancing the issues of the everyday world with Catholic teaching; feeling incompetent in my knowledge of the faith; and lacking confidence in my abilities to teach.
“The institute’s small-group learning sessions provide a model for effective formation. They give extroverts the help they need to be more helpful to others, while for introverts, they show how to deal with groups so that no one dominates and everyone in the group has their say.
“God can do much with little,” Keimig said. “The early Church started with a handful of people – the Apostles, the first generation of priests and deacons and a laity made up of people who were discipled in such a way that following Jesus and sharing Jesus were indistinguishable.
“It grew by leaps and bounds because of two factors: people who lived as other Christs and sacramental grace to lift their witness beyond weakness. The key to success in spreading the faith will always be personal, and the institute’s mission is to enable people to more effectively offer their own witness.”
The workshops are designed to be viewed in a group setting but are available online to anyone in the diocese at no charge. To obtain access, go to https://franciscanathome.com/diocese-columbus, select the middle blue button that says “My parish or school is already registered, and I would like to set up my individual free account under that institution” and follow the prompts to enter your information.
Another program for parishes and families that the Office for Evangelization recommends, titled Pathways Faith and Family, is designed to promote family-based learning. It was started by Father Tim Donovan, a priest of the Diocese of Orange, California, and founder of Faith and Family Life Catholic Ministries, in 2019 and has spread to about 7,000 families in about 120 parishes across the nation, he said.
“It started when me and some other youth ministers talked about the high school students who are involved in our ministries and realized they came from strong Catholic families,” Father Donovan said.
“We always tell parents they are the primary educators of their children in the faith and began to ask what we could do to help parents in enabling their children to encounter Jesus and forming them.”
Pathways consists of nine sets of tools and resources, titled Seek, Root, Claim, Mend, Nourish, Zeal, Witness, Mercy and Wonder, which deal with a particular aspect of Catholic teaching. Eight of the nine are for children and their parents; three also have units for teens and parents; and one is for parents only. The boxes and supplemental videos contain all the materials for a variety of hands-on, innovative activities that prepare children, along with their family, for reception of the sacraments. The whole family comes together to help prepare the child for the sacraments, promoting family centered learning.
Using the boxes for baptism, parents and godparents learn together to prepare for the baptism of their child. The box for confirmation also provides formation for sponsors to aid them in their important role.
The Pathways journey begins with a conversation between the parent and a religious education director, catechetical leader, clergy member or other parish representative for about 20 to 30 minutes to determine where the parents are in their faith journey. The parents then take part in a self-led inventory on what they desire moving forward. This helps determine which resource packages might be most useful to a family.
The course of study can be individualized to a family’s needs to provide the most engaging experience for them. The Pathways model begins with the experience of knowing Jesus for the whole family and builds on that experience to catechize the family together, helping them grow in their faith. Resources are available in English and Spanish.
“We are more a process than a one-size-fits-all program,” Father Donovan said. “Our model is based on stages of growth rather than a continuing spiral of growth. It’s a return to an older way of formation, focusing on the entire family rather than just the children or just the adults.
“It’s designed to encourage intentional conversations between parents and children about what it means to be Catholic. Those of us involved in Pathways have found that the likelihood of children retaining the faith is much stronger when they and their parents often have this kind of discussion.
“Pathways is family-centered and parish-supported rather than being the other way around. I think it’s the kind of thing Pope Francis is asking for when talking about personal renewal. People tell me all the time that our resources are the most beautiful they’ve ever seen for a family faith program. I don’t think anyone offers anything quite like our boxes.”
Hilliard St. Brendan Church has been part of the Pathways program for the past two years and has 320 children from 205 families signed up for it for the 2022-23 school year, said Jacob Doran, parish director of evangelization and catechesis.
“Father Bob (Penhallurick, the parish’s pastor) and my predecessor in this position, Theresa Whiteside, had been looking for a couple of years for a family-based faith formation program that provided more than just textbooks,” he said. “We experimented with families using various programs and found that those involved with Pathways were learning the most about the faith at home.”
The parish is using Pathways’ Seek and Root boxes and will continue to use the sacramental preparation boxes throughout the year. Besides being involved in at-home studies, participants are meeting once a month at the parish, with the gatherings divided into groups for parents and for students in kindergarten to second grade and in grades 3 to 5 and 6 to 8.
The sixth- through eighth-graders also are having small-group meetings twice a month and using books from Ascension Press.
“I’ve had overwhelmingly positive feedback about what we do,” Doran said. “Families like how the program is structured and the ability to build rapport with parents of other children of the same ages. I also appreciate the personal support from the Pathways team – how they have invested in me as a parish leader for the sake of the families here.”
For more information about Pathways, go to www.fflcm.org. Doran may be reached at jdoran@stbrendns.net. Father Streitenberger may be reached at astreitenberger@columbuscatholic.org.
Information on either the Catechetical Institute programs or Pathways also is available from Liz Christy, the Evangelization Office’s associate director for missionary disciple formation, at echristy@columbuscatholic.org.