The second of four articles on Venite ad Me, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Considerations on the transmission of the faith.
Anne and Harry, as I will call them, were no casual Catholics. Trinidadians who emigrated to the United States, they raised their children there in a faith they lived with real attention.
Both were Eucharistic ministers. Anne served in her parish’s social justice ministry and, once she was able, went to Mass most weekday mornings. They chose their children’s Catholic schools with care. Every night before bed, the children gathered, held hands, and prayed a simple night prayer, each one naming someone to pray for.
In their late teens, the children began to drift, though they still went to Mass because their parents went. At college they stopped. They found many good reasons; one was a parish fundraising drive that seemed to them to be only about money. But those reasons were just that.
Today, those children are good people, gracious and kind. When their own children were born, they did not bring them for Baptism, and they do not believe faith matters for a child growing up. In their homes there is no crucifix, no image, no sign of faith.
When Anne and Harry have the grandchildren, they pray with them, bless them, and speak to them about Jesus.
No longer ‘automatic’
Last time we sat with Jim before the crucified Christ. Anne and Harry’s story is the other side of the picture, and the more common one. Venite ad Me names it plainly: in many places the handing on of faith in the family “no longer occurs, so to speak, ‘automatically’” (38). Nor does it exempt us. “The bishops of the Antilles,” it records, “note a weakening of intergenerational continuity” (50).
In the Caribbean that weakening has a particular shape. For two generations our families have sent sons and daughters to New York, Toronto, and London. Many took their faith with them; many, like Anne and Harry’s children, did not hand it on.
At the 2011 census, 21.6 per cent of the people of Trinidad and Tobago described themselves as Catholic, and every parish knows the pews where the middle generation should be.
Often, grandparents fill the gap. Bishops in the former Soviet lands report the same (49). Anne blessing her grandchildren is not a footnote to the crisis. She is one way God is already answering it.
Why the chain breaks
The document offers honest reasons. A new culture exalts “the ‘sovereignty of the self’” (56): personal freedom, a real good, turned into the measure of everything. Digital culture reshapes our sense of space, time and authority, the very ground on which tradition stands (61).
A teenager in Arima or Brooklyn carries the whole world in a pocket, yet the voices there rarely include a grandmother’s. And a crowded spiritual marketplace offers quick answers to real needs (68).
Then the document turns the mirror on the Church. Many rival offers attract because of “objective shortcomings” in our own communities, and the Gospel we proclaim must answer not only life’s ultimate questions “but also the ‘penultimate’ ones” (69).
A fundraising drive was not why Anne and Harry’s children left. But how a parish speaks about money, and whether a young adult feels known there or merely counted, are penultimate questions we cannot wave away.
The hardest point is quieter. The document admits that, for all our catechesis, the Church still struggles to foster a lasting, personal encounter with Christ (79). That is not a verdict on Anne and Harry, who did more than most of us. It is a question for all of us.
A child can learn the prayers, receive the sacraments, and spend 12 years in Catholic classrooms, yet never hear, in a way that becomes their own, that Jesus Christ loves them, gave His life for them and lives at their side. Prayers and practices can be handed on, and they matter. But the encounter they serve cannot be inherited; each person has to receive it for themselves.
A minority, by choice
So, the document asks the Church to move from faith as an inherited affiliation to faith as a personal and conscious choice (66). It has the minority Churches of Asia in mind, but in Trinidad and Tobago we too are a minority among many faiths.
Our children, here and abroad, will not be Catholic because their grandparents were. If they are Catholic, it will be because someone introduced them to Christ and a community helped them stay. Belonging has to be offered, not assumed.
That changes the questions a parish asks: not only how many children made their First Communion this year, but who among them has met Christ, and who will walk with them at 19, when they leave for university or for Brooklyn.
It changes the questions families ask, too: not only whether the children go to Mass, but whether anyone has ever told them, plainly and warmly, why we do.
Not the first crisis
None of this is cause for despair. The document asks the Church to study its decline honestly rather than explain it away (119), and it reminds us that the chain has broken before, and that every epochal crisis has produced creative renewal (118). That renewal rarely began with a plan from above. It began with small communities of people who had met Christ and could not keep quiet about Him.
We have seen it here. In 1975, Rhonda Maingot, a businesswoman, had an encounter with the risen Lord. With Sr Assumpta (Rose Jackman), who had been a contemplative nun for 16 years, she founded the Living Water Community.
Its consecrated members live in household communities, and its ministries reach the homeless, abandoned children, the dying, people fighting addiction and the children of migrants and refugees, with missions from Russia to Barbados.
In Tunapuna, Deborah de Rosia began by gathering people to pray. The Eternal Light Community that grew from it runs a vocational school for young people the system had failed and homes for girls with nowhere else to go. Through the Charismatic Renewal, a Bible institute and formation in evangelisation, it makes Christ known.
Living Water and Eternal Light are two of six such communities. In San Fernando, Zion Community grew in 1980 from three young women set alight by the Charismatic Renewal.
In Woodbrook, the Emmanuel Community, founded in 1984 by a priest and two lay women, serves through spiritual and temporal works of mercy. In Arima, People of Praise began in 1989 with 26 young people determined to reach their own generation.
On the Feast of the Transfiguration in 2000, following another encounter, three young men began praying together and called themselves GANG, God’s Anointed New Generation. Today, they are known as the Companions of the Transfigured Christ, with outreach in Curaçao and Barbados.
In these communities, hundreds of Catholics have found what the first Christians found when they “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). The chain is broken in many homes, but the Spirit is already forging new links.
On the road
St Luke tells of two disciples walking away from Jerusalem on Easter evening, heads down. “We had hoped,” they say (Lk 24:21). They had followed faithfully, and it had ended at a tomb. What they did not know was that “Jesus Himself drew near and went with them” (Lk 24:15).
Anne and Harry could say, “We had hoped”. So could many parents and grandparents reading this. But the story is not over. Each time Anne blesses a grandchild, the stranger on the road is walking beside her.
In the next article, we turn to how faith takes root in a people’s own culture, and in their own words.
Key Message:
Faith no longer passes on automatically, even from the most faithful homes. Naming the wound honestly, and asking what our communities have failed to give, is where renewal begins.
Action Step:
This week, ask one person who has stopped practising their faith why. Then listen, without defending.
Scripture for Reflection:
Luke 24:21
written by Archbishop Jason Gordon
