For the next few weeks I want to share with the readers of my column a reflection paper I was requested to give at the opening of the Annual General Meeting of the Antilles Episcopal Conference that was held in Bermuda.

The theme of the reflection paper was: Lifelong Learning and adult education/formation. My reason for sharing the paper is that the application of theme is not limited to the Bishops.

It also applies to the adult population of the Catholic Church. 

Introduction

In many, if not most cases, of our preparation for pastoral ministry, our principal goal is to serve the people as well as we can. We benefit from our ministry personally in an indirect manner.

For example, when we prepare conferences for those staffing the RCIA programme in our dioceses, we learn more and more about the methodology and spirituality of the RCIA programme ourselves. 

However, when we begin to look at the serious challenges of lifelong learning and adult education/formation as an intrinsic issue, there is an important change in goal-setting.

We are called to be personally involved as believers in the process of lifelong learning and adult education/formation. It is no longer just a question of the pastoral care of our people.

It is also about us. If we grow stale holistically, if we tire from the unending and frequently stressful responsibilities of our office as Bishops, it will inevitably affect the energy level we bring to ministry and, probably, it will also affect the sense of wholeness in our lives.

Brief historical development on catechetics in the Conference

Prior to the Jubilee Year 2000, the Conference began to recognise the importance of the issue of lifelong learning and adult education/formation.

We all had to face the fact that the number of people who were identifying themselves as Catholics in the censuses of our respective nations was dropping.

 In some cases, the drop was quite significant. No Bishop in the entire Conference was able to report numerical growth in his diocese. 

As we began to analyze that unhappy and challenging statistic, we arrived at two points of consensus:
1) Our people were vulnerable to the international process of secularisation and, in some cases, the neo-pagan culture in which they and we may be living; and
2) Our people were vulnerable to the sects because, we found, they had not grown in faith knowledge and in the formation process that must accompany faith knowledge.

The result of those two influences was that they could not meet the faith challenges of adult life. They changed their minds about their membership in the Catholic Church. They became statistics in what Pope John Paul II eventually called the New Evangelization.

In too many cases, we found that our people were being sacramentalised but they were not being either evangelised or given an experience of Church. An image that was used in the discussions at the workshop hosted by the Catechetical Commission was that of a gas station.

For many Catholics, Church is a place ‘to come in, fill up and move on.’ There is no sustained spiritual feeding in their lives. We also discovered that the catechetical experience of the people was almost exclusively informational and pre-sacramental. In addition, it frequently stopped at preparation for Confirmation.

Response of the Conference

What did we do as a Conference to begin to meet the challenge? We did what the Church usually does. After dialogue and analysis, we put out documents – a document on the nature of the Ministry of Catechesis and then a very lengthy document on implementing catechesis understood as lifelong learning. It was called Guidelines for Catechesis.

Eventually, the Catechetical Commission of the Conference hosted a weeklong workshop to help with implementation of the documents. Representatives from all the Dioceses in the Conference participated in the workshop.

It was a very positive experience but the energy at the workshop was not able to be sustained on the same level when the participants returned home. 

Post-workshop experiment

As a result of that workshop, the Archdiocese of Port of Spain decided to conduct an experiment in the methodology of lifelong learning. Sacred Scripture was chosen as the first theme for lifelong learning.

Five different certified speakers i.e. those who had degrees in scripture or theology made presentations that were televised live on cable television and carried on FM radio.

There was a ‘call in segment’ to the cable television/radio coverage. The text of the presentations was printed in a special pullout section of the Catholic News to allow for private and communal study.

DVDS of the presentations were distributed to the parishes, religious communities and to the ecclesial communities.

Facilitators were trained on the parish level to lead parish groups through the five presentations. Copies of the DVDS were shared with each Bishop of the Conference.

There were varied reactions to the experiment:
1) In some cases that the process of duplication failed i.e. the DVD was defective. In a few cases we had requests for replacement DVDs including some from the Bishops of the Conference.
2) Although the speakers tried ‘to keep it simple,’ some parishes found the material to be over the heads of the people;
3) Some parish priests did not cooperate with the experiment for various reasons;
4) The poorer parishes stated they do not have televisions in their chapel communities and frequently lose electricity. As a result they could not participate in the experiment;
5) Some parishes loved the process.   

Post-experiment developments

Since that time, in my capacity as Chair of the Catechetical Commission of the Conference, I have had the opportunity to meet with the new Regional Superiors of the Jesuit Community in Jamaica and Guyana.

They are quite interested in participating in future programmes of lifelong learning, adult education/formation projects of the Conference.

I ask that you keep their interest in mind because at the end of this reflection, I shall offer some proposals for the Region for consideration during our meeting.