Fr Mike Schmitz, Crossfit, And CCD

I've had a lot of comments about this week's posts on Our Lady of the Atonement, home schooling, and whether or not there should be CCD at Our Lady of the Atonement. They brought to mind a recent YouTube from Fr Mike Schmitz:

At about 4:55, he talks about something he feels the Church can learn from Crossfit, that there might be a "prescribed workout" for the day, but the program makes it clear that for those who may not feel able to perform at that level (at least at the start), the workout can be scaled. As a new Catholic, I appreciate the idea he presents -- let's recognize that many visitors here have eased into Catholicism from being "Catholic lite" Anglicans in the first place.

keeping in mind that, as the recent letter from Fr Lewis reminds us, the ordinariates are meant to evangelize Protestants, this issue of CCD and Catholic schools is important. On one hand, it isn't an objective sin simply not to send one's children to Catholic school. There could be any number of reasons why this is impossible, and the Church does not demand the impossible.

I know of a few families from my Episcopalian days who sent their children to Catholic school, but it's important to remember that there were highly prestigious Episcopalian schools in the area, and in those cases, the Catholic schools were simply cheaper.

So for evangelized Protestants, the idea of Catholic schools is probably one where scaling the program will work to good effect -- being a good Catholic means effective budgeting. (Our pastor has our diocesan parish provide a course in budgeting, in fact.) Sending one's children to CCD on Saturdays seems like it would be an effective way to scale the program. What on earth is wrong with that?

Several visitors provided background to the absence of CCD at Our Lady of the Atonement based on yesterday's post. The most complete was this one:

OLA's motivation for not offering CCD in the past was so you would enroll your children in the school. The school was where you would get religious education. Again a way to bump up enrollment and their profit.

After joining the Ordinariate, it was announced they would now offer CCD. They began open registration expecting people to line up for classes. Well that did not happen. There wasn't enough interest and they squashed it.

I am now told they are going to use a different CCD curriculum called Good Shepherd. They are "confident" this will work...

Another responded,

When we were at that parish, Fr. Phillips and Jim Orr told the congregation that if we were parishioners with children, we had an obligation to put put them in the Academy. Therefore CCD was not necessary and they stopped having it. They did provide for sacramental preparation if we were new and hadn’t gotten around to getting our kids all their sacraments. AFTER that, you were expected to enroll them in the Atonement Academy. They would call you out on it to your face if you hadn’t complied. We left soon after that, around 2008.

Our diocesan parish has a K-8 school and a girls' high school, but if offers both CCD and RCIA for older teens, so clearly the Phillips approach isn't necessarily the case in the Church at large. (In fact, the parish recognizes that the schools are in a highly competitive environment, and parishioners will send their children to a better Catholic school across town if it comes to that. They take nothing for granted.)

But here's another question. My regular correspondent found mention in OLA bulletins that "training" of catechists is under way for the new Good Shepherd CCD program. What does that "training" involve, and how does it correspond to the three-year formation program for certified catechists that's found in dioceses?

Wouldn't catechesis for the families of converts need to be even more comprehensive than for longtime faithful Catholic families? Isn't there a greater danger that a former Anglican catechist, like the Mrs Schmidlap I've postulated who studied Jane Austen, may think she's got it all down because she used to be Anglican, and anyhow, she's an expert on the Anglican patrimony?

The same goes for the ordinariate priests who supervise these catechists. How many were received, ordained a deacon, and ordained a priest in the course of a weekend? How many were waived in with MDivs from Nashotah House or Yale?

And even if there's halting and belated attention now being paid to CCD in San Antonio, what policies govern it, and what standards exist for licensing catechists, in Houston? On one hand, someone woke up last month and recognized we're dealing with evangelization here. On the other, a decade after the promulgation of Anglicanorum coetibus, nobody's yet given much thought to catechesis. Why not, for instance, enroll prospective ordinariate catechists in diocesan formation programs? Not sure if anyone's thought of it.

This goes to the lack of seriousness in this effort, and it's a reflection on Bp Lopes.