Announcing:
Saint Mary's Press winner for the week of August 27, 2012

Congratulations to Dennis Earle

Dennis will receive a copy of Catholic Connections Handbook for Middle Schoolers, an $18.95 value.

The Catholic Connections Handbook for Middle Schoolers
by Janet Claussen, Pat Finan, Diana Macalintal, Jerry Shepherd, Susan Stark, Chris Wardwell

Whether middle schoolers encounter this book as part of the Catholic Connections program in faith formation or pick it up out of curiosity, The Catholic Connections Handbook for Middle Schoolers offers great guidance and aims to help young teens learn about all the central aspects of the Catholic faith, including God, revelation, faith, Jesus the Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Church, liturgy and sacraments, Christian morality and justice, and prayer.

Catholic Connections Handbook for Middle Schoolers
ISBN: 978-0-88489-994-5, paper, 552 pages

"Catechetical Sunday"

Sunday, September 16, is Catechetical Sunday. It is a day to recognize and affirm catechists for the vital role they fulfill in the life of the Church. The theme for this year’s Catechetical Sunday is "Catechists and Teachers as Agents of the New Evangelization." In writing about the New Evangelization, Bishop David L. Riken, chairman of the Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis, said, "May the New Evangelization be a time of deepening our understanding of the faith, and nourishment through our worship and participation in the sacramental life of the Church." This theme beautifully reflects the calling shared by catechists. As stated on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Catechetical Sunday Web page, "Catechetical Sunday is a wonderful opportunity to reflect on the role that each person plays, by virtue of Baptism, in handing on the faith and being a witness to the Gospel."

On the USCCB Web page, you will find a variety of available resources to assist you in celebrating Catechetical Sunday. These resources include:

• A theological reflection titled "Reawakening Enthusiasm in the Baptized for the Gospel Mandate"
• Catechist in-services
• Teaching aids on the New Evangelization
• Family and parish resources

I pray that your parish youth ministry and religious education programs will be blessed with excited, committed, and competent volunteers and, as always, I pray that God will continue to bless you and your ministry.

Peace,
Steven McGlaun

Click Here for More Information

"Finding Your Focus"
From The Confident Catechist: Strategies for the New and Not-So-New Volunteer

You are only a few minutes into a session, and already you are struggling to maintain eye contact with the group. Some of the young people are still listening, but many are visually surveying the room for diversions, and one seems about ready to nod off. What can you do to get the young people back on track, connect them to the lesson, and improve their understanding of its contents? You are ready to try almost anything. How about a focus? A focus can be any word or object that, when centrally placed, draws and holds the attention of the group while clarifying and enriching the meaning of the lesson.

Focus Approaches
Group focus approaches are limited in scope and number only by your imagination, sense of humor, patience, and, of course, the developmental level and understanding of the young people in the group. Following are some of the more conventional focus types.

Simple-Word Focus
The most common focus technique is one you may already be using. You may use the simple-word approach by writing a word or phrase on a chalkboard, a whiteboard, or a sheet of newsprint at the beginning of the session.

The word or phrase should announce the main topic or theme of the session. For example, if the day’s lesson centers on the Lord’s Prayer, write "Lord’s Prayer" on the board or newsprint. During the session, occasionally return to those words, underlining them, starring them, circling them, and even drawing arrows toward them for repeated emphasis. The words provide an anchor for the young people, keeping their attention on the lesson securely in place. Looking at the board anytime throughout the session will bring the young people back to the main idea of the day’s lesson. This simple-word focus can help ensure that every young person will leave the session firmly attached to the central message for the day.

Consider varying the way you present the focus words—in bold print, in small italicized print, on colored sheets of paper, on a banner, on a T-shirt, on a balloon, or even on a large sheet cake. You might even give each young person an index card or a small slip of paper with the focus word written on it. The possibilities are as exciting as you wish to make them.

Visuals
Putting words on the board works, but this method works better if it is used in rotation with other focus tools. Fortunately, there are many. Maps, charts, graphs, and photographs can be wonderful focal points when you connect them to a lesson and refer to them throughout the session to further develop or enrich a point.

A map of the ancient Middle East can help the young people more clearly visualize and locate the scene of any Gospel story. Colorful charts or graphs can attract attention to, and provide clear explanation of, a simple analysis of the growth of the Catholic Church over time. And, of course, photos of a recent parish Baptism, Confirmation, or First Communion provide a personal way to connect the young people with the sacramental life discussed in a text.

Whatever visual you select, be sure to maximize the results it can produce by placing it where the young people can easily see it—on a board, on a shared table, duplicated in various locations, or occasionally even passed around the room. Then remember to reference the focus repeatedly throughout the session. Simply displaying a visual device and making only a passing reference to it is ineffective and may actually distract the group.

The Unexpected
Perhaps the focus tools you will enjoy most are those you gather from your own surroundings. You can use everyday items like a rock, a can of soda, or a sack of potatoes to make connections to lesson topics and themes. Rocks of different sizes, placed in appropriate locations, can provide compelling images for lessons that discuss the martyrdom of Stephen or the woman caught in adultery. With just a little direction and imagination, the young people can picture the rock that is sitting on their table as one of those raised against Stephen or the adulterous woman. Being able to pick up the rock, touch it, imagine the pain of being struck by it, brings the young people more clearly into the Scripture event.

A can of soda might provide a link to topics like the gifts of the Holy Spirit that are waiting within us to bubble forth. It might also become a tool for talking about stewardship of the land through recycling. A shaken can of soda provides a focus for talking about our bottled-up human emotions and how explosive they could become.

The obvious use of the potato sack is as a focus for discussion on world hunger. By removing the potatoes and distributing them around the room, you provide tangible proof of how the world’s goods are unevenly distributed, some people randomly receiving large potatoes, others small potatoes, some none at all. But the individual potatoes in the sack can also demonstrate how unique we are as human beings, no two potatoes (or humans) being the same.

Potluck
When the young people are comfortable with the use of a focus, you might want to recruit them to provide some of their own focus materials. When you announce the topic for an upcoming lesson, ask for volunteers to bring objects from their own homes or yards that they think will help focus everyone on the lesson for the week. The benefit here, of course, is threefold: you get help with providing a focus, the volunteers have to do some real thinking about the topic and may begin to look at everyday items as possible spiritual tools, and you coincidentally stimulate the young people’s curiosity and interest in an upcoming theme or topic.

Some Closing Thoughts
Not all young people come to faith-sharing sessions with well-developed verbal skills. Some may show a positive attitude toward the faith but can be turned off, or away, by traditional textbook approaches to learning. If your approach includes simple-word, visual, unexpected, or potluck focus items that help make learning clear, concrete, or tactile, you can draw everyone in and provide a lesson that the young people can take home.

Think About . . .
1. Look around the room you are in right now. What is the focus point of each side or corner of the room? Where do your eyes go and linger or return? What is the focus point of each of your rooms at home?

2. Have you already used a focus as a teaching tool with your group of young people? If so, what was the focus and how did it assist your teaching efforts? What worked well? Not so well?

3. Suppose the main topic for an upcoming session is one of those listed here. What focus ideas would you use for each?

Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 2, 2012
Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23

Opening Prayer
Jesus, through your words that we reflect on today, you ask for a conversion of our hearts. You want us to have hearts guided by justice and compassion, hearts of love that inspire our actions toward you and everyone we meet in our lives. Jesus, open our hearts to your presence, so that we may see others as you see them. Amen.

Context Connection
The Pharisees and the scribes have accused some of Jesus's disciples of not washing their hands before they eat their food--the prescribed custom of the day. "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" (Mark 7:5). In accordance with Jewish tradition, Jews do not eat without carefully washing their hands. Sometimes this tradition of the elders is called "The Great Tradition," a set of many practices kept by the elite who lived in the cities. The Pharisees required everyone to observe these urbanized traditions. However, the people who lived in the countryside and itinerants like Jesus and his disciples sometimes found it impossible to honor their Jewish traditions because of their work. "The Little Tradition," an adaptation of "The Great Tradition," developed out of a need to meet the realities of life in a rural setting. Jesus, who was from the rural area of Galilee, embraced "The Little Tradition" and in this passage challenges the Pharisees over the tradition of washing hands before eating.

Jesus responds to the Pharisees' requirement by first challenging the Pharisees and calling them hypocrites. Greek scholars tell us that the actual translation of the Greek word hypocrite is "actor." In this passage Jesus is saying something like, "you quote tradition and ask others to act in this way when sometimes you do not act according to the whole tradition." He next challenges them over the Pharisees' emphasis of some cultural traditions that have taken precedence over the laws of Yahweh given in the Torah. Jesus quotes Isaiah when he addresses the Pharisees, "'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrine'" (Mark 7:6-7). Basically Jesus tells the Pharisees that they place more value in their human traditions than they do in the Torah, the Law of Moses.

Jesus then takes the opportunity to teach and tells the crowd that nothing entering the body from the outside can defile a person; it is the evil in each person's heart that defiles a person. Conversion of hearts is what Jesus is looking for--not some superficial practice. The Pharisees are concerned with outward appearances rather than inner conversion. The prophets spoke of conversion of the heart in bringing Israel back to Yahweh.

Tradition Connection
"For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come" (Mark 7:21).

Last week we considered the understanding of free will, choice, and responsibility. The reading this Sunday takes us deeper into the issue of the morality of human actions.

"Human acts, that is, acts that are freely chosen in consequence of a judgment of conscience, can be morally evaluated. They are either good or evil" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1749). In Mark's Gospel Jesus asks us to consider the direction of our heart. Do we choose to do something good because it is the true good or because by doing this particular thing we gain recognition? I choose to act in a particular way because it is in accord with the larger understanding of the common good. As an example, I may choose to make a commitment to be a volunteer at a nursing home to befriend a resident and develop a long-term relationship with this individual. The resident and I may become mutual friends and support each other over many years of friendship. My reason for doing this is based on my understanding of Jesus's command to love and be concerned about those who are in need of fellowship. This action is something that I freely choose to do based on my heartfelt wish to give of myself to another person. The end result is the mutual good of fellowship.

I could enter into the same situation with a different reason or motivation: to fulfill a requirement or by volunteering because I know it will "look good" on my application for college. Jesus's challenge to the Pharisees and the scribes, and to you and me, is to look at our reasons or motivations and determine whether we are acting for personal gain or recognition or because it is the right thing to do, because it is what Jesus is asking of us. The Pharisees were part of a group that was more concerned with outward appearances than with the inner conversion of the heart. Piety in a person's life is important, but pious actions intended to draw attention do not respond to Jesus's desire for a conversion of heart. "An evil end corrupts the action, even if the object is good in itself" (Catechism, paragraph 1755).

Wisdom Connection
Where does your heart direct you? The Gospel passage is about the difference between external practices and internal faith. Maintaining integrity is a lifelong endeavor and centers on our external behavior flowing from our internal conviction. Practices that flow only from habit, tradition, or law may destroy one's own integrity. Jesus is concerned with the disposition of a person's heart that leads to actions that are either good or evil. Moses and the prophets spoke about the conversion of the heart, turning hard hearts into fleshy hearts. Throughout salvation history God often challenges God's people for going through the motions of prescribed ritual without care for God and God's justice. Sometimes the actions of the Israelites lacked compassion and exposed an intention not centered on God. This is also true of us today. We need to give priority to the process of inner conversion, which manifests itself in outward actions. Jesus is acutely aware that lip service and other outward observances without a conversion of heart are not true signs of a covenantal relationship with him.

Acknowledgments
The scriptural quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Catholic Edition. Copyright © 1993 and 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

The quotations labeled Catechism are from the English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for use in the United States of America, second edition. Copyright © 1994 by the United States Catholic Conference, Inc.--Libreria Editrice Vaticana. English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Modifications from the Editio Typica copyright © 1997 by the United States Catholic Conference, Inc.--Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Used with permission.

The Lord's Prayer is taken from Catholic Household Blessings and Prayers. Copyright © 1988 by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Inc., Washington, DC. All rights reserved.