"Do We Trust the Liturgy to Be Our Teacher?" : The Catechist, Liturgical Catechesis and Mystagogy

Nowadays, “liturgical catechesis,” and perhaps less-so “mystagogy,” has become a buzzword amongst catechists because it is a well-established ecclesial mandate. All official liturgical and catechetical documents resulting from Vatican II call for the faithful and pastors to engage in liturgical catechesis. Vatican II’s Ad gentes speaks of “formation in the entire Christian life” and of “an apprenticeship” in discipleship to Jesus, and “not merely an exposition of dogmatic truths and norms of morality.”¹ The Church has been moving towards a reclaiming and restoring of the inner sense of liturgical catechesis as mystagogy. It is nothing less than formation in baptismal spirituality, a spirituality that comes to birth, and is sustained and celebrated in the liturgical prayer of the Church. The challenge addressed by this paper is how do we, the baptized people of God, live from the liturgy? It is my intention to explore this through the particular question, “Do we trust the liturgy to be our teacher?”

It is almost sixty years since the modern Church was launched on this trajectory by Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (1963), the first document to explicitly use the term liturgical catechesis (catechesis liturgica), contextualized by a very focused conception of liturgical participation for instruction into the mysteries.² And with the appearance of the third edition of the Directory for Catechesis (2020),³ nearly a quarter century after the second edition, it is an opportune moment to evaluate what we are doing in liturgical catechesis, one that draws its inspiration from the Church’s ancient practice of the baptismal catechumenate,⁴ when we accompany people in places and times where prayer, liturgy and sacraments happen in the local parish and diocese, in schools and university chaplaincies, on navy ships, and as Pope Francis demonstrates, in hospitals, refugee-asylum centers, prisons, nursing homes, and among the homeless in shelters.

If liturgical catechesis is one of the most significant instruments in the Church’s priority of mission/evangelization and personal and ecclesial renewal, how do we get there? What will best support the catechist and the liturgist in this endeavor? I want to posit that it is more than a matter of knowing what all magisterial documents say about liturgical catechesis. The liturgy can only be our teacher if we know how such catechesis “works.” Our reflections focus on the way that catechists and liturgists may actually interpret, shape and conduct liturgical catechesis at “the coalface,” a catechesis capable of opening up the mystery and its meaning, i.e., mystagogy.

To ask “how we are to live from the liturgy” is to begin with Vatican II’s renewed consciousness of baptism and liturgical spirituality, the source of Christian life. From the outset, it is essential to appreciate that catechesis cannot be separated from liturgy, just as liturgy’s formative role is to be acknowledged in nurturing people to become disciples whose lives proclaim that they have seen the Lord (John 20:18).⁵ Since the catechist is “a witness of faith and a keeper of the memory of God,”⁶ I then pose a few observations that are integral to formation of the catechist’s and liturgist’s own perception and reality in order to ascertain whether we are there yet. “The quality of pastoral initiatives is necessarily connected to the person who brings them into being.”⁷

Within this baptismal context the principal task of the discussion is taken up. Every door needs a key to gain access to the room of a “Spirit-touched community.”⁸ Catechists, like liturgists, make choices about what, when, how, who and why liturgy and catechesis will develop in a particular way by means of the prayers and readings and the symbols and rituals set forth in the Church’s official rites, the sources for liturgical catechesis. The rites set the agenda for mystagogy and direct its catechesis. At the core of encountering the mystery is the most Catholic of principles: a sacramental vision of life,⁹ a recognition that access to theology...