Catechesis and Life Experience
22.
It is useless to play off orthopraxis against orthodoxy: Christianity is
inseparably both. Firm and well-thought-out convictions lead to courageous and
upright action, the endeavor to educate the faithful to live as disciples of
Christ today calls for and facilitates a discovery in depth of the mystery of
Christ in the history of salvation.
It
is also quite useless to campaign for the abandonment of serious and orderly
study of the message of Christ in the name of a method concentrating on life
experience. "No one can arrive at the whole truth on the basis solely of
some simple private experience, that is to say, without an adequate explanation
of the message of Christ, who is `the way, and the truth, and the life' (Jn.
14:6)."(51)
Nor
is any opposition to be set up between a catechesis taking life as its point of
departure and a traditional doctrinal and systematic catechesis.(52)
Authentic catechesis is always an orderly and systematic initiation into the
revelation that God has given of Himself to humanity in Christ Jesus, a
revelation stored in the depths of the Church's memory and in Sacred Scripture,
and constantly communicated from one generation to the next by a living, active
traditio. This revelation is not however isolated from life or artificially
juxtaposed to it. It is concerned with the ultimate meaning of life and it
illumines the whole of life with the light of the Gospel, to inspire it or to
question it.
That
is why we can apply to catechists an expression used by the Second Vatican
Council with special reference to priests: "Instructors (of the human
being and his life) in the faith."(53)
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