Continuing the Year of St. Paul, have the students write a 750-word commentary paper on a selected passage in one of Paul's letters. Suggested passages include:1 ThessaloniansMission of Timothy (3:1-8)Chastity and Charity (4:1-12)I CorinthiansBody of Christ (12:12-31)Love (13)PhilemonDignity of All (entire letter)GalatiansCalled by Christ (1:10-24)Justification through Faith (3:1-14)2 CorinthiansFalse Apostles (11:1-5)RomansFaith, Hope, and Love (5:1-15)Love and Law (13:8-10)Use the following outline to help you organize your paper:I. Text of the PassageWhat does the passage say?II. Content of the PassageWhat do biblical commentaries and scholars say about the passage?Analyze based on historical criticism, source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism.III. Interpret the PassageWhat does the passage mean for our world?What does this passage mean for me?This activity is taken from Encountering Jesus in the New Testament by Michael Pennock.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes the Second Vatican Council document Lumen Gentium in describing the four marks of the Church and their place in the Church:
"This is the sole church of Christ, which in the Creed we profess to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic." These four characteristics, inseperably linked with each other, indicate essential features of the Church and her mission. The Church does not possess them of herself: it is Christ who, through the Holy Spirit, makes his Church one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, and it is her who calls her to realize each of these qualites (CCC, 811).
Listed below are some case studies related to the four marks of the Church. For each situation, have the students list as many possible realistic responses to the dilemma as they can. Encourage them to be as specific as possible in describing each response. Have them discus ways in which each response underscores or ignores the four marks of the Church.
1. There is a significant disagreement over the style of worship at your parish. One group thinks that worship should be just as it always has been, the other believes that worship should be "modernized" to attract people who do not come to church. What do you think?
2. The majority of people in the parish believe that a new building project is necessary; however a significant minority feels that the Church should use its money to help the poor. What do you think?
3. The parish youth group is organizing several sports' teams. Youth have to try out for the teams and some youth may be cut from the teams. There are many in the parish who believe that Church-sponsored things should be open to everyone who wants to join them. There is a loud call for developing rules to govern the formation of every new group within the Church. What do you think?
4. There are three very distinct cultural groups at your parish. There is a strong push for three distinct worship services and for separate organizational structures to respond to the needs of each group. What do you think?
5. There is no standard pattern of sitting, standing, and kneeling at your parish for worship. It has become the practice for everyone to do whatever they want and are most comfortable with. Some people are complaining that the lack of unity distracts them from worship. What do you think?
6. There are several new Bible study groups being started in your parish. Some feel that anyone who wishes to start a Bible study group should be able to do so and advertise it in the bulletin. Others feel that only those Bible studies which meet certain criteria and are lead by certain people whould be allowed to meet under the auspices of the Church. What do you think?
7. Your parish has been assisting at a local soup kitchen for many yearas. The use of the soup kitchen has grown tremendously and the space it is in is not longer adequate. Your parish has been approached to see it it would be willing to open its parish hall two days a week as a soup kitchen. The parish is divided between those who feel it would be sinful to refuse and those who feel that opening a soup kitchen in the church would bring in an "undesirable element" into the neighborhood, making the neighborhood less safe and unfairly reducing the property values for those people (primarily parishioners) who had invested their lives in this neighborhood. What do you think?
8. Your parish is divided over what standards should exist for those who teach religious education, serve as sponsors, lectors, or eucharistic ministers. Some feel that any baptized Catholic who is committed enough to go through the training and "do the job" should be accepted. Others feel that only those of "impeccable moral character" should be accepted. What do you think?
The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines family as "a man and woman united in marriage, together with their children" (2202). Ask the students to comment on the definition with questions like:
Is this the only viable definition of family?
Can a family come in other shapes?
What "makes" a family?
Point out that a Christian family is a communion of persons, imaging the relationship between the Persons of the Holy Trinity. Ask the students to describe how families can concretely do this.
Continue the lesson by having the students complete the following exercises (taken from the text Marriage and Holy Orders: Your Call to Love and Serve).
The United States Census Bureau defines family as “a group of two or more people who reside together and who are related by birth, marriage, or adoption.” How do you define family? Write your definition below.
Family is . . .
Every family has special traits or qualities or does special things together that really matter to it as a family—make it unique. Think of a characteristic or quality you admire in your family, for example, humor, athleticism, or generosity. Write a limerick that shares something that matters in your family.
The following sample limerick is by a young woman whose last name is Wood. Check out how her family matters to her. Then, write your own family limerick.
I’m part of the family called Wood.
I wouldn’t leave if I could.
Though I’m oft’ underfoot,
I think I’ll stay put,
Cuz here is where I’m understood!
My Family Limerick
A limerick is a simple five-line poem. Lines 1, 2, and 5 have seven to ten syllables and rhyme with one another. Lines 3 and 4 have five to seven syllables and also rhyme with each other.
This activity, taken from Activities for Catholic Social Teaching, is designed to get students in touch with society's attitudes toward work and to challenge them to consider more carefully the service dimension of work and how to put this into practice in the present as well as the future. Copy and paste all or part of the material below to create your own student worksheet.
1. Write the words that come to your mind when you read each of these statements.
“I’ll work for food,” his ragged poster read.
“Get a job!” the passerby shouted.
“The working poor,” the story featured.
“I can’t afford to retire,” the 65-year-old lamented.
“Does this job include benefits?” the job-seeker asked.
“Medicaid Slashed,” the headline proclaimed.
“How do they expect me to pay for childcare, transportation, and health insurance, plus all my other bills, on this $7.00 an hour job!” the single mother screamed in frustration.
“That’s women’s work,” the young man protested.
“Women Still Get Paid 2/3 of What Men Do,” the headline stated.
“That’s the janitor’s job,” the student argued.
2. Overall attitudes. Based on your reactions to these statements, how would you describe your overall attitudes toward work, working people, and the unemployed? How do your attitudes compare to those of your family and close friends? to those of society in general?
3. Work attitude assessment. In terms of the work you are currently doing at school, at home, on the job, in your community, how would you rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 on the following pairs.
I do the least amount that is necessary/I go beyond what is asked of me
I’m negative and complain a lot/I’m joyful and positive about what I do
I think about myself first/ I’m careful about how my work affects others
In describing our work as something we do for God and for Christ, Mother Teresa says that we should “try to do it as beautifully as possible” ( What grade (from “A” to “F”) would you give yourself on how beautifully you do the various tasks of your life?
As you think about all these tasks, what would you say are your main goals in doing them?
4. Work as co-creating with God, as service to humanity.
Pope John Paul II said “… men [and women], created in the image of God, share by their work in the activity of the creator” and that “the purpose of work is to fulfill our own humanity and to benefit the humanity of those our work serves” (p. 000).
1. What are some of the ways you are already using your skills and interests to benefit others?
2. How do you envision putting your skills and interests in the service of others in the future?
3. What could you do right now—at home, at school, on the job, at church, or in the community—to be of greater service?
4. If we are truly are “co-creators” with God, what is it that you would like to create with your life?
Ave Maria Press is sponsoring its fifth annual Enrichment Day for High School Religion Teachers.The event will be held on Saturday, October 10th, 8am –3pm, at the Mendoza College of Business on the campus of the University of Notre Dame.This year our keynote speaker is Dr. Daniel Smith-Christopher, Professor of Theological Studies (Old Testament) in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University Dr. Smith-Christopher is a well-known speaker at catechetical conferences throughout the nation, including, for many consecutive years, at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress sponsored by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. He is the author of several books on Scripture, including the high school textbook: The Old Testament: Our Call to Faith and Justice.The afternoon will feature mini-break out sessions. J.D. Childs, Principal of Mission College Preparatory Catholic High School in San Luis Obispo and co-author of The Catholic Spirit: An Anthology for Discovering Faith through Literature, Art, Film, and Music (published in July 2009) will speak about the value of using classical literature, film, art, and music as part of a high school theology curriculum.Also to be explored: ways to incorporate electronic media in the theology classroom.There is no charge for this event—it is FREE to high school religion teachers. A complimentary breakfast and lunch will be served. Each participant will receive several free gifts and a chance to win a complete set of high school textbooks for his or her classroom. Special hotel rates in the South Bend area will be arranged closer to the event. To make sure you are on a mailing list for registration, please send your contact information to Karey Welde.
Last autumn, Ave Maria Press sponsored its annual Teacher Enrichment Day at the University of Notre Dame. The attendees shared favorite lesson plans with their colleagues. Periodically, we will share these lesson plans here.
Playing Monopoly with the 7 Themes of Catholic Social Teaching
When teaching the seven principles of Catholic Social Teaching, specifically The Principle of the Call to Family, Community, and Participation, we take notes and discuss the theme, stressing the roles of families and communities, the right to participate in society, the problems of the marginalized, and the concept of the common good; then I tell the students we are going to have some fun after those serious concepts, and that we are going to play Monopoly. (You will need to provide several Monopoly game sets to be able to play games with four people around each set.) I make a mental note of those students who tell me they always win at Monopoly.
I tell the students that in the interest of saving time, we are going to start playing "in the middle of the game." I give each student an envelope that contains money, properties, houses, and hotels. The set-up, of course is that the contents of the envelope vary greatly. One person at each game will have Boardwalk, Park Place, utilities, hotels, and lots of money; another may have only $300, one cheap property, and a "get out of jail" card. Not surprisingly, the envelopes with the least money and property goes to the students who brag they never lose in Monopoly.
As the students play, I wander through the groups and record what they are saying. I pepper my list with frequent variations on what gets down to the fairness of the game. I record comments like, "Sorry, I just own a lot of properties" and "This is not fair." After the allotted time is up, I ask the students to determine who "won" each game, and they immediately talk about how it was a set-up. I read them the list of comments, and they laugh sheepishly at their own. Then we discuss how it felt to open that envelop and see that they had a great draw or a lousy one. The discussion that ensues is very lively, and the students clearly get the point that not everyone is an equal participant in our society and it will remain that way unless we work toward making changes to established social structures. Every student seems to "get it" in a way I seldom see.
The activity leads very well into the Preferential Option for the Poor theme. At the end of my test on the unit on the seven principles, many students named the Monopoly activity as their most memorable part of the unit.
This lesson was submitted by Mary Mattingly, Assumption High School, Louisville, Kentucky.
January 28 is the Feast Day of St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the Church's great theologians and history's true geniuses. Here is some information about St. Thomas's life from This Is Our Church: A History of Catholicism:
St. Thomas Aquinas' work is the summit of the intellectual achievements of the Middle Ages. Born around 1225 into a family related to the emperor, Thomas defied his parents by joining the Dominicans. They had two of his brothers kidnap and imprison him in the tower of their castle hoping he'd change vocational plans. But Thomas persisted, and eventually returned to the order.
Thomas went to Cologne where he became the student of St. Albert the Great, a brilliant scholastic thinker and teacher. Thomas’s classmates called him “The Dumb Ox” because of his weight, seriousness, and slow movement. However, Albert defended his prize pupil by prophesying, “This dumb ox will fill the world with his bellowing.” And Aquinas did just that. He lectured in many of the leading universities in Europe, including the top school of the day, the University of Paris. He also wrote prolifically, producing his masterpiece of theological thought, a twenty-one-volume work known as the Summa Theologica.
In the Summa, Thomas showed the reasonableness of faith. He also defended human intelligence as a prelude to faith. Thomas argued that human reason is supreme in its own domain, but it can't master everything, especially the mysteries of faith. However, Thomas showed that these revealed truths are not beyond rational explanation. With the gift of faith, believers can make some sense out of the mysteries of our Christian religion, for example, the Incarnation, the resurrection, and the Trinity.
Thomas' masterful thought did not gain easy acceptance in his own lifetime. The Archbishop of Paris believed Aquinas’ teachings were heretical. Other philosophers, like St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), distrusted Thomas' well-developed and ordered theological system. Bonaventure and his allies emphasized the mystical approach to God through prayer, contemplation, and meditation. They stressed the will and downplayed the role of human reason. Toward the end of his life, Thomas had a direct experience of God. Commenting on it later, he said that all he had written was chaff compared to what he had experienced. He stopped writing, and three months later he died (1274).
Although Thomism (the philosophy of Aquinas) had its opponents even after Thomas' death, the Church finally endorsed his thought. In his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), Pope Leo XIII gave special theological prominence to Thomas’ thought. Thus, Thomas’s writings—especially the Summa— has powerfully influenced Church teaching. Aquinas’ clarity of thought, insistence on truth, respect for human reason, and defense of Christian revelation have helped the Church explain and defend its teaching up to our own day.
Discussion/Journal
1. Thomas said: "Even some things which reason is able to investigate must be held by faith; so that all may share in the knowledge of God easily; and without doubt and error." What is one belief that you hold about God that you credit to the gift of faith?
2. At first Thomas's great gifts went unnoticed. What is a talent or skill that you have that no one seems to notice?
Assignment
Locate and report on St. Thomas Aquinas's five proofs for the existence of God from his Summa Theologica. You can find the proofs online.
Prayer
Pray these words of St. Thomas Aquinas:
Grant, Lord, that I may gladly share what I have
with the needy.
humbly ask for what I need from him who has,
sincerely admit the evil I have done,
calmly bear the evil I suffer,
not envy my neighbor for his blessings,
and thank you unceasingly
whenever you hear my prayer.
Amen.
Pope Benedict XVI said that new technologies—including blogs, Internet video posts, and Facebook accounts, have an "extraordinary potential" to bring people together and that they can help people share the search for goodness, beauty, and truth.The Pope had some cautions too—including the sharing of degrading images on the computer and the danger of substituting online friendships for face-to-face friendships—but also recognized the enormous potential for the "digital generation "to bring witness of their faith to the digital world." In another announcement, Pope Benedict announced that the Vatican would produce daily videos available on YouTube in several different languages. And, just to note, anyone can already join with others of the more than 25,000 fans of Pope Benedict on Facebook.
