Jubilee of Catechists

The Jubilee of Catechists is to be marked during the days 26th-28th September 2025. The Institution of new catechists is due to take plae during Mass celebrated by the Holy Father on Sunday 28th September 2025. 

In the Motu Proprio Antiquum Ministerium , Pope Francis established the lay ministry of catechist for the universal Church. 

The role played by catechists is one specific form of service among others within the Christian community. Catechists are called first to be expert in the pastoral service of transmitting the faith as it develops through its different stages from the initial proclamation of the kerygma to the instruction that presents our new life in Christ and prepares for the sacraments of Christian initiation, and then to the ongoing formation that can allow each person to give an accounting of the hope within them (cf. 1 Pet 3:15). At the same time, every catechist must be a witness to the faith, a teacher and mystagogue, a companion and pedagogue, who teaches for the Church. Only through prayer, study, and direct participation in the life of the community can they grow in this identity and the integrity and responsibility that it entails (cf. Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, Directory for Catechesis, 113). ...

Referring more specifically to the stable ministry envisioned by the Motu Proprio, Pope Francis continued: 

This ministry has a definite vocational aspect, as evidenced by the Rite of Institution, and consequently calls for due discernment on the part of the Bishop. It is in fact a stable form of service rendered to the local Church in accordance with pastoral needs identified by the local Ordinary, yet one carried out as a work of the laity, as demanded by the very nature of the ministry. It is fitting that those called to the instituted ministry of Catechist be men and women of deep faith and human maturity, active participants in the life of the Christian community, capable of welcoming others, being generous and living a life of fraternal communion. They should also receive suitable biblical, theological, pastoral and pedagogical formation to be competent communicators of the truth of the faith and they should have some prior experience of catechesis (cf. SECOND VATICAN ECUMENICAL COUNCIL, Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church Christus Dominus, 14; CIC can. 231 §1; CCEO can. 409 §1). It is essential that they be faithful co-workers with priests and deacons, prepared to exercise their ministry wherever it may prove necessary, and motivated by true apostolic enthusiasm. 

 In most parishes in Britain, catechists are likely to be involved in particular programmes - preparing children for First Communion or Confirmation, or preparing adults to be receivied into the Church at Easter - so they may not experience the full range of the catechetical role outlined in the first paragraph above. It is unlikely that they will be familiar with the Directory for Catechesis, to which Pope Francis referred, and they may not have a good knowledge of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The focus of catechetical activity only on these specific moments also has, in my view, a weakness of its own making. If the parish is a locus in which to experience the universal call to holiness, it is also a locus in which there is a need to experience a specificity in how that universal call is lived out by the individual Catholic. In other words, it needs to be a locus to experience a specific charism, and it is this need that is missed out by a catechetical strategy that focuses only on three specific moments. A formation within a specific charism is also needed, which is why I sometimes think that the formational structures of a new movement such as the age based groups of the Focolare can form a model for parish catechesis, into which the specific moments of First Communion and Confirmation can fit. 

The situation of catechists in less developed nations can be very different. At the Third International Congress on Catechesis, held at the Vatican in September 2022, the Bishop of Lolo in the Democratic Republic of Congo presented the work of the Mobokoli Catechetical Formation Centre. In a one year programme, the centre trains married couples to then return to their parishes as catechists. A combination of religious and practical training enables couples to proclaim the Gospel and promote an integral human development:

The spouses are formed in basic theology, spirituality, sacred scripture, catechetics, and pedagogy.  They are also schooled in matters of agriculture, animal husbandry in both theoretically and practically, cultivating model rice and manioc corn fields, practicing various methods of raising poultry, sheep and goats, etc.   Spouses are formed in basic language skills (reading/writing), sewing, life education, catechesis of children, young girls and women.

Catechists might make their own the words of the Jubilee Prayer:

May the grace of the Jubilee reawaken in us, Pilgrims of Hope, a yearning for the treasures of heaven. May that same grace spread the joy and peace of our Redeemer throughout the earth.