I was initially shocked to hear Fr. Murr say that for over six decades there has been no proper catechetical teaching in the Church. I suppose I had assumed, or at least hoped, that what I knew to be true on this side of the Atlantic was untrue on the far side of the Atlantic.
From 1969 to 1981, I was the director of a retreat and conference center in London, and every week in term time Catholic schools sent me class-loads of children to give them a retreat. I was appalled at the almost complete lack of religious teaching. So, twenty or more years ago, I decided to produce a website that could provide for all serious searchers a free guide to the God-given spirituality that Jesus Christ Our Lord first practiced Himself before introducing it to the early Church. Although I completed my task by last August, I spent almost two more months writing an introduction that was divided into four podcasts that I edited.
Thanks to a piece of outdated equipment that I was using, the quality of the sound was totally unacceptable. At my age, the prospect of rerecording everything again was daunting. I was at the point of throwing in the towel when a book that I was reading on the “Poor of Yahweh” made me think, for I was convinced that what I read must be incorporated into my podcasts. Let me explain why, because what I read has so much relevance to our predicament in the contemporary Church.
After what were considered to be the golden days of Judaism, in and immediately after the reigns of King David and King Solomon, Jewish spirituality began to wane. It was the vocation of the great prophets to remind the people of God’s covenant with Abraham and of the great nation that they would become if they remained true to that covenant. However, it seems that it was only a comparatively few who remained faithful. These few came to be called the remnant.
Continue reading at Crisis Magazine