Before Amanda Cabe became a catechist at the Church of the Little Flower in Bethesda, Maryland, she admired the volunteers who gave up part of their Sundays each week to teach children about the Catholic faith, seeing their work as an important service to the parish.
She had no intention of joining them.
“I didn’t think I was qualified, I had no teaching experience, and I certainly didn’t think I had the time,” Cabe said. “That was my Peloton time!”
Now beginning her second year teaching fifth grade in the parish’s religious education program, Cabe has learned that willingness to share the faith matters more than having every answer.
“What I’ve learned is that you don’t have to come into it knowing everything,” Cabe said. “You need a willingness to learn, to share your faith, and to serve the children.”
About 3,000 catechists serve across the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington each year in ministries that include children’s catechesis, the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults and continuing adult faith formation, according to Sara Blauvelt, Secretary for Catechesis for the Archdiocese of Washington.
Those catechists support more than 17,000 students in parish religious education programs for kindergarten through eighth grade. About 4,000 adults participate in ongoing adult faith formation each year, Blauvelt said, and more than 1,700 people who entered the Catholic Church at Easter this year in the archdiocese were accompanied by catechists.
Ahead of Catechetical Day on Oct. 17 at DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, catechists reflected on what brought them into the classroom, what keeps them returning and the challenges of passing the Catholic faith to a new generation.
Their experiences range from being professional educators to being parents who never imagined themselves teaching. Their ministries include First Communion preparation, Confirmation and faith formation programs serving children and adults.
In his 1979 apostolic exhortation Catechesi Tradendae, St. John Paul II described catechesis as one of the Church’s primary tasks, rooted in Christ’s command to make disciples and teach them.
“Catechesis is a vocation; it is a call to which so many lay faithful respond ‘yes,’” Blauvelt said. “It is a profound ‘yes’ to the mission of helping people fall in love with Jesus Christ.”
Maggie Gorman, coordinator of faith formation at Jesus the Good Shepherd Parish in Owings, Maryland, has more than 10 years of experience as a catechist and previously taught religion and English at the Cardinal Hickey Academy there.
“The biggest misunderstanding is that the catechist needs to know it all and also be a trained teacher,” Gorman said.
“The catechist needs to be faithful, prayerful, and practicing acts of charity,” she said. “A new catechist learns, or re-learns, the material chapter by chapter, and with preparation and prayer, can teach the kids.”
“If you love the Lord and feel any nudge to help in faith formation, don’t let fear stop you — just jump in,” she added.
Alicia Richwine, a former teacher and stay-at-home mother who has served as a catechist at Jesus the Good Shepherd for nine years, began as an assistant in a second grade class and stayed because she loved helping children prepare for First Reconciliation and First Communion.
“You don’t have to have all the answers — just be willing to learn with the students,” she said.
Jessica Ptomey, director of religious education at Sacred Heart Parish in Bowie, Maryland, has served in that role for six years, working with catechists in adult and children’s faith formation programs.
“We are all called to be evangelists for our faith, and those who have encountered Christ have all they need to begin sharing Him with others,” Ptomey said.
Blauvelt said volunteer catechists are essential to the Church’s work of forming disciples, sharing the Gospel and helping people grow in faith through the sacraments and Christian life, and that their perseverance “builds up the Body of Christ, the Church.”
Ptomey said every Easter Vigil and every sacrament received leaves her grateful to witness what happens in people’s lives when they encounter God through the Church and its sacraments.
For Jessie Cortes-Fuentes, that work began when she was still a student herself.
Cortes-Fuentes, who works in religious education at St. Catherine Labouré Parish in Wheaton, Maryland, first became a catechist as a seventh grader at Christ the King School in the Bronx, New York.
“At the time, I thought it would be kind of ‘cool’ to help children from the public school learn more about God,” she said. “I remember feeling that they didn’t have the same opportunity to learn about their faith that I had, and I wanted to share at least a little bit of what I had been blessed to receive.”
Years later, as her own children prepared to receive the sacraments, Cortes-Fuentes returned to catechesis. She has served at St. Catherine Labouré for 11 years and now accompanies children in third through sixth grades through a two-year preparation for First Communion.
One of her former students returned to the parish program after receiving Confirmation and became a teen assistant assigned to Cortes-Fuentes’ class.
“Seeing one of ‘my kids’ come back not only for her service hours for school but also wanting to help teach the faith and serve others, especially at such a young age, was incredibly heartwarming and special for me,” Cortes-Fuentes said.
“I planted that seed, and now I get to see it flourishing right in front of my eyes!”
Stephen April, a theology teacher at DeMatha Catholic High School, is in his fifth year as a catechist at Sacred Heart Parish in Bowie, where he teaches eighth graders preparing for Confirmation.
“You can be young and still do it,” April said. “You don’t need to wait until you’re retired to help out at church.”
Many of Sacred Heart’s catechists are younger than 40 or 45, he said.
“The children who attend are very much interested in the witness we bring to the classroom,” April said.
During his first year teaching religious education, he watched his students’ understanding of Confirmation change.
“It wasn’t just information they learned, but they were actually excited to receive the sacrament because of what it truly means,” he said.
The catechists also pointed to the pressures competing for children’s time and attention.
“Families are so busy it is hard to fit faith formation classes into their schedules,” Richwine said, pointing to sports and other activities that increasingly fill Sunday mornings.
“I think some, not most, of our young people just see CCD or maybe even Confirmation as a box to be checked,” April said. “Not everyone fully realizes the gift of the sacraments.”
“They’re kids, so they may not fully understand, but parents have to reinforce what we’re teaching,” he said. “The home is the first church, as they say.”
Gorman also said that responsibility belongs to the laity.
“I think the priests are doing their job, and it is the laity that must bring the Word out to the family, the place of work, and the neighborhood by words and example,” she said.
For families, she said, that means making Sunday Mass a priority even when sports, dance and other activities compete for their time.
“When a parent caves in to the demands of sports and other activities, the faith of the family is weakened,” Gorman said. “The Catholic family needs the Eucharist to stay unified and strong.”
Ptomey said forming young Catholics is a responsibility for the whole parish.
“We need parishes full of Catholics from different walks of life who feel responsible for all the other people in their parish,” she said.
Young Catholics whose families already practice the faith need other adults reinforcing what they encounter at home, she said, while children without strong examples of Catholic life in their families need the wider parish community even more.
Cabe pointed to another challenge: the lack of quiet in children’s lives.
“For young people especially, life can move from school to homework to activities to bedtime, sometimes without even much time to sit down together for dinner,” she said. “Add phones and all of the other distractions around us, and there is very little opportunity for kids to simply be still.”
“I needed someone to teach me how to pray, how to seek Him, and how to make space for Him in my life,” Cabe said.
She hopes catechesis can give young people practical ways to do the same.
Laura Bradley, a Sacred Heart parishioner who teaches fourth through eighth grade religion at St. Mary of the Mills Catholic School in Laurel, Maryland, and second grade sacramental preparation at her parish, takes her religious education students to Eucharistic Adoration during every class.
“The kids just want to kneel at the front and be close to Him, and it is incredible to see how they love being still and quiet,” Bradley said.
When another part of class runs long, she said, someone inevitably asks when they are going to the chapel “to see Jesus.”
Bradley said watching her second graders receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation and later approach the Eucharist at their First Communion moved her to tears.
“We can’t teach the faith the same as we were taught,” Bradley said. “Kids are so distracted by screens and noise from the world around them.”
“Kids need daily encounters with Jesus so that they can understand who He is and how much He loves them,” she said.
Cortes-Fuentes said young people may also struggle to hold onto faith when they encounter suffering they do not understand.
She pointed to children facing separation from loved ones because of immigration status, seeing friends or classmates experience such separations, or living through natural disasters, loss and grief.
“Why would God allow this to happen?” she said they may wonder. “Where is God when people are suffering?”
“We also need to help them understand that it is okay to have questions, fears and doubts,” Cortes-Fuentes said. “Rather than being afraid of those questions, we can use them as opportunities to help their faith grow deeper.”
The goal, she said, is to help children move from knowing about God to trusting in God, including when answers do not come easily.
Teaching the faith also changes the people doing the teaching.
“I can’t just teach it; I have to back it up in my own faith life,” April said. “That has been a positive and humbling experience.”
Richwine summed up one lesson of her nine years as a catechist in a few words: “How much your own faith is strengthened when it is shared.”
“God is continually unveiling His mysteries and His love to me,” Ptomey said.
“The more I learn, I see there is always more to learn,” Bradley said. “They give me so much hope, and I learn from them every single day in the classroom. Being a catechist has changed my life.”
Blauvelt hopes Catholics will think about the people who helped form their own faith.
“My first hope is that you make time to say ‘thank you’ to someone in your life who has helped you to grow in your faith — especially those who had a great volunteer catechist,” she said.
“The Church needs more joyful witnesses to the faith, and you may be the person He is inviting,” Blauvelt said. “Do not be afraid to accept that invitation.”
Cabe did not grow up Catholic and was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church at age 25. She sometimes feels as though she is receiving the formation she missed as a child alongside her own children and the students she teaches.
“There is something very meaningful to me about the fact that a faith I chose as an adult is now one I have the privilege of helping pass on to another generation,” Cabe said.
She entered the classroom hoping to help form the faith of the children entrusted to her.
“They are helping to form mine as well,” she said.
