The fundamental need in catechesis today

Nowadays, it's difficult to meet an adult of forty years of age who is not a skeptic. Young people stand and look, and when they see that one after another their expectations for happiness are unfulfilled, they think that there is no answer and resign themselves to that. Someone who has his own happiness at heart cannot be indifferent when he finds a person who wants to live intensely for the whole of his life...

Only something real and present is able to draw hearts and challenge nihilism. People are more and more apathetic, because there are no proposals fascinating for the "I." It is only when the Mystery reveals its face that man finds the energy to adhere to it. We need the Mystery to be present, we need a living presence we can fall in love with. We need a carnal attraction like that of a child for its mother. Nothing less than this is enough for man.

It needs the presence of another man. It needs the Mystery to have become flesh. In Christ, concepts that were abstract become flesh and blood. This unheard-of realism, this involvement with the Mystery, is the only possible way of being saved. No reduction of Christianity to something merely spiritual or to ethics is enough to arouse people... Christ is contemporary to man by means of the Church. His Body is the tangible and historical sign, which carries the Mystery in its womb.

Christianity is able to embrace the whole of what is human and bring it to fulfillment, without any reduction...

It happened in the past that Christianity was reduced to morality or little more than a correct discourse. As John Paul II said, we have exchanged the astonishment of the Gospel for a set of rules... When we see Christ's capacity to respond to men, to forgive, and his tenderness, it is impossible not to say, "We have never met a man like this."...

It is time to offer a Christianity that is not reduced in its nature. But the problem is the method. We have to present the Christian proposal, while giving people the chance to try it out to see if it is true, and showing that it is reasonable to belong... Only something present and real can re-awaken us. This is the battle.
(Fr. Julian Carron, from TRACES, vol. 8.3, 2006)