Presentation on 'Initial Proclamation in the educative environment'
for the Study Days of the Salesian Family on the Initial Proclamation of Christ

in the Africa & Madagascar
November 7, 2012 Addis Ababa

Mons Lisane-Christos Matheos Semahun (Catholic Archeparchy of Ethiopia)

Initial Proclamation

In this presentation I kindly ask you to understand initial Proclamation ‘IP’ generally as ‘evangelization’ or religious education (eg: IP is superficial), although there are many adult baptism in DB works. The term initial proclamation refers to the start of the rich, dynamic, and complex process of integral evangelization. It is the beginning of the pedagogy which introduces people step by step to the mystery of Christ. Initial proclamation is the short but it is a door to the next step and it is an engaging work. It is directed not only towards those who do not know Christ but also to the baptized and who have abandoned the practice of their Catholic faith, to those who are living their faith with cultural and sociological understanding of Christianity, to those who practice the Christian faith occasionally, and to those who practice their faith out of habit, hence this practice has not enabled them to personally encounter Christ as their personal Savior. IP depends on our quality of life (witness), friendly approach. Initial proclamation is the witness and explicit, contextualized presentation of Christ and his Good News to a individual and community which stirs up their interest, inviting the listeners to a personal and communitarian encounter, conversion and fundamental choice for Christ in community (1 Cor. 12,17; Eph 5,23).

Since, proclamation is the permanent priority of mission it is not something to opt for. Because it is made in union with the entire ecclesial community, is never a merely personal act. It is also inspired by faith, which gives rise to enthusiasm and fervor in the missionary In order to be consistent I will use the word Evangelization or religious education while, it may mean also Initial proclamation.

Evangelization is in fact the grace and vocation proper to the Church, her deepest identity. She exists in order to evangelize, that is to say, in order to preach and teach, to be the channel of the gift of grace” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 14).

These words from Pope Paul VI perfectly summarize the core of the Church’s identity. She has been given the supreme privilege of proclaiming God’s message of love, mercy and salvation for His people. She is called to be the mediator of salvific grace to the world. Such gifts cannot be hidden. By its very nature they must be shared.

Evangelization and Catholic Schools

Throughout the centuries, the Church has developed many ways, many methods for evangelizing, for sharing God’s saving message and grace. One of the most effective is the Catholic School.

By nature and design, the Catholic School is equipped with the necessary tools for proclaiming the Gospel and ensuring that its students have every opportunity to accept this ineffable gift.

In contemporary society, the Church finds its mission and importance as relevant as ever. People throughout the world hunger for God’s word and His grace through the Sacraments of the Church. Therefore, the Church expends significant resources to build schools to help people learn about God’s love so they might respond better to that love and ultimately share it with a world that needs it so desperately.

In our continent, Catholics expend great effort to ensure that these schools are well staffed and funded, are academically excellent and provide students with activities that help them become well-rounded persons. In fact, these aspects are so important to the well being of a Catholic School, ways have been developed to measure empirically a school’s progress and success in each of these critical areas.

However, none of the areas listed above (funding, academic excellence, and success in extracurricular activities) is the defining aspect of a Catholic school. Most schools strive to achieve success in these areas. The defining aspect of a Catholic School, which separates it from every other kind of educational institution or enterprise, is its Catholic identity.

Running a Catholic school today is challenging for many reasons. On the spiritual level, young Catholics are constantly confronted by values hostile to those of the Church. This causes tension within young people, who are already struggling with issues of self-identity and looking for meaning in their lives.

That is why a Catholic School is perfectly positioned to provide the spiritual guidance that young people so greatly need and which they desperately seek. When a Catholic School fails in its mission to help students grow in love of God and others, the consequences can be disastrous.

The five Essential Mark of the Catholic Schools”,

The Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education recognizes this reality by way of admonition and encouragement in its document Education in a Catholic School: ARCHBISHOP J. MICHAEL MILLER, CSB Secretary Congregation for Catholic Education, who is the writer of the book called “the Holy see’s teaching on the Catholic Schools” in 2006 for the purpose of solidarity association. has also written an essay with the title “The five Essential Mark of the Catholic Schools”, which deals on the five elements that necessarily belong to a school's Catholic identity are the principles proposed by the Holy See that justify the Church's heavy investment in schooling. Like the marks of the Church proclaimed in the Creed – one, holy, catholic, and apostolic – so, too, does the Holy See identify the principal features of a school as Catholic: a Catholic school should be inspired by a supernatural vision, founded on Christian anthropology, animated by communion and community, imbued with a Catholic worldview throughout its curriculum, and sustained by gospel witness. These benchmarks help to answer the critical question: Is this a Catholic school according to the mind of the Church?

I found it to be fitting to the subject I am requested to present to this Study Days.

1. Inspired by a Supernatural Vision

The Church sees education as a process that, in light of man's transcendent destiny, forms the whole child and seeks to fix his or her eyes on heaven. The specific purpose of a Catholic education is the formation of boys and girls who will be good citizens of this world, loving God and neighbor and enriching society with the leaven of the gospel, and who will also be citizens of the world to come, thus fulfilling their destiny to become saints.

If Catholic educators, parents, and others who dedicate themselves to this apostolate fail to keep in mind a high supernatural vision, all their talk about Catholic schools will be no more than "a gong booming or a cymbal clashing" (1 Cor. 13:1).

2. Founded on a Christian Anthropology

Emphasis on the supernatural destiny of students brings with it a profound appreciation of the need to perfect children in all their dimensions as images of God (cf. Gen. 1:26-27). Catholic theology teaches that grace builds on nature. Because of this complementarity of the natural and the supernatural, Catholic educators should have a sound understanding of the human person that addresses the requirements of both the natural and the supernatural perfection of the children entrusted to their care.

It is a concept which includes a defense of human rights, but also attributes to the human person the dignity of a child of God. . . . It calls for the fullest development of all that is human, because we have been made masters of the world by its Creator. All this says nothing more than: "It is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear."

The Holy See's documents insist that, in order to be worthy of its name, a Catholic school must be founded on Jesus Christ, the Redeemer. It is he who, through his Incarnation, is united with each student. Christ is not an appendix or an add-on to Catholic educational philosophy; he is the center and fulcrum of the entire enterprise, the light enlightening every boy and girl who comes into a Catholic school (cf. John 1:9). Many Catholic schools fall into the trap of a secular academic success culture, putting their Christological focus and its accompanying understanding of the human person in second place. Christ is "fitted in" rather than being the school's vital principle.

As John Paul II wrote in his 1979 Message to the National Catholic Educational Association, "Catholic education is above all a question of communicating Christ, of helping to form Christ in the lives of others”.

3. Animated by Communion and Community

A third mark of catholicity is the emphasis on the school as a community – a community of persons and, even more to the point, "a genuine community of faith." Such an emphasis proposes an alternative model for Catholic schools to that of an individualistic society. This communal dimension is rooted both in the social nature of the human person and in the reality of the Church as "the home and the school of communion." That the Catholic school is an educational community "is one of the most enriching developments for the contemporary school." The Congregation's Religious Dimension of Education in a Catholic School sums up this new emphasis: The declaration Gravissimum Educations notes an important advance in the way a Catholic school is thought of: the transition from the school as an institution to the school as a community. This community dimension is, perhaps, one result of the new awareness of the Church's nature as developed by the Council. In the Council texts, the community dimension is primarily a theological concept rather than a sociological category.

The Holy See describes the school as a community in four areas: the teamwork among all those involved; the cooperation between educators and bishops; the interaction of students with teachers; and the school's physical environment.

Teamwork

Elementary schools "should try to create a community school climate that reproduces, as far as possible, the warm and intimate atmosphere of family life. Their communion fosters appreciation of the various charisms and vocations that build up a genuine school community and strengthen scholastic solidarity. Educators, administrators, parents, and bishops guide the school to make choices that promote "overcoming individualistic self-promotion, solidarity instead of competition, assisting the weak instead of marginalization, responsible participation instead of indifference."

The Holy See is, moreover, ever mindful of ensuring the appropriate involvement of parents in Catholic schools: Close cooperation with the family is especially important when treating sensitive issues such as religious, moral, or sexual education, orientation toward a profession, or a choice of one's vocation in life. It is not a question of convenience, but a partnership based on faith. They promote solidarity, mutual enhancement, and joint responsibility in the educational plan, and, above all, they give an explicit Christian testimony.

Cooperation between Educators and Bishops

Catholic educators recognize that the bishop's pastoral leadership is pivotal in supporting the establishment and ensuring the catholicity of the schools in his pastoral care. Indeed, “only the bishop can set the tone, ensure the priority, and effectively present the importance of the cause to the Catholic people”. Episcopal responsibility is twofold.

• First, the bishop must integrate schools into his diocese's pastoral program; and,

• Second, he must oversee the teaching within them. As John Paul II straightforwardly

affirmed, "Bishops need to support and enhance the work of Catholic schools."

The bishop must see to it that the education in his schools is based on the principles of Catholic doctrine. This vigilance includes even schools established or directed by members of religious institutes.

Interaction of Students and Teachers

The Catholic philosophy of education has always paid special attention to the quality of interpersonal relations in the school community, especially those between teachers and students. This concern ensures that the student is seen as a person whose intellectual growth is harmonized with spiritual, religious, emotional, and social growth. Because, as St. John Bosco said, "education is a thing of the heart," authentic formation of young people requires the personalized accompanying of a teacher.

In measured terms, the Congregation's document Lay Catholics in Schools: Witnesses to Faith describes the student-teaching relationship: A personal relationship is always a dialogue rather than a monologue, and the teacher must be convinced that the enrichment in the relationship is mutual. Also, rapport with the students ought to be a prudent combination of familiarity and distance; and this must be adapted to the need of each individual student. Familiarity will make a personal relationship easier, but a certain distance is also needed.

Catholic schools, then, safeguard the priority of the person, both student and teacher. They foster the proper friendship between them, since "an authentic formative process can only be initiated through a personal relationship."

Physical Environment

A school's physical environment is creating a pleasant and family atmosphere." This includes an adequate physical plants and adequate equipment. It is especially important that this "school-home" be immediately recognizable as Catholic. The Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education sums it up perfectly this way:

From the first moment that a student sets foot in a Catholic school, he or she ought to have the impression of entering a new environment, one illumined by the light of faith, and having its own unique characteristics. The Council summed this up by speaking of an environment permeated with the gospel spirit of love and freedom (Education in a Catholic School, 25).

The Incarnation, which emphasizes the bodily coming of God's Son into the world, leaves its seal on every aspect of Christian life. The very fact of the Incarnation tells us that the created world is the means God chose to communicate his life to us. What is human and visible can bear the divine.

If Catholic schools are to be true to their identity, they will suffuse their environment with a delight in the sacramental. Therefore they should express physically and visibly the external signs of Catholic culture through images, symbols, icons, and other objects of traditional devotion. A chapel, classroom crucifixes and statues, liturgical celebrations, and other sacramental reminders of Catholic life, including good art that is not explicitly religious in its subject matter, should be evident. All these signs embody the community ethos of Catholicism.

Prayer should be a normal part of the school day, so that students learn to pray in times of sorrow and joy, of disappointment and celebration, of difficulty and success. Mass should be celebrated regularly, with the students and teachers participating appropriately. The sacramental vitality of the Catholic faith is expressed in these and similar acts of religion that belong to everyday ecclesial life and should be evident in every school.

4. Imbued with a Catholic Worldview throughout its Curriculum

A fourth distinctive characteristic of Catholic schools is that the "spirit of Catholicism" should permeate the entire curriculum. Catholic education is "intentionally directed to the growth of the whole person." An integral education aims to develop gradually every capability of every student: his or her intellectual, physical, psychological, moral, and religious capacities. Vatican documents speak of an education that responds to all the needs of the human person:

The integral formation of the human person, which is the purpose of education, includes the development of all the human faculties of the students, together with preparation for professional life, formation of ethical and social awareness, becoming aware of the transcendental, and religious education. Every school, and every educator in the school, ought to be striving "to form strong and responsible individuals, who are capable of making free and correct choices," thus preparing young people "to open themselves more and more to reality, and to form in themselves a clear idea of the meaning of life" [The Catholic School, 31].

• It is Catholic because it undertakes to educate the whole child, addressing the requirements of his or her natural and supernatural perfection.

• It is Catholic because it provides an education in the intellectual and moral virtues.

• It is Catholic because it prepares for a fully human life at the service of others and for the life of the world to come.

All instruction, therefore, must be authentically Catholic in content and methodology across the entire program of studies. If a Catholic school is to deliver on its promise to provide students with an integral education, it must foster love for wisdom and truth, and must integrate faith, culture, and life.

Love for Wisdom and Passion for Truth

In an age of information overload, Catholic schools must be especially attentive in their instruction to strike the delicate balance between human experience and understanding. Catholic educators do not want their students to say, "We had the experience but missed the meaning."

Knowledge and understanding are far more than the accumulation of information. T. S. Eliot puts it just right: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" Catholic schools do far more than convey information to passive students. They aspire to teach love for wisdom, habituating each student "to desire learning so much that he or she will delight in becoming a self-learner."

The contemporary world urgently needs the service of educational institutions that uphold and teach that truth is "that fundamental value without which freedom, justice, and human dignity are extinguished" [Veritatis Splendor, 4].

Closely following papal teaching, the Holy See's documents on schools insist that education is about truth – in both its natural and its supernatural dimensions: The school considers human knowledge as a truth to be discovered. In the measure in which subjects are taught by someone who knowingly and without restraint seeks the truth, they are to that extent Christian. Discovery and awareness of truth leads man to the discovery of Truth itself.

While Catholic schools conform to government-mandated curricula, they implement their programs with an overall religious orientation. Such a perspective includes criteria such as "confidence in our ability to attain truth, at least in a limited way – a confidence based not on feeling but on faith . . . [and] the ability to make judgments about what is true and what is false." Unwavering commitment to truth is at home in an authentically Catholic school. Alongside love, Don Bosco stressed the importance of reason and religion.

Faith, Culture and Life

A second principle that derives from communicating a Catholic worldview to children is the notion that they should learn to transform culture in light of the gospel. Schools prepare students to relate the Catholic faith to their particular culture and to live that faith in practice.

In The Catholic School on the Threshold of the Millennium, the Congregation for Catholic Education commented:

From the nature of the Catholic school also stems one of the most significant elements of its educational project: the synthesis between culture and faith. The endeavor to interweave reason and faith, which has become the heart of individual subjects, makes for unity, articulation, and coordination, bringing forth within what is learned in a school a Christian vision of the world, of life, of culture, and of history.

Furthermore, young Catholics, in a way appropriate to their age, must also learn to make judgments based on religious and moral truths. They should learn to be critical and evaluative. It is the Catholic faith that provides young people with the essential principles for critique and evaluation.

The educational philosophy that guides Catholic schools also seeks to ensure that they are places where "faith, culture, and life are brought into harmony." Central to the Catholic school is its mission of holiness, of saint-making. It strives to develop virtue "by the integration of culture with faith and of faith with living." The Congregation for Catholic Education has written that "the Catholic school tries to create within its walls a climate in which the pupil's faith will gradually mature and enable him to assume the responsibility placed on him by Baptism."

A primary way of helping Catholic students become more committed to their faith is by providing solid religious instruction. To be sure, "education in the faith is a part of the finality of a Catholic school." For young Catholics, such instruction embraces both teaching the truths of the faith and fostering its practice. Still, we must always take special care to avoid the error that a Catholic school's distinctiveness rests solely on the shoulders of its religious-education program.

5. Sustained by Gospel Witness

A final indicator of a school's authentic catholicity is the vital witness of its teachers and administrators. With them lies the primary responsibility for creating a Christian school climate, as individuals and as a community. Indeed, "it depends chiefly on them whether the Catholic school achieves its purpose." Consequently the Holy See's documents pay a great deal of attention to the vocation of teachers and their participation in the Church's evangelizing mission. Theirs is a supernatural calling and not simply the exercise of a profession. "The nobility of the task to which teachers are called demands that, in imitation of Christ, the only Teacher, they reveal the Christian message not only by word but also by every gesture of their behavior." Don Bosco’s educational system is often described as the 'preventive system'. It was an approach built on love and the character of the educator.

Hiring Committed Catholics

To fulfill their responsibility of speaking about the Father, educators in Catholic schools, with very few exceptions, should be practicing Catholics who are committed to the Church and living her sacramental life. Despite the difficulties sometimes involved, those responsible for hiring teachers must see to it that these criteria are met.

When such a policy is ignored, it is inevitable that children will absorb, even if they are not explicitly taught, a soft indifferentism that will sustain neither their practice of the faith nor their ability to imbue society with Christian values. Principals, pastors, school-board members, parents, and bishops share in the serious duty of hiring teachers who meet the standards of doctrine and integrity of life essential to a flourishing Catholic school.

A primary way to foster a school's catholicity is by carefully hiring men and women who enthusiastically endorse its distinctive ethos, for Catholic education is strengthened by witnesses to the gospel.

Transparent Witness of Life

As well as fostering a Catholic worldview across the curriculum, even in so-called secular subjects, "if students in Catholic schools are to gain a genuine experience of the Church, the example of teachers and others responsible for their formation is crucial: the witness of adults in the school community is a vital part of the school's identity."

Children will pick up far more by the example of their educators than by masterful pedagogical techniques, especially in the practice of Christian virtues. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI:

The central figure in the work of educating, and especially in education in the faith, which is the summit of the person's formation and is his or her most appropriate horizon, is specifically the form of witness. This witness becomes a proper reference point to the extent that the person can account for the hope that nourishes his life [cf. 1 Pet.3:15] and is personally involved in the truth that he proposes.

The prophetic words of Pope Paul VI ring as true today as they did more than thirty years ago: "Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses." What educators do and how they act are more significant than what they say – inside and outside the classroom. This is how the Church evangelizes. "The more completely an educator can give concrete witness to the model of the ideal person [Christ] that is being presented to the students, the more this ideal will be believed and imitated."

The same can be said about a failure to give clear witness to the Church's teaching on the sanctity of marriage and the sacredness of human life. Catholic educators are expected to be models for their students by bearing transparent witness to Christ and to the beauty of the gospel. If boys and girls are to experience the splendor of the Church, the Christian example of teachers and others responsible for their formation is indispensable, and no effort should be spared in guaranteeing the presence of such witness in every Catholic school.

Suggestion for schools and oratories to add this value of

Catholic identity privileged space for initial proclamation difficult, are:

1. Explicit signs are important and effective tools of Evangelization.

2. All external signs like: The name of the center or the School to be mentioned clearly as Catholic very clearly on the sign board.

3. Religious Pictures in the compound and in the class rooms. Ex. Holy Cross..

4. Film show of the Saints Spiritual heroic people

5. Allow ecclesial movements, clubs, and association to be established voluntarily in the compound. For example: EYM, AP, MAGIS,YCW,YCS, PL, ETC…

6. Catechism: Permanently give Catechism class including preparation for the first communion and confirmation

7. Train and Mission the Catholic student in this case we need to give an extra class for the FAITH formation to the Catholic student

8. Hire a practicing Catholic s in the institute as teachers/workers to be used as instrument for transmission of Faith.

9. Increase the admission Catholic number of the Student

10. Awareness training for all the Staff members.

Some of The factors, which make the (initial) proclamation difficult, are:

• Ethiopia is by tradition a Christian country

• Our Catholic Christians are threatened

• The wrong concept of “proselytise”

• Sometime a wrong concept of “Discrimination”

• Ignorance of our religious freedom

• Tendency from discrimination of other religion to the discrimination of the Catholics.