Catechist's Journey

Overview of the New Directory for Catechesis

This is part one of a four-part series on the new Directory for Catechesis. Anyone who has read Pope Francis’s 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, will be familiar with many of the themes in the new Directory for Catechesis. Let’s begin our exploration of the 2020 Directory for Catechesis with an overview. What is the new Directory for Catechesis? The new Directory for Catechesis was publicly released on June 25, 2020, against the backdrop of […]

Catechetical Sunday 2020: Commissioning Our COVID-Era Catechists

Joe Paprocki

This year, like any other year, we celebrate Catechetical Sunday on the third Sunday of September. This year, however, is unlike any other year as we will be commissioning catechists to teach during the COVID-19 pandemic and to cope with all of the complexities that go with it. Some will be teaching in person, others will be teaching remotely, some will be doing a mix of both, and others may be assisting parents in teaching […]

Professional Development Workshop: Reclaiming the Fire

Joe Paprocki

In her book, Start with Jesus, friend, author, speaker, and evangelist Julianne Stanz states that “too often our approach to our faith lacks the fire or energy that it deserves,” and she issues a call for us to “reclaim the fire.” Faith formation programs can provide the spark needed to ignite this blaze! In a new, free professional development workshop, Reclaiming the Fire: Six Keys to Making Our Faith Formation More Evangelizing—which can be found below—I offer […]

Helping Parents with Faith Formation at Home

Joe Paprocki

We ended the last catechetical year with many parishes asking parents to work with their children at home on faith formation because of the pandemic. Our hopes were, of course, that we would soon see a return to normalcy and that, come fall, young people and catechists could once again resume in-person sessions of faith formation at the parish. Alas, those hopes have been dashed in many parts of the country where the pandemic lingers […]