What do catechizing the faithful and safeguarding them from abuse have in common? Both, the Church teaches, are responsibilities belonging to the entire Catholic community.
In his 2019 letter Vos Estis Lux Mundi (“You Are the Light of the World”), Pope Francis called for “a continuous and profound conversion of hearts… attested by concrete and effective actions that involve everyone in the Church,” to ensure that “the crimes of sexual abuse,” which “offend our Lord, cause physical, psychological and spiritual damage to the victims and harm the community of the faithful… never happen again” (VELM, Introduction). Two years later the Dicastery for Evangelization, in its Directory for Catechesis — not available online, but helpfully summarized by the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales — described that same community of the faithful as “responsible for the ministry of catechesis” and “the main provider of accompaniment in the faith” (DC 111).
Safeguarding and shared responsibilities
The connection between catechizing and safeguarding is, as the Directory itself makes clear, not merely coincidental. In fact, it cites Vos Estis in its section on the formation of the catechist to help draw together these twin responsibilities into one coherent vision of catechetical ministry.
Highlighting the importance of affective maturity and ability to form healthy relationships as necessary personal qualities for a catechist, the Directory tells us that, “in reiterating the commitment to promoting the human and Christian maturation of catechists, the Church reminds us of the task of determinedly ensuring that, when the Church carries out her mission, every person, especially minors and the vulnerable, is guaranteed absolute protection from any form of abuse” (DC 141), and hammers its point home by quoting the panegyric introduction to Vos Estis referenced above.
Both the Directory and Vos Estis are keenly aware of the deeper theological truth that underpins their pronouncements: the significance of human relationships in the life of the Church. The relational nature of catechetical ministry, and its rightful context in the Christian community, is a theme that the Directory turns to again and again. Vos Estis, meanwhile, makes clear in its introduction that our responsibility to ensure the safety of others belongs to the very essence of ecclesial life and of credible witness to the Gospel.
God has ordained that His life be transmitted to us not through individual, ethereal private revelation, but through embodied human relationships. This is a principle we see consistently across God’s plan of salvation, from the Incarnation itself, through the communication of sanctifying grace in the sacramental economy, down to the personal witness to faith we receive from our Christian friends and family.
In the plan of God, human relationships are a catechesis on divine love. And as we as a Church have grown in our understanding of the profound suffering caused by abuse and its resulting trauma, we have simultaneously grown in our understanding of the importance of trauma-proofing our pastoral relationships.
But to do so effectively, we must be prepared to experience a “profound conversion of hearts” of the kind the Holy Father calls for in Vos Estis, and re-examine a foundational — and, currently, somewhat controversial — aspect of pastoral relationships: vulnerability. And one place we can go to help deepen and develop our understanding of vulnerability is, perhaps surprisingly, the Directory for Catechesis.
Vulnerability in pastoral relationships: a feature, not a bug
The word “vulnerability” comes from the Latin vulnerare, meaning “to wound,” and refers to a person’s likelihood or capacity to be harmed or injured. Most of us will have come across the term in the context of safeguarding policies and safe environment training, where it is used to identify specific categories of people at particular risk of abuse. In a recent Substack post, Paul Fahey observes that “many safeguarding guidelines in the Catholic Church present vulnerability as belonging to individuals – like children or adults with developmental disabilities – rather than belonging to the pastoral relationship itself.”
This, of course, is a view entirely congruent with the Church’s own legal definition of vulnerability, which applies to adult members of the faithful who, due to a mental health condition or disability, are to be considered equivalent to minors in matters of law. When Vos Estis gave a definition of “vulnerable adult” that included not only those with limited mental capacity, but also anyone experiencing a “deprivation of personal liberty which, in fact, even occasionally, limits their ability to understand or to want or otherwise resist the offence” (VELM I.1.§2), the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — the Dicastery responsible for investigating allegations of sexual abuse against minors and vulnerable adults — had to clarify that this expansion of the category of vulnerability had not, in fact, brought about any change to their own legal responsibilities. Instead, they would still be working from the definition of vulnerable adults as those who, due to a particular, personal condition, were equivalent to minors in law.
But this narrow, tightly delineated legal category of vulnerability presents a “problem” for pastoral ministry, Paul argues. It “give[s] the impression that vulnerability is a deficiency in a person, and it fails to account for the vulnerability of every individual seeking out pastoral care.” Since “pastoral relationships always have an imbalance of power… the person being ministered to is always vulnerable,” and so by “limiting vulnerability to only children and adults with developmental disabilities,” we “fail to hold ministers accountable to ensure the safety of everyone they minister to.”
Paul then calls upon the Directory for Catechesis as an example of an ecclesial document which acknowledges this imbalance of power as characteristic of pastoral relationships. He draws particular attention to the Directory’s section on the formation of the catechist, referenced above, which tells us that “the catechist, on account of his service, holds a position relative to the people he accompanies in the faith and is perceived by them as a point of reference, who exercises a certain form of authority.” Therefore, the Directory tells us, it “becomes necessary that this role be lived out with the most absolute respect for the conscience and person of the other, avoiding every kind of abuse, whether of power, of conscience, financial, or sexual,” and with “great respect for the sacred freedom of the other” (DC 142).
The Directory encourages us to see vulnerability as a stable feature of pastoral relationships, rather than a bug in them. It is something that we cannot and should not compartmentalize or treat as merely an issue for certain members of the faithful in certain circumstances. Certainly, there are some members of the faithful who are particularly vulnerable. But the pastoral relationship itself invites the kind of profound and life-changing openness, the opportunity for sharing, confiding, and calling upon the help of another in places of spiritual and psychological need, which simultaneously leaves us open to being wounded and mistreated — in a word, vulnerable.
I agree with Paul Fahey that the Directory for Catechesis helps us to think clearly and constructively about vulnerability in pastoral relationships. It requires catechists to observe boundaries which preclude maltreatment and abuse with all of those to whom they minister, acknowledging that they share a basic level of vulnerability irrespective of personal ability or disability. We could describe these requirements as the Directory’s negative formulation of human flourishing — using negative in the sense of “privation” and “absence,” rather than in the sense of “bad.”
But I cannot help but notice that the Directory also presents us with a positive formulation of human flourishing, one which goes far beyond a simple requirement to refrain from active harm. This positive formulation helps us to understand how vulnerability can in fact be a constructive and fruitful experience in the catechetical relationship: something which helps make possible profound spiritual growth, a deeper encounter with Christ through His Church, by honoring the profound importance that God has attached to human connectivity within His plan of salvation. And this positive formulation of human flourishing found in the Directory is marked, above all, by a deep understanding of the importance of freedom and conscience.
Human flourishing in pastoral relationships
The paragraph of the Directory which Paul quotes ends by exhorting the catechist to develop “great respect for the sacred freedom of the other” (DC 142). When we pan out our camera and view the Directory as a whole, we see that human freedom is one of its most consistently emphasized themes. Freedom is presented as both a condition and a fruit of the catechetical relationship: catechists “should not impose the truth but appeal to freedom” (DC 59) and minister “with a gaze full of compassion but also respectful of the other’s freedom” (DC 135), because this freedom is “a condition of human life” (DC 102). This respect for freedom, moreover, goes hand-in-hand with “absolute respect for the conscience and person of the other” (DC 142).
The Directory’s emphasis on freedom and conscience is not found in its immediate predecessor, the (confusingly similarly named) General Directory for Catechesis, and so we must look elsewhere to trace its origins and development. What we find is that the connection between pastoral relationships and freedom is a particular concern of Pope Francis. In his 2013 exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, the Pope called upon the Church to “initiate everyone” into the “art of accompaniment” (EG 169), which will “lead others ever closer to God, in whom we attain true freedom,” and be characterized by “prudence, understanding, patience and docility to the spirit” (EG 170). When the new Directory took up the pope’s emphasis on the importance of accompaniment — describing the catechist as “an expert in the art of accompaniment” (DC 113) — it simultaneously took up his emphasis on the importance of freedom to that accompaniment, preserving the connection between the two.
It’s worth pausing at this point and thinking about what freedom actually is. In the Christian understanding, freedom doesn’t begin with external choice. The free person isn’t the person who can do the most and choose the most. A free person is, instead, one who knows God and desires God as their ultimate good, and whose external choices — whatever those choices are, and however numerous they may be — are formed by that knowledge and desire. Here we see the connection between freedom and the conscience, the inner capacity by which we recognize God’s moral law and assimilate it into our personal discernment of right action. The “formation of mature Christian consciences,” the Directory tells us, is a primary task of catechesis (DC 261). It is here, in the interior sanctuary of the conscience, that true Christian freedom is exercised.
A healthy catechetical relationship is one which, making use of the “prudence, understanding, patience and docility to the Spirit” which the Pope describes in Evangelii Gaudium, encourages, and makes possible this formation of conscience. The more confident a person is in recognizing the voice of God within this inner sanctuary, and the stronger they can build its walls and boundaries, the better their protection against voice of a predator or manipulator who wishes to break down those walls and drown out the voice of God with a message of shame, confusion, and despair.
Such work takes time and requires the guidance of a patient and reliable catechist. The trust and openness that it requires from the one being catechized undeniably puts them at risk of harm. But if these relationships are to be truly fruitful, we must be confident in approaching this vulnerability as a gift to be respected, and not merely a problem to be solved. Holding together the Directory’s positive and negative formulations of human flourishing, we can understand that vulnerability in pastoral relationships gives us more than just the (crucial and necessary) requirement to refrain from harm. It also creates the conditions in which the free Christian conscience, the human person’s inner safeguard, can grow and flourish.
Image: Adobe Stock. By Konstantin Yuganov.
Sr. Carino Hodder
Sr. Carino Hodder is a Dominican Sister of St. Joseph, based in the New Forest, England.
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