Seán Ó Conaill: A Church that Proclaims the Gospel?

There is a crisis of generational transmission of the Catholic Christian faith in this era – a crisis that defies the catechetical models we have inherited.

This frank admission by the Vatican in October 2026 (in Venite Ad Me§47) is accompanied by narrative evidence from different cultures that, when it does cross the generational divide, deep faith is more often caught than taught – a fruit of caring close relationships.

As for the professional catechist, Venite Ad Me reiterates a priority first stated in 2013 by Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium – the critical importance of summary proclamation of the faith at every stage:

“On the lips of the catechist the first proclamation must ring out over and over: ‘Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.’ This first proclamation is called ‘first’ not because it exists at the beginning and can then be forgotten or replaced by other more important things. It is first in a qualitative sense because it is the principal proclamation, the one which we must hear again and again, in different ways, the one which we must announce one way or another throughout the process of catechesis, at every level and moment.” [Venite Ad Me §75}

Implicit in this emphasis is an acceptance of the futility of mere doctrinal exposition – of dwelling endlessly on ‘what the church also teaches’ – as though it will be the full weight of all church teaching that will necessarily transmit faith – rather than this compressed kerygmatic message of God’s closeness and care, through Jesus.

Two questions now present themselves:

1. Just how much professional training does anyone need to be ready to proclaim that Jesus is always with us, and that this relationship is readily available through sincere prayer, especially in times of difficulty?
2. What necessary professional training must follow from Venite Ad Me§80:

“In summary, for the transmission of the faith to be truly effective, it must take the form of an engaging interpersonal relationship.”?

There is surely a dramatic corollary to the weight of evidence provided by Venite Ad Me that school catechesis ‘struggles’ to proclaim the Gospel, and that narratives of ‘caught’ faith tell always of nurturing close relationships. Effective catechesis – a catechesis that can transmit what is most vital – does not require complex and extended doctrinal expertise: its most important requirement is not extensive knowledge but faith accompanied by love.

In fact, anyone who believes in the ever-presence of the Trinity – and in the availability of this close relationship, through prayer – is already a fully qualified catechist at this first and most critical level.

Why Schools?

Why then in Ireland was the major burden of catechesis transferred from parents and families to schools and teachers in Ireland – as though Catholic faith would inevitably be a product of professional catechetical expertise?

Are school teachers– even with the best will in the world–ever truly capable of forming ‘engaging interpersonal relationships’ with most of their pupils?

Totally unwittingly Venite Ad Me offers a dramatic explanation of the problem posed by synodal reports from virtually every diocese in Ireland in 2022 – of a sense of evangelical inadequacy on the part of lay adults in ‘passing on’ the faith.

From the school-bound model of catechesis we have inherited – the model that now ‘struggles’ – we absorbed in Ireland a totally mistaken understanding of how faith is passed on. We came to believe that ‘transmission of faith’ is only for those who are professionally trained – when this is a catastrophic mistake. The primary faith that ‘catches’ and lasts is (a) radically verbally compressible and portable and (b) most effectively transmitted by loving relationships, including especially family relationships.

It follows inexorably from the findings of Venite Ad Me that Irish Catholic parents and grandparents should never have been dispossessed of a sense of their primary catechetical competence and responsibility- by the locating of the essential catechesis of children in Irish Catholic schools.

A Change of Era?

I will inevitably be told by some that this is simplistic nonsense – because Ireland has been undergoing radical social change in the modern era, including industrialisation, urbanisation and invasive alien cultural influences via electronic media. How could the church, and faith transmission, have kept up if we hadn’t developed a professional catechetical corps in Ireland’s Catholic schools?

The answer is that we didn’t keep up, because the concentration of that expertise in schools, interfacing almost always with children rather than their parents, undermined the vital intergenerational transmission of faith within families – by depriving most of those parents of all sense of competence and responsibility for faith transmission in the home.

Worse still, that ecclesiastical investment in school catechesis enabled clergy to shelve the problem of adult faith formation in this same era of radical social change. Always over trusting the power of rote learning of the Catechism by adolescents – and eschewing close questioning by intelligent adults if they were convened for serious dialogue – Archbishop McQuaid of Dublin could return from Rome in 1965 with the message that nothing that had happened at Vatican II should ‘worry the tranquillity’ of our Christian lives.

That tranquillity was soon to be disturbed by Humanae Vitae in 1968 – but even then we didn’t question the wisdom of centring faith formation in schools.

We now know that this ‘tranquillity’ – such as it was – rested upon the ghastly mistake of trusting ‘transmission of the faith’ to a vehicle that was doomed to failure – because Irish Catholic parents had been effectively told by their bishops – over several generations – that our schools were taking care of that issue.

Not even when an alarm bell was loudly rung in 2006, by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, did the Conference of Irish Bishops initiate open research into the young generations missing from Mass. Nearly a decade later, we still lack a published, detailed analysis of what Irish teenagers told the Church about Catholic faith and practice during the consultations leading to the 2018 Youth Synod.

If it was not fear of the likely public impact of the findings of such research, what was it that prevented Irish bishops from asking school-going Catholic adolescents why they were not catching the faith – and then telling us?

Nothing could be clearer than that Catholic over-reliance on schools to transmit faith was always an essential support for Catholic clericalism, the clerical monopoly of responsibility in the church – an essential  ‘snooze’ button for lay unrest, a means not of keeping up but of dodging the need to keep up.

Crisis? What Crisis?

As late as October 2026 while an Irish synodal working group on faith formation could describe school-centred faith formation as ‘insufficient’ the working document for the synodal assembly that followed would omit that judgement and take pains to extol the work of Catholic schools. Yes, that work is now to be supplemented by parish-based and home-based catechesis and faith formation, but the word ‘crisis’ is still not employed anywhere in the working document to describe the situation that over-reliance on schools for catechesis and faith formation has produced.

And yet the Vatican document Venite Ad Me (2026) does now frankly recognise this catechetical crisis [§47]. If Irish Catholic parents and grandparents are now to come fully awake to their own responsibility – and competence – for basic Christian faith formation Irish bishops should now take this opportunity to admit the mistake of over-reliance on schools and the urgent necessity of home-based and parish-based solutions.

Venite Ad Me(2026)-Considerations on the Transmission of the Faith in an Epochal Change