Saturday morning catechism

Marcelo Sheppard, college student

December 4, 2002

Tags: Doctrine, Youth, Opus Dei, Catechesis College students with a good grasp of the Christian faith go to districts in the outskirts of Montevideo, Uruguay, to teach catechism to children and young people. As time goes by, as well as recalling episodes from their classes, they realise that they themselves are the ones who have benefited the most.

When we were in our fourth year of secondary education, the people in Flama, an Opus Dei club for schoolboys, asked some friends of mine and me if we would like to help in the catechism classes being given in a parish in one of the poorer parts of Montevideo. At first we found it quite hard as it meant “sacrificing” our Saturday mornings, when many of us used to have a lie-in.

We started getting together the day before to prepare the topic we were going to teach that week. They were the first classes we’d ever taught in our lives, and our pupils were not naturally attentive, so we had to prepare them really well.

The people at Flama Club explained to us in detail how important these catechism classes were, and how much St Josemaria loved catechism-teaching. They told us how, at the beginning of Opus Dei, the Founder used to go out with groups of young people to teach Christian doctrine in the outlying parts of Madrid.

I began by helping with the catechism classes in Punta Rieles, then in Euskalerria, and finally in the district known as “14 Km”. In Punta Rieles some religious sisters gave us the use of some rooms adjoining their convent for the classes. Punta Rieles is close to 14 Km so we went round there to invite more boys to come to the classes. The next week the 14 Km boys got into the convent store-room and ate the fruit Jell-O the sisters had prepared for tea. We had to find a different solution, so we decided to go and teach in the district the Jell-O kids had come from, and keep on teaching the more manageable ones in the convent rooms. So we had two catechism groups.

14 Km is a shanty-town. The people live in shacks they make out of sticks and sheeting, the sanitation is dodgy and the other side of the road is a trash dump. We knew very well that people’s attitudes were not exactly positive, and we had to explain our intentions very clearly before they’d let us go and give classes there. The people in 14 Km, if they are even baptized, mostly go to the Sunday-schools run by certain sects or groups, and it can be hard to persuade them to live in accordance with their faith.

Five of us went together for the first class there. We divided the kids into groups by age, and gave them the classes in an open space close to the trash dump, as there was nowhere else. Then we started a game of football. At the end of the first half Juancho started a fight with Anthony over a fault the ref hadn’t seen, and soon after that they drove us away by throwing stones at us, shouting “Don’t come back!” In a way, it reminded us of the time when St Josemaria had stones thrown at him just because he was wearing a cassock, especially when he went to the King’s Hospital in Madrid.

After two or three more attempts, they stopped stoning us on sight, and with a little bit more effort and a lot of grace from God the kids prepared for Communion, and some of them received our Lord in the Eucharist for the first time.

Years later, you realize how much good those catechism classes do the kids, the way it gives them real support in their morale and their faith, which they’ll never forget.

What we could do for them at that age was not getting them jobs or solving their housing problems, but teaching them the truth of Christ.

What I’d most like to stress is that in the final analysis the ones who really were strengthened were us, the teachers. We learnt so much from those kids, we realized how urgent it is to overcome the ignorance that exists about Christ’s teachings, we came face to face with real poverty, we suffered together with them. All of that inspired us to fight to take our country forward.