Exploring the Ecclesial Identity of the Catechist Through the Hermeneutic of "Full, Conscious, and Active Participation"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to explore questions of belonging and participation in the Catholic Church in the context of a particular catechetical ministry. As the Director of the Catechesis Office for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Hamilton, Ontario, the researcher oversees training and ongoing formation for catechists. The General Directory for Catechesis claims that catechists must receive formation that goes beyond simply communicating the content of the faith or the methodology of catechesis and emphasizes that catechists must understand their ecclesial identity. Four areas of study are addressed. First, the question of belonging is looked at through the fields of faith development, group dynamics, and citizenship theory. Since ecclesial identity refers to one’s identity in and to the Church, the thesis also addresses what is meant by ‘the Church’. Third, the hermeneutic of “full, conscious, and active participation” is argued to possess rich theological potential to further the understanding of the participation of lay people beyond the context of liturgy. Finally, this thesis explores the consequences and implications of the participation of catechists in particular. Theologian Bernard Lonergan is influential in terms of understanding the Church as process, understanding the role of catechesis in that process, understanding the importance of everyday valuing, choosing and deciding, and in understanding participation as more than external activity. The Action-in-Ministry for this thesis is a case study of five lay volunteer catechists who are interviewed regarding their work, and the connection of their work to the broader mission of the Church. Participants are asked to respond to the description of full, conscious, and active participation by means of a reflective homework activity. From the analysis of responses, seven insights are proposed that speak to the self-understanding of catechists regarding the meaning of their participation, the importance of the feeling of belonging and the ways in which communication in the parish enhances that feeling, their need for common language to describe their work, and their understanding of ecclesial identity. The results of this study suggest improvements in both content and form in the formation of catechists and may have resonance with others training lay volunteers in the church.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".