Booklet Review: Be an Amazing Catechist

In most Catholic parishes, volunteer catechists are the unsung heroes who strive to pass "the faith once delivered to the saints" on to future generations. I was a catechist for two years in a huge parish whose Director of Religious Education does a yeoman job of supplying volunteers with resource books, and Lisa Mladinich's Be An Amazing Catechist would have been a worthy addition to that pile, second only to the New Catholic Answer Bible in its usefulness.

What Mladinich has written is, in essence, a 30-page pep talk. But Our Sunday Visitor's Publishing Division picked it up because editors there recognized the same thing I saw in my review copy, to wit, Be An Amazing Catechist is a spiritually-grounded booklet packed with what Mladinich rightly calls "valuable tools for making your apostolate in catechesis more vibrant, more exciting, and more effective."

In my own brief career as a once and future catechist, my biggest challenge was a class of fifth-graders who had a mixture of auditory and kinesthetic learning styles (yes, Mladinich covers that, too). The girls were sweet and eager to please, but the boys' favorite activity was a weekly game of "stump the teacher," and they never asked easy questions like "What is the Trinity?" or "How come Catholic bible translations have more books in the Old Testament than Protestant bible translations do?"

The question they delighted in tying me in knots with was "Where did God come from?"

I always answered "God didn't come from anywhere, because He made everywhere," but then they'd say "But you said Jesus is God, and He's Mary's son, right?" So we'd have a conversation about the difference between God the Father and God the Son, but whenever I thought I was making progress, the Primary Questioner would say "That doesn't make any sense, Mr. O'Hannigan."

Had Mladinich's book and its 15 practical tips been in my catechism kit back then, I might have fared better than I did while losing that argument with a gleeful 10-year-old and his admiring sidekicks. Some of her suggestions seem blindingly obvious, but the cumulative effect of combining "no-brainers" like "Use the Bible" and "Don't give up on slack-jawed teeenagers" with more innovative stuff like "Try puppets" and "Don't neglect your own sacramental life" is a step-by-step program for doing a better, more joyful job as a catechist. If you're trying to spread the faith, or you're intimidated by the thought of trying to spread the faith, this booklet (only $2.95 for one copy or $17.95 for ten) can help.

P.S. There's more book talk over at Julie's place.