Welcome to a Grand Adventure!

“Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.”
Mark 16:15

Congratulations. As a catechetical leader, you have embarked on an adventure in which you seek to engage hearts and minds, bodies and souls. Your ministry involves you in a journey of discovery—you are both leader and follower, teacher and student, seeker and the one who is found.

You are engaged in the lives of many people, encountering them at their core. What can be more pressing or more immediate than the questions “Who is God?” “How is God involved in my daily life?” “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” or “Where am I going?” We know that all people hunger and thirst for God in their lives, even when they are not aware of it. You are helping people to find God.

Our Catholic tradition takes the above questions seriously, and you take the people, young or old, who entertain those questions seriously as well. The answers do not come easily. They involve a person’s whole being and they need to be embraced over the course of a lifetime. A part of your ministry is to gather a group of people willing to be catechist mentors in a way of living—the way of Jesus.

You play an important role in organizing people and places and programs in order to address these questions and engage new groups of learners at various stages of their lives and spiritual growth. There are countless details to attend to: recruiting catechists, enrolling students, communicating with parents, coordinating with other parish ministries, and on and on. Remember, even the most mundane of those activities can be holy when you are mindful that you are tending to people’s spiritual lives.

So, we at Loyola Press honor you, your efforts, your hopes, and your dreams. We pledge to support you. We are pleased to be a partner with you in this work that is so essential to what it means for us to be fully human and fully alive—aware of God’s love for us and happy to live in his love.