The mother of Christian initiation
Parker, James
THE MOTHER OF CHRISTIAN JAMES PARKER INITIATION IN MEMORIAM: CHRISTIANE BRUSSELMANS When I first met Christiane Brusselmans in 1974, I was a graduate student in Louvain. It was after an...
...What participants didn't suspect is that it was just as often Good Friday for Christiane...
...We didn't comprehend how painful were her depressions...
...From Senanque came workshops around the world and, in the U.S., the North American Forum, which has aided parishes in almost every diocese to implement what Christiane liked to call the best-kept secret of Vatican II...
...Few took note...
...These ventures began in the '60s after she was invited by her brothers and sisters to provide meaningful sacramental experiences for their children...
...One girl, whom years of family abuse had hardened in sullen resistance to everything Christiane said and did, called her aside...
...It was no wonder, then, that she was as beloved among bishops as she was among children and their parents...
...Christiane was about to leave the parish...
...People in small communities, formed by reflection on the Word of God, could be church in the most basic sense of the word: gatherings for celebration and service...
...Some future pope, however, may survey thousands of priestless communities nourished by an array of ministers and gratefully judge this gathering the most important...
...One who did was Christiane...
...Before the horrified Christiane could intervene, the girl put it into her mouth and swallowed...
...It is hard for me to think of a single individual who has had a wider and more profound influence on post-Vatican II church renewal than Christiane Brusselmans...
...Christiane took her process of initiating children to rural congregations in Belgium and Africa, and to urban families in New Zealand and New York's Spanish Harlem...
...Even when bishops disagreed with her about interpreting that tradition, as did the archbishop of Portland on the question of first confession, it was hard for them not to go along with her...
...Most of the people in New Mexico or New Zealand, Spanish Harlem or suburban Los Gatos, who met Christiane Brusselmans never saw the dark side of the energy and enthusiasm that they witnessed at her presentations...
...The few friends who could prevail on her to stay in their homes would sometimes see a mood change that made them wonder...
...After hearing his lectures on the Eucharist, Christiane enrolled as a religious studies major at Louvain...
...That evening in Louvain, she had found me on the edge of things, a little like Zaccheus...
...Now," she announced, "even if you go away, you'll never leave me...
...Here, write your name...
...Christiane carefully formed each letter of her name...
...Martin, a gem of Romanesque architecture, stands as a symbol of a community reborn...
...That challenge would daunt all but a Christiane...
...Christiane had succeeded in getting the ordinary to appoint a sympathetic pastor, and she had recruited local artisans to restore the church building...
...She offered what neither right nor left wing of the post-Vatican II church could offer: not old traditions or new inventions, but the Catholic tradition...
...One afternoon, years after our first meeting, Christiane accompanied me to the parish church in the village of Tourinnes LaGrosse...
...By the end of a year the initiation group included a dozen children, all of them accompanied by parents...
...instead, a succession of alcoholic pastors fueled the villagers' anticlericalism...
...The party's leaders had no Don Camillo to challenge them...
...She 20: 31 January 1992 Commonweal began translating the Lectionary into simple but elegant language, composing lively responsorial psalms that children whistle all week long, and designing exquisite illustrations for them to take home to the family table...
...Her degree in hand, she taught for a short while at Fordham, and then was accepted back at Louvain as an associate professor of theology...
...Under her leadership they inaugurated a yearly festival of the arts that still draws crowds of tourists to the village...
...Like many French and Italian towns after World War II, it had been run by the Communist party...
...They could take inventory of one another's needs and plan their service to the neighborhoods and society in which they found themselves...
...Tourinnes La-Grosse was an early industrial site whose nineteenth-century citizens had ceased practicing their historical religion...
...it had to be caused by more than jet lag and airport waits...
...The story came from her children's catechumenate in Spanish Harlem...
...It was after an evening liturgy, and I was standing alone outside the chapel of the American College...
...There were medical issues which made her manner of dying less surprising...
...There she came under the influence of a host of other theologians who, without knowing it, were preparing for Vatican II...
...There she influenced a generation of Americans—seminarians, priests, sisters, and, especially during the '70s, laity—for whom Brusselmans was part of the lure of studying theology at Louvain...
...From this and successive experiences with forty-three nephews and nieces came workshops around the world on the manner of bringing children to the table of the Lord...
...You'll always be inside me...
...In all of Christiane's great accomplishments— devising a children's catechumenate for the Eucharist, restoring the process of initiating adults into the church, reviving the many ministries of the local church, creating a Liturgy of the Word for children—she taught us how to retrieve the Catholic past and make it serve the needs of twentieth-century Christians...
...She headed off to L'Institut Catholique in Paris, where her instructors convinced her that she had to experience the church's ancient method of initiating adults in order to know what to do with children...
...In 1978 she called catechetical and liturgical experts to Senanque, a monastery in southern France, for a symposium on restoring the rites of Christian initiation as the centerpiece of pastoral strategy in the ordinary Catholic parish...
...Christiane suspected that there was a strategy here...
...Puzzled by the overwhelming response, Christiane asked organizers what she had done...
...They could help solve the problem of priestlessness, already a reality of church life in Europe and fast becoming a crisis in North America...
...Three years later, when Jane Redmont was baptised, confirmed, and given the Eucharist during the Easter Vigil, the catechumenate had been restored...
...During our supper, she had filled my head and heart with dreams of church renewal through children's initiation and a catechumenate and rites for the initiation of adults...
...She expressed mock terror and then told me a story...
...By the late '60s, when Christiane was invited to help prepare a child of a friend in Tourinnes La-Grosse for Eucharist, only a small congregation, mostly widows, attended Sunday Mass...
...One of those friends, the Reverend Ron Rolheiser, writes that Christiane "struggled a lot, a victim of her own extraordinary sensitivity and giftedness...
...She held out a small piece of notebook paper...
...She turned to The Catholic University of America, where she was allowed to do her doctorate under the direction of the Reverend Gerard Sloyan...
...It was a point of honor for working-class families to never cross the threshold of the church, which had fallen into disrepair...
...They could renew the church from the ground up...
...Soon she was filling the church with the melodies of the Gelineau psalms...
...In her last years, Christiane returned to the children...
...A few years earlier it happened that she was addressing a religious congress in Portland on the historical, psychological, and canonical reasons that children should not be required to make fnrst confession before initiation into Eucharist...
...She breathed in the air of danger and intrigue as older siblings came and went from resistance activities...
...Each point had won thunderous applause...
...The rites involved revolutionary notions of conversion, catechesis, church, liturgy, and sacraments...
...Christiane explained to her the stages of catechesis and liturgy outlined in the Rites, and quickly gathered friends to form a catechetical team to accompany the young woman on her journey...
...Christiane began with the one child—sent to the church rather than accompanied by her parents, who feared being ostracized for their faith...
...What started with children became a vision of renewal for the whole church...
...The ingredients were biblical catechesis, family involvement at the dinner table, communities of families celebrating simple liturgies made joyful by banners and music (Christiane was a superb cantor), and, most important, time...
...People began returning to Sunday Mass...
...One of eight children in a family that was the heart of a small village outside Louvain, she grew up in a home that had been commandeered by the Nazis for their Belgian headquarters...
...The combination of her theological acumen, childlike faith, and constant gracefulness would carry the day...
...The memory of our meeting and our meal came back to me in the sadness of learning this past November that Christiane had taken her life, succumbing to the manic depression that had dogged three generations of her family and afflicted her throughout her life...
...Where was I from...
...In 1972, a curial congregation charged with implementing the liturgical mandates of Vatican II published a provisional text of the Rites of Christian Initiation of Adults...
...let the manner of her death reflect in any way upon the quality of her person or upon the importance of her contribution...
...From parents who entertained the younger and more frightened children with stories and songs, Christiane learned the arts of storytelling and music that she would later discover are essential to good catechesis...
...At as many as a dozen workshops each year on the rites of initiation, during which participants celebrated the liturgies of the Easter Vigil, she entered into each celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus as if it were the first and only one of her life...
...She immersed herself in one of the most exciting experiments of the pre-Vatican II liturgical movement—the Paris catechumenate...
...She realized that if she were ever to do something about that problem, she would have to continue her studies in liturgy and catechesis...
...Her father, recognizing the crisis as more than the lapse from Mass attendance customary for students, suggested she attend a course being offered by an exciting young professor, the Reverend Edward Schillebeeckx...
...Some future historian, trying to account for the twentyfirstcentury appearance of a church in which people choose their pastors from among men and women who have proven records in service, may well devote a chapter of his or her book to the event in Bruges...
...It wasn't in the Louvain classroom, however, that Christiane became so widely known and loved...
...From her experiences in the Paris catechumenate, she knew that the rites were more than a liturgical antique or a fancier way of welcoming converts than the customary practice of quizzing them on the catechism and baptising them privately...
...From Portland, Oregon...
...Her story dissolving into infectious laughter, Christiane insisted that I join her for supper...
...Of all her projects, this symposium, held in Bruges in 1985, is the only one yet to bear fruit...
...It hadn't always been this way...
...For the duration of a year, she gathered the families for celebrations that unwrapped, one after another, the treasures of the Eucharist...
...As a young woman, Christiane went through a crisis of faith...
...She honored them for embodying the tradition...
...A favorite story of Christiane's for conveying the meaning and love of Eucharist will be in the minds of all her friends from now on as they approach to receive their Lord in Communion...
...They explained that just a few minutes before her arrival the archbishop had inveighed against the notion that children could receive first Communion before confessing their sins...
...Like many others who have to suffer the stigma of this kind of death, she was taken out of this world against her Hopefully no one will...
...Stories of Christiane's childhood, which became a part of her lecture repertoire, bring the Trapp family to mind...
...The restored church of St...
...So Christiane, whom friends teased for being "La Popessa," did what many would have wanted the pope to do: she called an international symposium on "The Future of the Local Church...
...It was now a question of how to replicate the Harvard experience in parishes around the country...
...Christiane also suspected that the catechumenal renewal had parallels in the success stories coming out of Christian base communities in Latin America and the missionary churches of Africa...
...The girl snatched the paper and crumpled it quickly into a small ball...
...I was delighted to discover a splendid eleventh-century church that was home to an active and enthusiastic congregation...
...Tantiane," as the nephews and nieces called their tante (aunt) Christiane, set to work developing a catechumenate for children...
...She wanted them to take part in a Liturgy of the Word on their level...
...Her real platform was at workshops and congresses around the world...
...Christiane's opportunity came when an undergraduate at Harvard, where she was lecturing at the time, asked Christiane to help her enter the church...
...During the next seventeen years, I watched her teaching the church the meaning of hospitality, giving people around the world the same vision and hope...
...Christiane hoped to return to Louvain to do doctoral studies on the ways in which the early church had drawn children into sacramental experience, but university offncials, puzzled by the Commonweal 31 January 1992: 19 notion of a woman theologian, refused her entry...
...She excused herself from a circle of friends to greet me...
...Commonweal31 January 1992: 21...
...Meanwhile, brothers and sisters were establishing families, and Christiane was dismayed as nephews and nieces received perfunctory religious instruction and approached sacraments as social formalities...
Vol. 119 • January 1992 • No. 2
