EDUCATING TOWARD COMMUNION: THE TRADITIONAL ITALIAN FESTA AS A MEANS OF CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Religious Education, Winter 2007 by Franco, Philip A

Fashioning a People: The Vision of Maria Harris

The feast studied also serves as one fruitful expression of the vision elucidated in Maria Harris' work, Fashion Me a People: Curriculum in the Church. In this book, Harris proposes, "community and communion as the initial educational ministry" (1989, 75). Beginning with the Church community, the people, Harris maintains that comprehensive and lifelong Christian education takes place not solely or even primarily through schooling, but amid the constant interplay of the five forms of teaching as seen in the early Church: koinonia, leiturgia, didache, kerygma, and diakonia (1989, 44). Through the interplay of these forms, the fashioning of a people takes place.

Both the young and old of this feast, in accord with Harris' vision, are taught of these five forms not through instruction, but through profound experiences of community (koinonia), actively engaging in spirited parish liturgies and prayer (leiturgia), learning Catholic teaching through participation in various rituals (didache), publicly processing and proclaiming their faith (kerygma), and serving those in need (diakonia). In their lifelong commitment to feast participation, those within the feast domus live and pray together as a united community.

The Festa and the Theology of Communion

Of these five essential forms, Harris gives pride of place to koinonia, arguing that there must be a people in existence before a people can be properly fashioned. The feast examined in this study similarly emphasizes koinonia, as, I contend, it is firmly rooted in a theology of communion. In fact, upon close examination of the theological underpinnings of the Festa, it becomes clear that lying at its source is a constant awareness of the intimate connection, a communion, that exists between the Divine and humanity and, flowing from this, the intimate connection that exists among believers. It was this notion of the intimate connectedness that exists among all participants-including but transcending the sociological definition of community-that was consistently emphasized by various informants. In noting this theological foundation, "the major idea is that theology has deep implications for religious education and that a good theology leads to a good educational philosophy" (Miller 1995, 9).

Within the Catholic tradition, the ancient model of the Church as koinonia, or communion, has been a favored ecclesiological model since the second Vatican Council. It is not possible to give a broad survey of communion ecclesiology here, but a brief discussion is necessary in order to adequately articulate the type of koinonia fostered by the feast examined.

The ecclesiology of Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, emphasizes the importance of an adequate balance between the vertical and horizontal dimensions of communion, so that the authentic understanding of Christian communion does not devolve into a purely horizontal or sociological concept, focusing excessively on human community and forgetting that true koinonia is rooted in the believer's communion with the Triune God as made possible by Christ in the Eucharist. Benedict therefore places a great deal of emphasis on the vertical and diachronic dimensions of koinonia (Franco 2006,11).