By Leila Miller, Crisis Magazine, Feb. 19, 2024
Leila Miller is a wife, mother, grandmother, writer. Her books include Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce Speak; Raising Chaste Catholic Men; Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues; and Impossible Marriages Redeemed. …
Just when we thought we had blessedly stamped out the cartoon, CCD “Jesus,” a newer, slicker incarnation of this caricature has seeped back into the Catholic Church in the form of “The Chosen”.
My generation first met the happy, hippie “Jesus” in our 1970s and ’80s CCD classes. He was a super-nice dude, not scary or stern or particularly demanding. This was a new, enlightened era, after all, and the old paradigms would no longer do. As I’ve often described of those vacuous catechetical times, “the God presented to us was a God who hardly needs to be worshipped, since he’s our pal…” It almost seemed like we remade Christ in our own image and then began to worship ourselves. …