By Gretchen Keiser

The new archdiocesan director of religious education, Tom Brassington, said that he sees a critical part of his new role as being “one who calls people to Gospel values, especially values of peace and justice.”

In an interview in his office at the Catholic Center, the 37-year-old director said that the emphasis upon justice was one of four threads which held together his vision for his new post. Then, he chuckled and said, “Meet me in a year and a half and I’ll tell you how it all works.”

Brassington is assuming a post that has been vacant since Father Jim Kelly moved in 1982 from the religious education office in Atlanta to pastor of Queen of Angels Church in Thomson. He is now pastor of St. Philip Benizi parish in Jonesboro.

The archdiocesan director of religious education oversees a staff of six people, four of whom are consultants with responsibility for particular areas of education. Sister Carleen Lynch, C.S.J. is consultant for elementary education; David Adcock for youth ministry; Sister Lorraine Masucci, R.S.M. for adult education; and Jim Sendleback for catechist formation and ministry certification.

Audio-visual librarian Paul Boehlert and secretary Marion Presson round out the group, Brassington noted.

As “captain of the team,” Brassington’s job is to “coordinate, supervise and evaluate” religious education programming both in Catholic schools and in parish religious education for youth and adults.

He brings to the post an awareness gained in the Diocese of Birmingham, Alabama that one “issue of concern” is “how Catholicism is understood in a predominantly non-Catholic area.” For his last three years he has served as director of Birmingham’s religious education office and as a member of the Continuing Education of the Clergy Committee and the Peace and Justice Educational Team.

While the Birmingham diocese is smaller in Catholic population than the Atlanta archdiocese -- only about 56,000 Catholics compared to Atlanta’s population of 119,000 -- the diocese had 12 more schools and a similar number of parishes and mission to the archdiocese, he said.

Prior to his work in Birmingham, he had been a teacher, counselor and retreat director in Catholic high schools in Cleveland and Dayton, Ohio. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he is a graduate of the University of Dayton in Ohio, where he obtained a B.S. degree in business administration and philosophy and teacher certification for secondary education. He received a master’s degree in religious education from the University of Toronto St. Michael’s Faculty of Theology.

His office on the second-floor of the Catholic Center is still “new” but is dominated by a framed poster of a black mother holding her infant in her arms with the opening words of the Hail Mary printed alongside -- a cherished gift from a friend, Moses Anderson, who is now the auxiliary bishop of Detroit, one of the country’s 10 black bishops.

Brassington’s emphasis as he spoke was upon transmitting not just the content of the faith through religious education, but a living witness of faith.

“We’re called to teach the faith -- to hand on the teachings of the Catholic Church. But now we are also called to evangelize as well as teach,” he said. “You put the two together and that is catechists.”

While at one time “we taught from the catechism” alone, Brassington said, now teachers of the faith must also witness by their lives what the faith is about. “If teachers can’t witness to their own sacramental life, there’s a lesson that doesn’t come alive.”

He also said that Catholics in general need to be educated about the Church’s social doctrine and, particularly, to assume that the Church’s efforts in the area of justice have a direct relationship to their lives. He noted an attitude that it was possible to dismiss even reading the recent U.S. bishops’ pastoral letter on war and peace as an optional matter for Catholics.

“Sometimes we look at justice apart from how it affects you,” he said. “Justice is a constitutive part of the Gospel.”

But, on the positive side, he noted that “more people are reading more about their faith and praying more about their faith.”

“I think that’s very exciting,” he said. “It’s a positive, healthy sign.”

Brassington also noted that one of his primary concerns was to serve parish and school coordinators of religious education and to build community among the department of education, pastors and parish and school coordinators.

“I’ll be visiting parishes to meet coordinators and schools to meet principals,” he said, “to listen to their needs from the office.”

“We’re here to serve,” Brassington said. “We have to reach out to coordinators and teachers throughout the entire archdiocese.”