Reflections of a New Catholic Teacher

It happens fairly often, I think, that converts to the Catholic faith, such as myself, who tend to be fairly well-educated people who have thought deeply about religion, get recruited as teachers in Catholic schools or PRE programs. It makes sense, to a certain extent, because they have undergone formal instruction in the fundamental truths of the faith and they are usually excited about it and ready to share it with others. However, as I tell my friends, if someone is a young and eager convert, they should NOT under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES undertake the catechesis of youth who are primarily from Catholic families.

The reason for this is because cradle Catholic children are, in my opinion, the most scandalous creatures in existence. Even if they have received impeccable religious education, the convert finds himself confronted with a group of creatures who, having been cleansed, as we believe, from original sin and nourished with the spiritual food of the Blessed Sacrament, nonetheless tend either to behave in exactly the same manner as children from the non-catholic communities he has left behind or, as has been my experience, to behave even worse than their non-catholic counterparts. At best the well-catechized children can recite their prayers, know a few theological definitions, can explain the trinity, have the Ten Commandments memorized, etc., but have absolutely NO clue the reasons for this or that particular belief, nor feel particularly effected, from long habit, by receiving or not receiving the sacraments, except perhaps Confession.

Now, while I do not have any illusions about the fact that my Sunday School experience as a Baptist was excellent in comparison to most, I also know that we, in general, had a sufficient knowledge of the Biblical texts that supported this or that doctrine to be able to make a pretty devastating reply to any would-be papists we might meet--and that by the eighth grade! It helps, of course, that fundamentalism reduces the Christian message to such an easily consumable product, but nonetheless, we were far ahead of our Catholic friends in being able to account for much of what we believed.

So, that is why I tell new Catholics to stay away from Catholic children. It often tries the faith of the new convert, who finds all of his new beliefs, for which he has suffered and with which he has struggled, trivialized or ignored by little urchins pockmarked with original sin. Luckily, before I started, I had spent plenty of time with Catholic families and, in general, had some hold onto reality before jumping into the classroom. Still, I will be the first to admit that I was disheartened by Catholic high school boys who, while they could rattle off a rosary like nobody's business, never seemed to let it sink in to their personal morality or relationship with their teachers, and who, despite their ability to serve at Mass like angels, had never gone to the trouble of actually studying their missal to see what it said.

That being said, I don't think that we can lay the guilt entirely on the shoulders of the children, nor on those of their parents who have tried so hard to bring their children up in the Catholic religion. I think that one of the biggest problems comes in the general methodology used to instruct children in the Catholic faith, which comes in one of two varieties: (1) the 'traditional' approach of giving students a certain set of catechism questions to study and then expecting them to parrot back the answers to you with rapid-fire accuracy and (2) the 'modern' approach of trying to teach little bits and pieces of the Catholic faith while removing all the traditional doctrinal content and replacing it with so many variations of "Jesus loves you!" Both of these methods, in my opinion, have the same failing: they underestimate the capacity of children for profound religious sentiments. This is because, I think, in the former case, the instructor is afraid that he cannot assess, content-wise, the religious sentiments of children, and in the latter case, because the instructor himself has no truly profound religious sentiments.

I don't pretend to have all the answers. When I was working with a group of college-aged Catholics, all of whom were brought up in the faith, I often discussed the question with them, trying to get them to analyze their experiences and bring out their deep misgivings about the Catholic faith in a group-discussion format. I noticed that there were a few things that seemed to come up over and over again.

First, most of them seemed to have never had an experience of "discovering" the Catholic faith. For them it was always a given. The process, then of maturing, which is really a process of testing and stretching things that are "given" then becomes a process of rebelling against their "given" faith. Although many of them never actually reject the beliefs themselves, they become callous to them and marginalize them to Church and family life, although oftentimes Church life is so marginalized that it eventually gets snuffed out too.

My suggestion? Generally I would say that we need to spend more time at the beginning of catechesis making students familiar with the stories and poetry of our faith. Focus on the lives of Christ and Mary, the history of salvation, the meaning and texts of the liturgy, the musical tradition of Gregorian Chant, rather than on dogma. In other words, give them all the stuff of the faith and let them play with it, never making it simplistic or watered down, long before you didactically hand down to them the official formulas of the Catholic faith. I have had great experiences in my Religion class having the students look up the important texts from the Bible and discussing them with an eye to the Catholic interpretation; generally they can remember the stories long after they forget the answers to their catechism questions.

I think that another aspect of this is setting. It simply does not take a whole academic school year to cover Baltimore no. 1 or the Penny Catechism. The whole thing, cover to cover, can be taught content-wise in a few weeks over the summer, if students spend the time on it. And perhaps this would be the better way to ensure that children see the faith as something that is holy and exceptional, if rather than being incorporated into the ordinary course of school work or Sunday school programs, they instead went to summer camps where, mixed with games, solemn liturgies, and outdoor activities away from home, they intensively studied the key texts of our Catholic faith. I envision something like what Vacation Bible School used to be when I was a small child in a Baptist congregation, but whose function has gradually been turned over to residential Church Camps.

Of course, many cradle Catholics love to carry on and on about the way their devout parents browbeat them into believing or doing this and that, and many of them tie all their notions of prayer or religious study to some fond, or perhaps traumatic, memory of their parents or home life. This is a complicated issue. On the one hand, it is good to associate one's family with one's religious life, and clearly it is the intention of the Church for one to make the family home a center of prayer and religious virtues. On the other, no person, even a mother or father, can have faith for someone else. Each person must have that desert experience of conversion and temptation; every person must work out their salvation with fear and trembling. My fear is always that parents try, in their good intentions, to preserve their children from that fear and that trembling and, thereby, deny their children the experience of testing and doubt that is needed to refine a person's faith.

Lately, I have been thinking that a certain secularism is healthy in the Catholic family home. Sure, prayer has its place, but rather than compelling children to participate in so many Catholic devotions and so forth in the home, simply taking time to pray to God before meals, before trips, or on important occasions, such as birthdays and funerals and so forth, seems to me to be more in keeping with the individual character of faith. It is true that Catholicism holds that faith is essentially shared with others, but it is with others as brothers and sisters in Christ, not as natural or biological parents.

On the other hand, religious experience, in order to be shared by the children equally with the parents, needs to have a certain "otherness" to it. That is why I think it would be best for religious education programs, particularly those that have to do with sacramental preparation, to be more intensive and to take place at times other than those which are usually taken up with school and family duties. Rather, on ordinary Sundays, I think it would be better for the parish religious ed. programs to be focused on making Catholic children literate in basic apologetics,Sacred Scripture, church history, and liturgy.

I do think that it is important to give children the opportunity to develop their own relationship with God. Some of the most devout people I know were cradle Catholics whose families were always very keen to take the family to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, which requires everyone to just spend time in silence together with God. I like this idea lot: simply giving children an opportunity to be quiet with God and to say such prayers as interest them. It could even take place at home in the evening as a sort of "daily sabbath".

Prayer, it seems to me, is the most common element missing from the religious formation of young Catholic children. Not that many programs do not strive to have the children say prayers, but as Lesson 28 of Baltimore no. 3 tells us, merely reciting formulas "such as a machine might do" does not really amount to praying. True, we must always stick to the concrete, and formulas are often helpful for beginners, but too often, for lack of creativity, we often find ourselves merely reciting 'vain repetitions' as if saying more prayers meant that God heard us more, which is fundamentally untrue. It is likewise untrue for children.

One of the things I think I would like to see is a religious education program that taught the segments of the Catechism backwards, starting with the Lord's Prayer and prayer, both mental and vocal, public and private, as the foundation, then proceeding to the study of the Ten Commandments,  the Sacraments, and the Creed. It seems to me that this might be more effective in inculcating the need to constantly tend to one's relationship with God, even outside of school and the family.

I apologize if any of this seems overly judgmental or harsh about the nature of Catholic families. I have to confess my general ignorance about such things. I am only writing as someone who sees the effects of various family situations, and the general indifference of many children to spiritual matters. I am writing mostly to those who undertake the religious education of young children; parents have to work out their own solutions.