By ARTHUR HIPPLER
“Why do the religion classes have to be so hard?” This is a question I used to hear from parents at my school. “Don’t they just need to know ‘God loves you’ and ‘be kind to others’?” These same parents expect math and science, history and literature, to be challenging, to prepare their children for college. But for them, religion is a subject that, in the words of Robert Fulghum: All you really needed to know you learned in kindergarten.
The Church discourages the trend of schools toward making religion “easy.” In the General Directory on Catechesis (1997), the Congregation for Clergy insisted that “religious instruction in schools appear as a scholastic discipline with the same systematic demands and the same rigor as other disciplines. It must present the Christian message and the Christian event with the same seriousness and the same depth with which other disciplines present their knowledge” (n.73.5). The mind must be formed in theology, just as it needs to be formed in language and mathematics and the scientific method.
Even basic catechesis does rest with the mere acknowledgment of a loving God and basic kindness to others; it involves mysteries of Divine Persons, a God who takes on human nature, and sacraments that somehow make God present to us. There is nothing simple in any of that. Indeed, to strip down the faith to belief in God and kindness fails to inculcate essentials of the faith. (Perhaps it is no accident that Robert Fulghum is a Unitarian minister.)
The General Directory on Catechesis tells us further that religious instruction “should not be an accessory alongside of these disciplines, but rather it should engage in a necessary interdisciplinary dialogue.”
Religion classes should not treat its subject matter as hermetically sealed from the rest of the curriculum. How can religion address creation without responding to the materialism of those who look to science alone to explain the universe? Or address the inspiration of Scripture without responding to the rationalist accounts of history that deny miracles and prophecy? Or address the natural moral law without responding to the “cultural relativism” of contemporary social science? A religion class that accepts these responsibilities cannot be “easy.”
Almost a decade earlier in The Religious Dimension of Education in a Catholic School (1988), the Congregation for Catholic Education declared that the Catholic high school should give “special attention to the ‘challenges’ that human culture poses for faith,” which then forms them in a way that they are able “to recognize and reject cultural counter-values which threaten human dignity and are therefore contrary to the Gospel” (n. 52).
This should be true of all the academic subjects, but it should be especially true of religious instruction. A religion course that does not energetically address the challenges of the secular world and its “counter-values” is not doing its job.
The religion teacher may have a course developed from sound catechetical materials that addresses the essentials of the faith. But “young people bring with them into the classroom what they see and hear in the world around them, along with the impressions gained from the ‘world’ of mass media,” a formation that can make them “indifferent and insensitive” (n. 71).
As a result, it is crucial that the class not merely involve lecture and memorization, but a candid dialogue between the teacher and the students: “An excellent way to establish rapport with students is simply to talk to them — and to let them talk. Once a warm and trusting atmosphere has been established, various questions will come up naturally.”
These questions are often not disagreements with this or that teaching, but rather a misunderstanding or even a denial of the principle upon which the teaching is based. “Typical questions have to do with atheism, non-Christian religions, divisions among Christians, events in the life of the Church; the violence and injustice of supposedly Christian nations, etc.”(footnote 65). Objections often come from the grounds of modern social science, that man is merely natural, religion is invented, morality is relative, and so on.
Many religion teachers fear this kind of dialogue, because it may involve questions they do not feel qualified to address. The religion teacher may seek to give a basic catechesis when student questions draw them into the realm of moral philosophy, theodicy, Church history, and the secular sciences.
When I explain to parents why my religion courses are challenging, the easiest response is that “student questioning makes it a hard course. They won’t put up with anything else!”
In her direction of Catholic schools, the Church is helping us to understand that without this dialogue between faith and culture, between the teachings of the Church and the intellectual life of our students, an essential element of evangelization is missing. If the faith remains compartmentalized as a set of thoughts and emotions removed from activity in the “real world,” this is not an authentic faith.
The Congregation for Catholic Education cites the words of John Paul II: “Faith which does not become culture is faith which is not received fully, not assimilated entirely, not lived faithfully.”
The Catholic school in general and the religion courses in particular must help its students form their culture through the faith. Without this, our students will be merely intellectual schizophrenics, split personalities who are Catholic on one side, purely worldly on the other.
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