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"This will spell the end of Catholicism as a taught programme for
good."
That was one published reaction to recent news of pending
inter-faith schools in Northern Ireland. A senior priest in Tyrone
has publicly challenged Down and Connor Auxiliary Bishop Donal
McKeown for supporting the idea.
But for Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas, nothing is ever taught
until something has been deeply learned. This is the principle known
to Catholic thought as reception. By contrast, according to a recent
poll organised from Dublin, only one in twenty young people on the
island can identify the first of the Ten Commandments, and most
cannot even name the Blessed Trinity. A clear majority of those
young people are products of Catholic schools.
The virtually total absence of young people in the age range 15-35
from Sunday Mass in most of the country tells the same story. So
does the experience of Catholic chaplains in our universities - to
whom only a small minority of nominally Catholic students ever
introduce themselves. What was assiduously presented in Catholic
schools over the past several decades was in most cases not received
- certainly not at a depth that could retain key doctrine or
maintain a lifetime's interest or commitment from then on.
It is high time that all involved in Catholic education face up to
this, and ask a fundamental question. Why should we ever have
supposed that Catholic formation could effectively be confined to
the years of childhood - the years before childhood faith is tested
by further education, secularist challenge, adult trials and adult
questions? Why should we ever have thought that greenhousing our
children could educate and perpetuate our church?
The answer was provided in 2002 by Cardinal Cahal Daly at a
conference in Maynooth. Commenting on the phenomenon of over 90%
Mass observance in Ireland until recent decades he observed that
beneath "the pleasing surface" of those times there had been
"dangers of conformism and routine" and even "sometimes hypocrisy,
with people, for reasons of expediency, professing in public views
which they rejected in private discussion or contradicted in private
behaviour".
No one is more ready to conform than a child. Catholic religious
education as presently managed depends almost entirely upon the
compliance of children. This explains not only why Catholic children
conform to the Catholic faith norms of their schools, but why they
then so quickly conform to the secular faith norms of their society
when they leave school.
People of strong faith are never mere conformists: they have been
encouraged to ask their own deepest questions, and to find their own
faith, in freedom - and this is an adult affair. There is no
scriptural evidence that Jesus spent any time instructing children.
The virtually complete indifference to adult Catholic faith
formation in Ireland (usually a small minority option for the well
heeled) has been a tragic miscalculation. That miscalculation
occurred because clericalism mistakenly supposed that to educate the
child was to educate the adult as well.
It was the mass conformism of Irish Catholicism in the 1960s that
misled the Irish Catholic hierarchy into supposing that the reforms
of Vatican II weren't needed in Ireland. These invited lay people to
leave the passivity of childhood faith and to adopt an adult role,
based upon a theology of church as 'the people of God'. An era of
dialogue and learning at all levels was supposed to ensue.
It never truly did in Ireland. Clericalism - the tendency of too
many clergy to prefer the passive compliance of their people -
continued to dominate. Clericalism is uncomfortable with dialogue,
because dialogue presumes that people will relate as adults. Valuing
conformity and docility above all other virtues, clericalism prefers
lay people to remain children forever.
So, the huge efforts of well educated teachers to instruct Catholic
children in the theology of Vatican II were unsupported by an adult
programme that would have allowed the parents of those children to
understand and reinforce that theology. A huge gulf developed
between the generations. Passive parents, expected to 'pay, pray and
obey' could not inspire their children with enthusiasm for the same
passive role. It is the anticipation of responsibility that
primarily motivates learning, and clericalism leaves lay people -
parents included - without any real responsibility.
So children whose teachers told them that at Confirmation they
became 'Temples of the Holy Spirit' soon found that, strangely, they
would never have an adult speaking role in their own church.
Clericalism insists that ordination trumps all the other sacraments,
leaving nothing for lay people to discover or to say.
How then could those children ever rise to the challenge posed by
Vatican II to the laity - to 'consecrate the world to God'? Their
parents had never been invited to discuss as adults what that might
mean - and their bishops showed no sign of inviting their own
generations to do so. So what were we ever educating our children
for? The answer was shown in the failure even to develop parish or
diocesan pastoral councils in most cases: for perpetual Catholic
childhood. No wonder so many former Catholics in Ireland say: "I
have outgrown all of that!"
A radical crisis of continuity now obliges Irish Catholics to
completely rethink and reorganise our faith formation system. It is
time to refocus that upon adult needs and adult questions, to
discover as adults how to be church together - priests and people -
and to make parents once more the chief religious educators of their
children - while there is still time.
A reflexive resistance to any change - in defence of the failed
totem of the segregated Catholic school system - is not the answer.
To go on supposing that to instruct the child is also to educate the
adult would be to deny a mountain of evidence to the contrary, and
to guarantee the disappearance of our Irish Catholic tradition.
(© The Irish News, 21st June 2007)
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