How Catholic Are Our Catholic Schools?

Religion Class is Not Enough

Before we answer that question, we need to be clear about one thing. The raison d'etre for the Catholic schools, their purpose for being, is to help pass on the deposit of faith to the children in their care, and—please God—to pass it on in such a way that the faith is understood, valued, and integrated into the whole pattern of the student’s life. Our question then becomes, is the addition of a religion class to the regular subjects offered, sufficient to allow the Catholic school to fulfill this purpose?

The simple answer is, no.

Vatican II’s Declaration on Christian Education, directs Catholic schools to integrate the Christian faith into the whole pattern of human life in all its aspects. It enjoins Catholic educators to strive “to relate all human culture eventually to the news of salvation, so that the life of faith will illumine the knowledge which students gradually gain of the world, of life, and of humankind.” (1)

Dominic Aquila, chairman of the Humanities Department at Franciscan University, develops this thought when he writes, “Rather than seeing Catholic education as merely the addition of a religion course to the usual academic subjects, we want our students to make Christian sense out of what they learn in their natural science, math, and history courses, in their study of art, music, and literature.”(2) While clearly stated in the documents of Vatican II, and in many other places, this vision remains the great, largely unrealized ideal of Catholic education in North America today.

The Censorship of Religion

In 1986, Paul Vitz wrote Censorship: Evidence of Bias in our Children's Textbooks, in which he outlined the findings of a research project set up by the National Institute of Education (NIE) to determine if there is bias in text books used in public schools in the United States. In this, the only systematic study of religion and traditional values in public school textbooks, Vitz and his research group concluded that public school textbooks are both biased and censored. Religion, traditional family values, and conservative political and economic positions have been systematically excluded from our children's textbooks.(3)

No one even vaguely familiar with the direction Canadian and American public education has charted for itself over the past 35 years could be much surprised by this finding. What may surprise, and should certainly concern Catholics, is the fact that Catholic schools, in both Canada and the United States, are using these same resources — resources which are predictably silent about the Christian perspective on how social life should be conducted and on the contribution of Catholic faith and culture to the progress of history and our current cultural context.

Of course, the fact that the resources we are using were written with the public schools in mind shouldn't make any difference. Paul Vitz has pointed out that the central issue is a question of the facts of our past and present. Those facts are clear, “…religion, especially Christianity, has played and continues to play a central role in our culture and history. To neglect to report this is simply to fail to carry out the major duty of any textbook writer — the duty to tell the truth.” The study of Western civilization remains incomplete and distorted without an adequate consideration of the influence of Christianity upon it. The Holy Father puts it forcefully, “The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man.”

Surely then one of the great tragedies of public education today is the fact that the average young person leaving our school systems has no conception of the positive influence Christianity has had on society and culture. As citizens of the modern world our young people are destined to live off the spiritual and cultural capital of our Judeo-Christian heritage without ever recognizing or acknowledging their debt. Yet given the ideological agendas now driving curriculum development in public education, it is hardly surprising that public schools fail to give Christian faith and culture their rightful place; the reaction against Christianity is just too strong.

The fact is, as the public system has increasingly committed itself to an exclusively secular vision, public school resources have become less and less reflective of Christian values, Christian content, and, in the areas of history and social studies, Christian based criteria of interpretation. Public school textbooks today, can in no way be considered sufficient to the task of helping our students “…make Christian sense out of what they learn in their natural science, math, and history courses, in their study of art, music, and literature.”

Recognizing this problem many Protestant educational organizations have developed their own resources which emphasize a Christian perspective. For some reason we Catholics have been slow to react to the secularized content of the resources we are using.

Another problem facing us in the Catholic schools is that having received their training in secular universities, most Catholic teachers are poorly equipped to appreciate the positive historical and cultural impact of Catholicism and are therefore generally lacking in the background necessary to share these riches with their students.

As a consequence, most Catholic schools in the United States and Canada, having come to depend on the same textbooks and other resources as those used in the public schools, and staffed, for the most part, by graduates of the same universities as the public schools, are, outside of the subject of religious education, teaching almost exactly the same content as the public schools, content that is decidedly impoverished in the rich heritage and meaning of Christian faith and culture.

This situation is a serious concern, because the relationship between instruction in Catholic faith and instruction in Christian culture is a critical and interdependent one. In a sense faith requires culture to incarnate itself. If Catholic students are not made aware of the great wealth they have inherited in terms of culture, they may well end up, as the great Catholic historian Christopher Dawson predicted, “…divided personalities — with a Christian faith and a pagan culture which contradict one another continually.” The challenge and importance of the study of Christian culture for Catholic education can hardly be overstated.

A Resource for Catholic Educators

Sharing my concerns about this situation I found I was far from alone and in 1998 a group of teachers, priests, and academics in the Vancouver area joined together to form the Catholic Educator's Resource Center (CERC).

Presently working under a grant from the Homeland Foundation, out of New York, and the Madonna Foundation here in Canada, CERC is compiling an internet library of journal articles, essays, book excerpts, and other texts which have been chosen for their objective, concise, and clear presentation of Catholic teachings, history, and culture, particularly in those areas in which the Church's role is unknown, or misunderstood. Articles are selected to assist teachers in Catholic schools, home schooling parents, as well as all other interested Christians. Our current issues section offers articles discussing current cultural trends and issues of concern to Catholics: multiculturalism, homosexuality, environmentalism, feminism, parenting, persecution of Christians, marriage and family, medical ethics, euthanasia, population control, sexuality, and the media, from a developed Catholic understanding.

Our CERC site draws from a range of books, academic journals, and popular periodicals to provide some of the most articulate and cogent resources available explaining the Church's position on a broad range of social, moral, and historical issues. Any of these articles may be downloaded and copied for use in the classroom as supplementary reading materials for the students, or used simply as background by the teacher wishing to be better informed.

The response to this initiative has been most encouraging. Some thirty-five leading Catholic academics from across North America have signed on to our Advisory Board.

Well known Catholic historian James Hitchcock, Professor of History at St. Louis University, has written: “I believe that this project is one of the most promising of the past thirty years and will contribute greatly to the genuine renewal of Catholic education at all levels.”

Over the next year, we will be adding to our web site library hundreds of the best articles available on a wide range of issues. But our main objective will be to help Catholic teachers convey the great wealth of Catholic faith and culture by developing lesson plans and units which help them do just that.

Catholic culture is a historical and sociological fact which Catholic teachers need to learn more about themselves and pay much more honor and attention to in their own teaching; seeing their role as one of working with parents and priests, to initiate their students into both the spiritual and cultural reality of Catholicism.

We believe initiatives like CERC have a vital role to play in helping our Catholic teachers bring the good news of Catholic moral and social teaching — and so many other aspects of Catholic faith and culture — to the minds and hearts of our Catholic students.

We also believe that in order to better approximate the ideal of Catholic education, Catholic educators will have to work much more closely with Catholic academics, in order to develop resources which tell our Catholic story and re-present the gospel truths in new ways that are both challenging and compelling.

ENDNOTES:

  1. Walter Abbott, SJ and Joseph Gallagher eds., “Declaration on Christian Education”(Gravissimum Educationis), Documents of Vatican II, (New York: Corpus Books), 646.

  2. Dominic Aquila, The Value of a Catholic Liberal Arts Education. This talk was given to the board members and parents of students of Aquinas Academy, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on October 3, 1997.

  3. Paul C. Vitz, Censorship: Evidence of Bias in our Children's Textbooks, (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1986).

J. Fraser Field is executive officer of the Catholic Educator's Resource Center. He holds a masters degree in counseling psychology from the University of Victoria.

(This article appears courtesy of The Catholic Faith magazine.)

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