Conference Paper on Challenges facing Religious Education in Catholic Schools

 Kevin D Skehan

 

In the last century and into this New Age, we see a myriad of ecclesiologies emerging: Liberation, Feminist, GLBTIQ, Ecological, Global. All are “calls to mission” in a Post-Modern Age where past certainties are demolished and the global impact of humans on this earth is already potentially apocalyptic. The power of instant communication is all pervasive and its effects are yet to be realised or its moulding of a global culture fully comprehended. Vatican II empowered the laity as had not been allowed since before the third century A.D. The power structures, doctrines and ecclesiology of the Catholic Church are under scrutiny and criticism as never before from theologians like Hans Kung, Elizabeth Fiorenza and Bernard Lonergan, to name but three, and from secular philosophers. These ecclesiologies face obstacles in both the economically developed and developing world. In the West, they often are confronted by apathy, secularism, materialism, science and anti-clericalism. Priests and male religious are suspect, given the publicity surrounding sexual abuse. Some Catholic Bishops in their renaissance garb, mitres and metres of watered silk robes are seen as irrelevant anachronisms. Women are alienated and continue to be oppressed by Catholic Church teaching on contraception and a denial of full ministry. The clawing back of the reforms of Vatican II especially in the Liturgy is seen by many as symptomatic of a hierarchy out of touch with their congregations. The silencing of dissenters is seen by many as a Church “circling the wagons” and clinging to outmoded styles of governance, calling for a new Church Militant to fight against post-modernity. Gays and divorcees who remarry have been bitterly disappointed by the final Synod report. However, the pontificate of Pope Francis shows great promise that necessary reforms and a new spirit of dialogue will prevail, but “Time will tell!”   All of these issues impinge upon Catholic parents, pre-teens, teenagers, parishes and the religious educator in our Catholic schools.

 

RELIGIOUS CULTURE VERSUS POST-MODERN SECULAR CULTURE

 

 

We must ask, “Who are our learners?” Parish priests bemoan the lack of youthful attendance at Sunday Mass. Statistics support their observation. The national research study by McCrindle Research in October 2011 called “Australian Communities Report” was based on focus groups and completed surveys from 1,094 Australians. It revealed: overall 50% of

Australians do not identify with a religion, 40% consider themselves as Christian, identifying as Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant or Evangelical, 31% do not identify with any religion or spiritual belief, and 19% state that they are spiritual, not religious.

According to the Olive Tree Media Incorporated [1] commissioned study from McCrindle Research (Australian Communities Report, 2011),

“In Australia, around 20% of the community are open to spirituality and the idea of the existence of God, but fail to connect with the Christian church or faith. This is reflected in westernised countries around the world. Those who consider themselves ‘spiritually open’ are often blocked from considering faith due to a number of attitudes and beliefs that they hold towards the church and Christianity. For some, it’s the question of science, for others the existence of suffering and for many, the perceived hypocrisy of the church and the failure of Christian leaders. These belief blockers are creating an almost impenetrable wall to faith.”

The survey conducted by a Ballarat Catholic parish, of which a majority of respondents were females aged 55 and over, reveals a segment of the ecclesia open to radical change, especially in the area of moral theology. (Cunningham, 2014)

 

The secondary school, on which this paper is based, has 288 Catholic students out of a cohort of 637 for 2014. That is, only 45.2% of the students taught in this Catholic school are culturally Catholic as revealed by enrolment records. A survey of one hundred and thirty four 14-18 year olds at the college conducted between October 1st and October 20th 2014 reveals the following:

• 37.1% stated they were Catholic, while 32.8% did not follow any religion

• 26.7$ declared they were “practicing Catholics”.

• 55.2% stated that they were baptised Christians.

• When asked how religious they considered themselves to be, 25.9% were not at all religious, and 34.5% were “not too religious”.

• 58.6% “didn’t belong to any organised religion, but considered they were spiritual persons”.

• 11.2% attended church weekly, while 68.1% attended only when compelled to so do at whole- school Eucharists.

• 55.2% of parents/care-givers never go to church, while 12% attend regularly.

• 78.5% pray only on certain occasions or never.

• 38.8% are not interested in Religious lessons taught in the college.

• 41% believe in the existence of a God.

• They largely believed in a benign spirit deity and 62% regarded this God as benevolently concerned with this world and humanity. They also 60% did not ascribe to the idea that natural disasters are punishments from God.

• Interestingly they are divided on the existence of : Satan, heaven, hell, demons, but believe that animals have souls, global warming is real, life after death is most probable, and angels exist.

• As reflected in the wider society, 69% of student respondents agreed that Gay and Lesbian couples should be allowed to marry, 83% agreed that extra-marital sexual relations before marriage was acceptable if the couple were in a loving relationship. In the ABC Survey (Vote Compass: Majority of voters back gay marriage, 2013), Fifty-two per cent of respondents do not believe marriage should only be between a man and a woman, compared to 36 per cent who do. Twelve per cent selected 'neutral'.

• Only 11% of students agreed with the Catholic Magisterium’s teaching on abortion and only 3.45% agreed with the Church’s blanket opposition to contraception.

 

The questions in the final part of the survey dealt with Religious Knowledge. Students show a basic knowledge of Christian fundamental facts about Jesus the Christ, but there were a significant number of “don’t knows” to some questions and 14.29% didn’t believe Jesus actually existed. 41% agree that all religions are equally true and 60% believe that Religion is the cause of terrible conflict throughout history. 28% expect that science will replace religion and will eventually explain everything. But it appears that, of the 288 ‘culturally’ Catholic students and the majority of students who follow no religion or another religious tradition, many have serious reservations about what is taught in the formal Catholic Religious Education curriculum at this college, especially in the area of Church doctrines on sexuality and relationships. It is interesting and informative to compare our students with American Teenagers. The following statistics come from Pearce and Denton [2]. (A Faith of Their Own: Stability and Change in the Religiosity of America's Adolescents, 2011)

 

In looking for common patterns in the U.S. survey responses, the sociologists came up with five types of religious profiles among the teens:

•      Abiders, representing 20 percent of the teens. These are the adolescents with the highest levels of religious interest and practice. They not only believe in God, they pray regularly, attend services, volunteer and are most likely to say their religion is the only true faith.

•      Adapters, 20 percent. This group shows high levels of personal religiosity. But compared to the Abiders, they are more accepting of other people’s faiths and attend religious services more sporadically.  The Adapters are most likely of all the groups to help others in need.

•      Assenters, 31 percent. These teens say they believe in God, but they are minimally engaged with their faith. Religion is tangential to other aspects of their lives.

•      Avoiders, or 24 percent. They believe in God but do not engage in any religious practice. Their God is a distant one and they often don’t name a religious affiliation.

•      Atheists, representing 5 percent. The opposite of the Abiders. They don’t believe in God and don’t attend services.

 

 

Returning to our Australian school, of those hardy souls who have the task of teaching Religion at the College, only four have formal theological credentials, with a larger number studying a preferred course (Religious Education Accreditation Program) provided by the Archdiocesan Religious Education Office[3] or other in-services provided by the Assistant Principal Religious Education of the college to assist teachers of religion to maintain accreditation of a minimum of 50 hours Professional Learning within each five year cycle. As well, most teachers of religion are not specialists in this area but teach predominantly in other curriculum areas. Teachers of religion should be practicing Catholics but many of them are themselves in conflictwith the dogmas of the Catholic Church. There is also a new Curriculum in Religious Education P-12 introduced in the Brisbane Archdiocese from 2014 and currently being implemented. In addition, Year 7 is now part of secondary school education in Queensland from 2015. Colleagues often describe feelings of being ‘overwhelmed’ both by the pace of mandated change and the requirement to write new units of work for new curricula mandated by the new Australian Curriculum. The following personal observations have come from ethnographic research over the last eighteen years in conversation with teaching colleagues, parents and members of local parishes.

The Baby-Boomer generation, of which this author and many long-serving teachers in Catholic schools are members, experienced Catholic schooling radically different from today’s teenagers. The roots of pedagogic discipline practiced in Australian catholic schools as recent as the 1970’ were based on suspiciously Jansenist view of the innate sinfulness of the body and the need for constant vigilance against sexual thoughts and actions. Tell that to teenagers today. It is undeniable that unhealthy attitudes to sexuality were substantial contributors to the dysfunctional rearing of children in Catholic homes and Institutions. Alice Miller (For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, 1991, pp. 3-96) coined an excellent phrase to describe the fear-based destructive rearing of children even up to our own time. She called it “Poisonous Pedagogy.” Miller describes child-rearing approaches, based on beating the evil out of the child either physically or psychologically or both, as specifically harmful to the long-term development of the child, and in the case of perpetrator, can be rationalised as necessary, and more obscenely, serve to mask an inherent sadism.

The clergy and religious preached that celibate life was superior to married life, that "impure thoughts" were evil, as was all sexual activity without a marriage license. Sexual pleasure was suspect. “It was ‘dirty, disgusting’, all too powerful evidence of an inferior animal nature, which so constantly threatened what was divine in the human.” (McGarry, 2002) Another stumbling block for many of my colleagues, both newly minted and old fogies, is the perception that many of the clergy have been obsessed with their privileged state as ordained ministers. Clericalism that hubristic distortion that, consciously or insentiently, corrupts true servant-priesthood and culminates in clerical privilege and dominance. It has been mentioned as one of the contributing factors in the prevalence of sexual child abuse by priests and religious. “Clericalism” described by Shaw (2011, pp.27-28) as “the attitude, widely shared by Catholic laypeople as well as many priests, that clerics make up the active, elite corps in the Church, and laypeople are the passive mass; that clerics alone have intrinsic responsibility for the Church's mission while the apostalate of laypeople comes to them (if they come at all) only by delegation on the part of the clergy.” The crimes of sexual abuse for which many clergy and male religious have been accused and found guilty are one outcome of the clericalism which has been documented throughout Church history. (Nauheimer, 2009)

Priestly power and the corruption of such power is inimical to the teachings of the Gospels. Brian Lennon (Re-balancing authority in the abusive Church, 2012) says, “Catholic Church structures are riddled with patriarchy, clericalism and deference and these were at the very centre of the abuse problem itself. Repentance therefore means changing these.” Again, (Nauheimer, 2009) “Cultural clerical inbreeding has wed the ‘god complex’ with hubris. A person who is said to have a ‘god complex’ does not believe he is God, but acts so arrogantly that he might as well believe he is a god or that he was appointed to act by a god” and hubris applies to any outrageous act or exhibition of pride or disregard for basic moral laws. The Church has existed in a state of co-dependance, which is described as “an unhealthy pattern of relating based on low-self-esteem and on the belief that one’s worth depends on attachment to, or approval of, some other person or group.” (Hoffman, 1991, p. 15) Co-dependent relationships have been fostered by the hierarchical and hubristic religious and clerics of the Catholic Church, at least, in the past. Co-dependence flourishes in enforced silence and contrived guilt. Which brings up the elephant in the room, as illustrated in the series recently on Showcase®, the Devil’s Playground, and revealed in the Royal Commision into institutional abuse.

Despite the bad press and high profile cases it must be stated that the vast majority, at least 96% of priests and Religious are not abusers, but are honourable men, faithful to their vows. (my emphasis) According to George Weigel. "Priests, Abuse, and the Meltdown of a Culture." National Review Online (May 19, 2011). “Some 4 percent of Catholic priests in active ministry in the United States were accused of abuse between the 1950s and 2002. There is not a shred of evidence indicating that priests abuse young people at rates higher than do people in the rest of society. On the contrary: Most sexual abuse takes place within families. Statistics show whereas five young people in 100,000 may have been abused by a priest, the average rate of abuse throughout the United States was 134 for every 100,000 young people. The sexual abuse of the young is a widespread and horrific societal problem; it is by no means uniquely, or principally, a Catholic problem, or a specifically priestly problem.” It must be stated that sexual abuse has declined markedly in the last 20 to 30 years. Each of these issues have impacted on lay Catholics and lay Catholic teachers with greater or lesser effects. This is the baggage that is there for all to see. What of the parents? As reported by Justine Ferrari, National Education Correspondent for The Australian (Teachers left to do parents' job, 2014) “Professor Stackhouse … known for his work on the intersection of religion and public culture and institutions…It is crucial that children are informed about the religions of the world”. Obviously the professor is correct and teachers of religion in Catholic schools do their very best as dedicated professionals, unfortunately caught between the secular attitudes of the wider society reflected in many of the parents and the children we teach versus the expectations of the Church which expects doctrinal purity and effective evangelisation from educators.”In conversations with parents it can be observed that the school is relied on to both provide an academic education and to inculcate some worthwhile morals and values to their offspring. The more involved parents see the school as a partner in this rearing of their children. However, with a majority of families being non-Catholic it is more than probable that they do not expect the school to evangelise and convert their children to the Catholic faith. Parents value the ambience of the college for its Pastoral Care, moral values and ethics, and ability to provide a sound secular education. Lest it be thought that this college is struggling with its Catholic identity. Nothing could be further from the truth. The college is imbued with the charisms of its tradition and vigorously promulgates Gospel values of prodigal Love, Justice, Mercy, Inclusivity, and Care for each other and for the environment. The students are often astonishing in their generosity for charitable causes. The college is widely valued for these qualities and its commitment to an holistic education for all students regardless of ability or disability, background, family circumstances, ethnicity, and religiosity.  

 

Another aspect of the clientele of the Catholic schools lies in our attempt to understand the impact and probable changes to their consciousness by the ubiquitous use of technology, both inside and outside the classroom. A study by Miller, Mundey and Hill, Faith in the Age of Facebook: Exploring the Links Between Religion and Social Network Site Membership and  Use. (2013, pp. 246-248), “…membership and use of Social Networking Sites among American emerging adults (18-24) are associated with several aspects of religiousness: two religious traditions (Catholic and conservative Protestant) are associated with a greater likelihood of SNS membership compared with the not religious. … little religious values are displayed online.” An informal survey of students at this college reveals that the end of Gen Y and current Gen Z’s are overwhelmingly participants in such sites as Facebook® among a myriad others. Australians are noted for quick uptake of new technology.

 

Was Teilhard de Chardin prophetic when he predicated humanity’s evolution to the stage of the Noosphere, a postulated sphere or stage of evolutionary development dominated by consciousness, the mind, and interpersonal relationships, which phenomenon is eerily reflected in the ongoing evolution of the World Wide Web? However, despite the obvious benefits of technology, its effects are not all benign. They can include: Elevated Exasperation when interrupted,  Deteriorated Patience, Declining Writing Skills, and Lack of Physical Interactivity. (Martin, 2013)

Professor Susan Greenfield (2014) of Oxford University reports, “We could be raising a hedonistic generation who live only in the thrill of the computer-generated moment, and are in distinct danger of detaching themselves from what the rest of us would consider the real world.” She posits that the unrestricted overuse of computer and allied technologies is changing the very structure of our brains at the synaptic level. Some computer users exhibit very similar symptoms as heroin addicts trying to kick the habit. It is disturbing given the proliferation of extensive computer use in the classroom.  The college provides a laptop for each student and they are given full administrative rights and 24 hour access. Some students report they spend up to six hours using the computer for entertainment each day at home after school. It is unremarkable to see a high percentage of students watching downloaded videos most of their lunch breaks, and teachers need to be vigilant that computer misuse does not occur in the lesson itself.

THE PHILOSPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF CATHOLIC EDUCATION

The Church acknowledges the problems faced by educators today.  In the Introduction to “The Catholic School On The Threshold Of The Third Millennium” (1997) we see this admission.

“On the threshold of the third millennium education faces new challenges which are the result of a new socio-political and cultural context. First and foremost, we have a crisis of values which, in highly developed societies in particular, assumes the form, often exalted by the media, of subjectivism, moral relativism and nihilism. The extreme pluralism pervading contemporary society leads to behaviour patterns which are at times so opposed to one another as to undermine any idea of community identity. Rapid structural changes, profound technical innovations and the globalization of the economy affect human life more and more throughout the world. Rather than prospects of development for all, we witness the widening of the gap between rich and poor, as well as massive migration from underdeveloped to highly-developed countries. The phenomena of multiculturalism and an increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-religious society is at the same time an enrichment and a source of further problems. To this we must add, in countries of long-standing evangelization, a growing marginalization of the Christian faith as a reference point and a source of light for an effective and convincing interpretation of existence.”

 

The maintenance and transmission of a culture of the sacred in a profane and secular world has been and continues as a prime raison d'être for Catholic schools. This was not a problem when schools were staffed largely by Religious Sisters and Brothers, and pre-modern and modern Catholic schools were for Catholic children. It would have been a brave Catholic parent who chose to send their baptised son or daughter to a Sate school or worse still a Protestant-run school or college.

In the 21st Century the clientele of Catholic schools and colleges is significantly changed.  This new historical era which we see displayed daily on our HDTV, computer and tablet screens is Post-Modern. The Catholic Church is still immured in the patriarchal structures and attitudes of a pre-modernist Weltanschauung as so clearly exemplified by the traditionalist rewording of the final report of the Synod on The Family 2014. If modernists were disciples of a brave new world where science and reason would remake humanity and all the worlds’ ills would be expunged, Post-Modernists have reacted to modernity with a degree of cynicism. No longer is it universally believed that the greatest age of humanity is just round the corner.  The conflagrations of world wars, the threat of nuclear holocaust, the tribalism and murderous conflicts on ethnic and religious grounds, the despoiling of the global environment, the threat of pandemics, the increasing repressive responses of even the most established democracies to global terrorism, the unpredictable results of unchecked human population growth, have all contributed to a growing rejection of Modernism and to a degeneration into profound pessimism. It is my contention, based on conversations and engagement in the learning/teaching praxis, that our students are infected with the attitude that neither religion nor science have the answer to the survival of our species.

 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains: "God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world" (CCC 677). Catholic Christianity is an apocalyptic religion. In every Eucharist, the congregation chants “We proclaim your death, Lord Jesus, and profess your resurrection, until you come again.” (Gerard Moore, 2011). Christianity looks to the end of days. Fundamentalists are continually interpreting the signs of the times as predicting the imminent arrival of the Rapture. However, we live and move and obtain our meaning in the midst of this post-modern world. We cannot return to the apocalyptic communities of the first Followers of the Way, but we must acknowledge that if we are teaching Catholic Christianity to our students regardless of their religiosity or acceptance of Christian doctrines. We cannot gloss-over essential faith-statements in favour of a watered-down distorted version of feel-good, happy-clappy “social” religion. This does not mean a return to the penny catechism where “truth” was reduced to a series of glib answers, nor I believe, should we insist on an uncritical acceptance of the byzantine intricacies of the Nicene Creed without a full understanding of the anthropological and historical origins of the document.

Christian theological anthropology is out of touch with 21st Century reality. Christian understanding of “Personhood” formulated in the pre-modern era does not recognise the plurality of humanity. (Clayton, 2010) Science seriously challenges gender definitions which ignore or deny the validity of the bisexual, the homosexual, the transgender, and the intersex person. Susan A. Ross (Anthropology: Seeking Light and Beauty, 2012, p. 45)  challenges,  “How does the traditional Catholic approach of natural law, … with its appeal to stable structures of human existence that are true across time and place, find a place in a postmodern world. … Taking social and historical contexts seriously raises the question of whether we can assume that human nature is always the same in every time and place. Liberation theologies and, more recently, global theologies, have challenged the idea that traditional formulations of Christian thought are still adequate for the present.” As mentioned in the Introduction to this paper, new theologies have emerged which confront the old unchanging understandings of the nature of both humanity and the relevance of the Christian message. (Gaillardetz, 2008) (Schindler, 1996) (Cox, 2009)

Ross (2012) writes, “critical questions push Christian theology to articulate the message of the Gospel in ever more relevant terms for the present. The person, in a Christian postmodern perspective, continues to seek God but asks new questions in new contexts.”

These are all questions for the theologians and social-anthropologists, not for the teacher working at the coal-face of education.

 

SO WHERE CAN WE GO FROM HERE?

In his book, Catholic High Schools: Facing the New Realities, James Heft (2011) maintains that for Catholic high schools are to survive, they must remain relevant in a secular society that stress individualism, religious pluralism, and “therapeutic deism”. This latter concept, coined to describe U.S. teenagers, is characterised by the following:

• A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.

• God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

• The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

• God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

• Good people go to heaven when they die. (Heft, 2011, p. 47)

 

Have we reached “religionless Christianity” as Bonhoeffer describes it (Bass, 2009, pp. 3551-3555), where the old template of “church” is giving way to a new emerging Christianity? Are we approaching a new pattern? 

Pope Francis writes, “Yet in speaking of the light of faith, we can almost hear the objections of many of our contemporaries. In modernity, that light might have been considered sufficient for societies of old, but was felt to be of no use for new times, for a humanity come of age, proud of its rationality and anxious to explore the future in novel ways. Faith thus appeared to some as an illusory light, preventing mankind from boldly setting out in quest of knowledge” (Lumen Fidei, 2013)

Cuypers (The Ideal of a Catholic Education in a Secularised Society, 2004) argues that, “the progressive, revisionist reaction within Catholic education and schooling, as well as within Catholicism at large, to the challenge of modernity is a mistake. In view of modernity's malaises, it advocates instead the affirmation or reaffirmation of the ideal of traditional Catholicism as the only authentic response for Catholics to modern progress.”

Didier Pollefeyt (The Lustre of Life: Hermeneutic-communicative concept of religious education, 2013) writes that, “the Christian image of man … provides the basis of the hermeneutic-communicative model of Roman Catholic education” and is based upon the Judeo-Christian anthropological understanding of the nature of humankind. He calls for educators to help students to explore the ideological spaces which they and we inhabit, but these understandings have moved from that paradigm.

So, this paper has attempted to outline the challenge of being a teacher of the Catholic religion in a time when the institutional Church is in crisis; when the plurality of teachers’ theology intersects that of the institutional Church; when the plurality of students’ moral understandings is often in collision with official Church teachings; when the challenges of teaching teenagers who are apathetic towards traditional organised Catholic religion, and who have a paucity of knowledge and understanding of the relevance of religion to their lives is so obvious.

 

 

 

[1] Olive Tree Media© has been created as the organisation behind the media ministry of Karl Faase who, for more than twelve years has been involved in Christian media in Australia. This has now developed into ministry in radio, television and print.

 

[2] Drawing on the massive National Study of Youth and Religion's telephone surveys and in-depth interviews with more than 120 youth at two points in time, the authors chart the spiritual trajectory of American adolescents and young adults over a period of three years. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, the authors find that religion is an important force in the lives of most--though their involvement with religion changes over time, just as teenagers themselves do.

 

[3] The course offered is over four days and covers the following:

    • Day 1: Teaching in a Catholic School, Religion Curriculum P-12

    • Day 2: Sacred Texts, Beliefs: Jesus the Christ

    • Day 3: Religious Life of the School P-12, Christian Life: Prayer and Spirituality

    • Day 4: Church: Liturgy and Sacraments, Spiritual Formation, Christian Life: Mission and Justice