Editor’s Note: the following article was originally published on-line at New Catholic Times on October 19, 2009 in response to Jennifer Bushnell’s response to John Quinn’s “Welcome Back Kotter”. John Quinn’s rebuttal is posted with his permission.

Number three in an exchange of three

October 20, 2009 (Catholic education, Catholic schools)

As the primary writer of the editorial in question let me continue the dialogue.

Jennifer

Many thanks for your letter. At nctsf we are looking for responses to articles and dialogue amongst our readers.

You might be interested to know that the points you made were made strongly by another member of the editorial group prior to publication. That being said the decision to publish was to support all teachers in Catholic schools as they returned to classrooms and to encourage the response and dialogue which you have entered in to with your letter.

As the primary writer of the editorial in question let me continue the dialogue.

You are absolutely correct in your opening remark that “the writer’s basic premise is that there are more important aspects of being a Catholic than weekly church attendance and parish involvement.”

I am speaking here to Catholics in general and Catholic teachers in particular.

I find it interesting that your opening paragraph concludes with a statement “we should not negate the importance of those who work in Catholic schools to understand and follow the Church’s precepts.”

The 5 precepts are described as a description of the absolute minimum actions required of Catholics regarding the Church. They refer to attendance at Eucharist, reception of the eucharist, participation in the sacrament of reconciliation, observing days of fasting and abstinence and helping to provide for the (material) needs of the Church.

Unfortunately, the pastoral practice in many parishes in recent years has made obligations (emphasis of the author) of what should be invitational opportunities for Catholics to gather in community for mutual sustenance and support. God, most certainly doesn’t need or require my presence, at what for many, have become weekly demonstrations of clerical power and perhaps even clerical abuse.

Sacraments are for people, for the entire people of God, for Joyce’s “here comes everybody“, and not opportunities for clerical power and control. But that is for another day and perhaps another editorial.

In your second paragraph you write that, “quality religious education…becomes the foundation for students to understand the more difficult precepts”. As an old codger who was initially educated in England the five precepts were easily taught and easily understood, even using the old memorize-the-catechism-questions-and-answers approach. I think you are suggesting that quality religious education helps students “understand” more than the precepts of the church. The concern, expressed in the editorial, is that the emphasis in the cognitive component of that religious education focuses more on doctrinal statements from the 3rd, 4th, 5th centuries CE, the two ecumenical Councils of Trent and Vatican I with little time given to the documents of Vatican II and what has happened as a result. In the years since Vatican II and as a direct result of John’s aggiornamento we have seen God incarnate in liberation theology, women’s theology, a better understanding of both religious freedom and personal conscience (John Courtney Murray), Newman’s idea of development of doctrine, a far better founded understanding of homosexuality, and the implications of the new cosmology to mention but a few such developments. We tend to forget and rarely teach that Cardinal Flahiff spoke to the ordination of women in the 1960s at Vatican II.

The editorial welcomed back Catholic teachers, not religious education teachers. Religious education, in elementary and secondary schools is but one aspect of the explicit curriculum. Hopefully in Catholic schools, that area of the explicit curriculum is taught by teachers familiar with the documents of Vatican II and the developments in the 45 years since. But the Catholic school also has a catechetical responsibility which rests with everyone involved in that school community and that requires much more than the “Catholicity Across The Curriculum” documents so beloved of our Catholic Curriculum Cooperatives.

Teachers have a far greater impact on their students than the explicit curriculum they teach. Students remember teachers, whether they be teachers in Catholic, public or private schools. The teacher in a Catholic school or the Catholic teacher in a public school (and I was both in my 36+ years of teaching) does bring something different to the classroom than her/his “non-Catholic” colleagues does. Monica Helwig called it “the Catholic thing” and Andrew Greeley has spoken and written of it for many years. You suggest in your letter that “most educators…model the behavior our society desires”. To quote that great Catholic Ontario educator, Fr. Tom Melady,

” Catholic education, in its critique of society, must boldly confront the values of society which serve to estrange and alienate more and more the very students it is attempting to reconcile with themselves, with others and with their God. A Catholic educational system which fails in this regard and remains silent in the face of injustice and oppression, particularly of its own, is a contradiction”(Policy Document P1J1 – A Catholic Perspective1976)

Fr. John Geary CSSp, a former principal on Neil McNeil Catholic high school in Toronto wrote in “The Community – An Evaluation and a Challenge“:

In the future, this contributor affirms, our schools must be much more different! We must say” “You are worth- not the money you can earn, but, you are worth the degree of your love and concern for your fellow man, especially those who are poor in any way. We must not be afraid to be different. But we must be sure that the difference is the Christian dimension. We must resist the ubiquitous “success-ethic” – concern for possessions – and replace it with the “service ethic”, concern for the poor in all meanings of that word.

He continues:

We put a great deal of stress on the example which good teachers, as good Christians, can give to their students; and, since the vast majority of our students will live as lay people when they are following their post-academic careers, it seems eminently suitable that they should have many excellent models pf the Christian layman and woman before them during their formative, highly impressionable years. The living day-to-day example of such people is enormously important; they are living the kind of lives these students will face shortly and the students can see to best advantage in them how the Christian meets the challenges of coping with modern life while remaining truly Christian. All our teaching, all our books, all our exhortation will be as nothing without the reinforcement they must get, day after day, year in, year out from those who, from the heart, are a pattern to the young people entrusted to them.

And from Fr. James DiGiacomo SJ, a leading Catholic teacher and religious education theorist, writing in The Catholic Educator as Minister:

If our schools are to be anything more than vehicles for the upward mobility of baptized pagans, the entire staff must contribute to the creation of a genuine Christian environment….
Christian schools are supposed to offer an alternative vision of life, of what it means to be a successful human being…

If young people are to respond positively and generously to this alternative vision, they need more than good religion courses and well-planned liturgies and inspiring retreats. They need adult models with whom they can identify, whom they look up to, who demonstrate daily by deed and word that Christian living is both possible and rewarding. They need to be around grown-ups who are neither greedy nor selfish nor exploitative and yet are happy and at peace with themselves and with one another. It’s nice when chaplains and religious men and women fill that description, but it’s also expected of them. It’s even better when married and single, older and younger lay persons who are neither professed religious nor teaching religion give this kind of example.

One of your final comments suggests that to hear God’s word we needs must “pray, meditate on scripture, study our Catechism” (which you interestingly capitalized). Fr. Thomas Berry CP, who died recently, suggested Christians needed to put aside the scriptures for at least twenty years and study, pray with and meditate upon God’s initial revelation, the universe. In our schools many of those who have taken this seriously can be more often found in science, social science and English classrooms rather than teaching religious education.

Almost thirty years ago I wrote my Thesis, “Catholic Schools As Faith Communities: Fantasy Or Possibility?”. In it I described a three-dimensional understanding of a Catholic school. One of those dimensions was religious education as a discipline taught by teachers with good background in theology and religious education. I have chosen to teach religious education in a variety of schools in a number of different countries during my teaching career. I do not denigrate a good religious education programme staffed by persons with the qualifications I describe above. Unfortunately, during my time in Catholic schools in Ontario, schools with such staff have been extremely rare. Very few principals and even fewer superintendents and trustees have made it a priority. With more and more Catholics taking graduate degrees in both theology and religious education the hiring of such teachers has become less and less of a priority. Consequently the return to an understanding of Catholicism that ignores the People of God ecclesiology of Vatican II in favour of the hierarchical-divine-right-of-priests-bishops-and-trustees model is what allows such priests as our homilist and trustees with a not-catholic-enough-inquisition to flourish.

So you are correct. In terms of providing “Catholic memories” to students I do place loving, caring compassionate, forgiving relationships as a better foundation for learning and a better foundation for Catholic education than understanding and following the precepts of the church. To put it another way; Jesus taught a lot about love, care, compassion, forgiveness but nothing about the precepts of the church. I just hope I have done a better job of presenting it this time and sincerely thank you for your letter prompting this response.

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