Angels vs. Saints - 3rd grade religious ed lesson

[cyprian]

ProudArmyWife:

Wow - Patjoe, I am quite shocked, and insulted, at your response. Anytime you use I don’t mean to, BUT… you mean to do what ever is in front of the BUT in the sentence.

Although this has nothing to do with my original question, I will answer your posting.

Perhaps you should come to where I live and teach religious ed since there aren’t enough volunteers to even cover the classes that we have which results in rather large class sizes.

I am a certified teacher as well as having a Masters degree in Counseling. Therefore please don’t lecture me on how to teach children. As a convert to the faith, I may not have the strongest Catholic background yet we should ALL continue to be learning about the faith. I tell my students straight up that I was an adult convert, including baptism, and tell them my story - as well as tell them I don’t know all the answers, but I will try to find them out for them.

I discussed this specific question with my husband, who comes from a strong Catholic family that includes many priests, nuns, and bishops, only to stump him - Therefore I came to the forums. These forums are for postive question and answering, correct? If you have a side comment that is not directly related to the question in the posting, post a new thread about your comment/concern. Overall I find this forum to be a great source of knowledge and a wonderful place to learn things you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

As for resources, we have tons at our Church. We don’t meet in our Church since there are no classrooms there and we are not associated with a school - we meet on a college campus classroom. We cart all our supplies (art, books, prayer centers, etc.) ourselves to and from home each week - with smiles on our faces . I brought some books with me, since I am a prepared teacher. None of these books addressed this issue. So I would need to go back and get a different book, which would have resulted in another week of waiting anyway.

We have an excellent certified DRE. She is usually available, only this day she was covering a class herself. It is not appropriate to interrupt someone else’s lesson just so you can have an answer for your class, so I posted the question here.

As per the lesson… We have textbooks, including teachers guides. Our lesson in the text focused on saints. The students led an expanded discussion on saints and angels. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the difference between angels and saints - it was St. Michael question that threw me. I never really thought about St. Micheal - what a great question for a third grader to pose in front of his peers. It shows that they were processing the information and applying it to their existing knowledge base. And that, my friend, is true religious education.

Keep learning because as an adult revert I found that seeking and reading definitely allows you to cast out to the deep. I have a question, though. I was thinking about teaching rel ed at my kids Catholic school, on the weekends for public school kids…PSR. What kind of freedom do you have outside of the standard books and such, to expand and teach real orthodoxy, using the Cathecism etc. Using their books and expanding?

Peace and Love

 

[Patjoe]

Proudarmywife,

First, I believe that you may not have received the correct information about why St. Michael is called a saint. “Saint” is a generic word for “holy.” Everyone in Heaven is “holy.” When distinguishing between angels and saints, angels are God’s creatures who are pure spirit. Saints are God’s creatures, humans, with both body and soul, whose spirit (soul) is now in Heaven and whose body will be reunited with its spirit at the Final Judgment. In the latter sense, we probably should not refer to St. Michael or any of the angels as being “a saint.”

Secondly, I did begin a new thread on this subject. The facts of your circumstances are not reflective of anything attributable to you. Our children in rural areas, in poor areas, in cities, in rich communities should have the best religious education possible. The Church in the United States has held its collective breath for too long, hoping that children would manage to become faithful Catholic adults with the help of a few good mothers teaching for an hour or so on Sundays. It simply has not worked.

The Church has to reform the whole system, top to bottom. We need certification classes and paid teachers and better resources for every area in the country. If we don’t, we soon will lose the Church in America, because if the children grow into adults who do not believe because they were not taken seriously enough to be taught to the nth degree when they were young, there will be no more priests, no more parishes, no more Catholics. Your disclaimer when you began teaching speaks volumes. You were in effect saying to these children that you were not an expert in what you were going to try to teach them. As I said, that is not your fault. It is the result of the system. It needs to be changed at the soonest possible moment!

 

[Sir_Knight]

Patjoe, while those are noble ideas, they are extremely unrealistic in today’s world. Who is going to pay for this? Where is the money going to come from? Many dioceses are facing serious financial problems being forced to cut back on vital services. Parishes are having difficulties meetings their financial obligations are are cutting back and even being forced to close.

The parish where my children were baptized, the church where I was baptized, the church where I was married, the church where my parents were married, is being forced to close it doors after 118 years of service to the community.

Again, while your goals & objectives sound all very well & good, I don’t see how a majority of churches and dioceses will be able to fund such an effort.

 

[Ignatius]

I think the word Saint is derived from the Latin word for Holy. Saints are people designated by the Church as having had miracles and other signs of holiness in their lives. I suppose you could then apply the term Saint to any Heavenly Angle, since they are all Holy.