It’s a sad fact that many Catholics just don’t care. The even sadder thing is that catechesis, which now was put in the parents’ hands, is often just not happening. The parents are the product of 9 or 12 years of Catholic education that taught them very little and they are totally incapable of transmitting the Faith to their children, they don’t know the basics of it and they aren’t interested in learning. So for now, we get kids coming to us for preparation for First Communion who may not have been in church since they were baptized, who don’t know the basic three prayers and in some instances don’t even know the sign of the cross. But their parents bring them for this ‘rite of passage’ (rather than ‘sacrament’), we give them 6 sessions of preparation, they make their First Communion and we don’t see 50% of them again.
Our best and, for a long time, only catechist was the Catholic woman who taught in the Inter-denominational school system and whose children attended the school where she taught. When she first came here, she had to teach catechism to her own kids to prepare them for the sacraments so she volunteered to prepare the children of other parents whose children were going to the non-Catholic schools (due mainly to language). She continued doing so for 14 years. But unlike in the US, here there is no requirement that anyone be trained to be a catechist. You volunteer, you’re a catechist. Few volunteer and, of those that do, fewer still are capable of ‘transmitting the Faith’ since they don’t know it.
