The key word here is “average”. The “average” Cathlic teenager, these days, doesn’t attend Mass or religious ed, let alone attend a Catholic high school. Those teens aren’t exposed to any Catholic teaching on a regular basis.
Of those that do attend Mass and Religious ed, they would almost all have been exposed to Scripture study in one form or another. If they attend Catholic school, they likely have at least one of the four years of high school theology class dedicated to Scripture with liberal use of the Bible in the other years. Scripture study is a required component of **all **high school coures that are approved by the Bishops. My kids have been required to own their own Bible for use in class since the fourth grade.
If they attend parish religious education classes only, they may or may not have a formal Bible study curriculum. In my parish, there are sections on using the Bible woven into each year’s curriculum but not a stand-alone course.
Some parishes do not have formal religious education for high school students but rely on the teen programs to provide formation. Even so, I have never heard of a teen program that did not stress Scripture - either personal reading of the Bible or group based study.
I not sure why this disconnect is taking place between what’s been going on in the Church, and the perception of those who feel the “problem” is people’s perception of what has been going on. The USCCB, after much research, determined to overhaul Catholic textbooks, ceasing to use much of what has been propagated within the Church for quite some time now. The new textbooks promote the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a summary of everything the Catholic Church teaches, promulgated by Pope John Paul II.
The original article describing the state of those researched textbooks can be found here:
calcatholic.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?id=8fb2bb89-34e8-4cec-ad03-7a019fe9a8d1. Very Scary! (There was one retraction by the author who incorrectly incorporates the general philosophy of Ray O’Connor, theology department chair of Stuart High School, into the specific circumstance at the school)
I’m not trying to take this conversation in a different direction (liberal vs conservative). I am (apparently unsuccessfully) merely trying to make a point that whenever someone says, “I learned this in Catholic High School”, most everyone assumes the person misunderstood! That is definitely not the case. Catholic education (like much Protestant education) has veered off track more than one time in history. It is commonly understood that early in the Church’s history, scripture reading was discouraged. On the opposite extreme, as this article points out, much of what has been taught over the past few decades has been sheer rubbish. The Church is now responding to the damage that I believe has caused so much hemorrhaging of our Church membership. Waking up to all of this is a good thing, finally ridding us of the embarrassment of allowing these things to continue to damage the goodness and holiness of the Church. In this latter case, I am not inferring this stuff has ever been Church teaching; but it was damaging our Catholic youth, and it certainly wasn’t dealt with. That’s part of the reason why we have the situations at Notre Dame and Georgetown right now.
The conclusion to all of this isn’t bleak. I think it should simply awaken us the fact that we must always pray for good and holy men, women and children to each take their personal roles in contributing to the Church’s good. And that, I think, begins by looking at ourselves, as well as others, realistically.
