B
Brennan_Doherty
Guest
Amy Welborn had a good quote about Catholic life and education in an interview on Ignatius Insight:
The problem is that when you look at Catholic history, the faith has never been passed on predominantly in classroom situations. The faith has been passed on in families and in parishes and in communities. You can have really nice catechetical materials in which you have kids learn about a saint each week and you introduce them to various devotions, but if all of that is absent from parish life, and if all of that is absent from the life of Catholics, which it is for the most part…It’s something that any teacher of, particularly, the humanities can sympathize with. Think about the poor teacher trying to teach Shakespeare or Chaucer to kids who go home and are on the Internet for four hours and then are playing video games and doing all kinds of other things. It’s not just a religious ed problem; it’s a cultural problem. What we are trying to transmit in a classroom setting isn’t reinforced culturally.
In the Catholic setting, that means it’s not reinforced in most parishes. There’s no Catholic life that continually reinforces the Catholic faith. Our churches are bare. Kids don’t have the opportunity to study murals and pictures of stained glass and they get bored.
ignatius.com/Magazines/CWR/lott_welborn.html
The problem is that when you look at Catholic history, the faith has never been passed on predominantly in classroom situations. The faith has been passed on in families and in parishes and in communities. You can have really nice catechetical materials in which you have kids learn about a saint each week and you introduce them to various devotions, but if all of that is absent from parish life, and if all of that is absent from the life of Catholics, which it is for the most part…It’s something that any teacher of, particularly, the humanities can sympathize with. Think about the poor teacher trying to teach Shakespeare or Chaucer to kids who go home and are on the Internet for four hours and then are playing video games and doing all kinds of other things. It’s not just a religious ed problem; it’s a cultural problem. What we are trying to transmit in a classroom setting isn’t reinforced culturally.
In the Catholic setting, that means it’s not reinforced in most parishes. There’s no Catholic life that continually reinforces the Catholic faith. Our churches are bare. Kids don’t have the opportunity to study murals and pictures of stained glass and they get bored.
ignatius.com/Magazines/CWR/lott_welborn.html