I did not literally mean that the hierarchy should be the ones directly delivering the teaching. One of the roles of a bishop is teacher of the Faith. They have a responsibility to ensure that the faithful are taught the true and orthodox Catholic Faith properly.
It’s not just geography. It’s even basic life skills like personal financial management, or basic science knowledge.I remember reading, a while back, a similarly direly-worded report that detailed the fact that Americans’ lack of knowledge of geography was horrendous. (IIRC, around half of Americans couldn’t find the state of New York on the map.)
Maybe the ones who can find NYC are also able to articulate the essence of the argument for transubstantiation, and those who can’t distinguish NYC from LA are also among those who can’t discuss the Eucharist in any great detail.
I worked in international marketing–exporting. It was a company based on the East Coast. My associate asked me why we weren’t exporting to New Mexico…
Can’t parents just figure this out by talking to their own kids? Why does a pastor need to tell them this? This is part of the problem. Kids get talked at, not talked to. When kids are talked at, they tend to shut down, not listen, not pay attention, etc. For a variety of reasons, “indoctrination”, in the sense the word was used in the past, no longer works on most kids the way it once did. This much is clear, by the numbers alone. New methods should be developed if a positive oucome is desired.
This was also the situation in my dad’s family. They all went to Catholic School in the 1940s. The boys went to a Catholic Prep school for High School. My grandfather got mad at the church and my grandparents stopped attending, but they sent their children every week. Only my dad was practicing out of his eight siblings and he was poorly catechized until he was in his sixties. On the other hand is my grandfather’s brother’s family. They went to the same schools and were members of the same parish as my dad’s family. They produced a sister, two Religious brothers, and two priests.
The Pastor and Parish should be Catholic parents’ spiritual guides for raising their children in the faith. There is plenty of advice for parents on how to keep their kids occupied, dress them, feed them healthy, get them into good schools, etc…any morning show or magazine will right now have the inevitable “how to get your kids ready to go back to school” stories as the next school year begins. My comment was focused on the parents receiving guidance from the Church on these matters. And I don’t think a solution is “talking at” anyone, so I agree with you there. But sometimes you need a presentation of facts to make a point.
Most every parish that I’ve seen has a multitude of these resources, from printed material in the bulletin to links on the website, to talks sponsored by the parish. All adults, not just parents, need to make use of the resources that are made available.
The linked article reports on a quiz with “32 fact-based, multiple-choice questions about topics related to religion. The average U.S. adult is able to answer fewer than half of them (about 14) correctly.“ (second paragraph)
People from New Mexico have dozens of experiences like that. I subscribed for a couple years to “New Mexico” magazine because I liked the state’s food, furniture and fashions when I visited. They had a section in the magazine that every month listed humorous stories about New Mexico being mistaken for a foreign country. The post office, major newspapers (which in those days still had editors) and other organizations you would expect to have a brain working all made such mistakes. The magazine would have about 10 such stories per monthly issue to report.
Apples and oranges, my friend. In a school system, faculty take on the role of “primary educator”. In fact, education experts now tell parents to sit down and listen up, and then tell them that they know, better than the parents themselves, how to educate their children. So… vastly different context.
Not so.
No, we do not. I have little enough time to teach the externally imposed biology curriculum and certainly do not have time to teach other things.
That is not the same as what a classroom teacher does. Unfortunately, many parents are failing to act as primary educators because they abdicate the responsibility and think it is someone else’s responsibility. We will always have the ‘experts’ and the state telling other people they do not know what they are doing.
To take every opportunity to teach and when he does so to ensure that he teaches the true Catholic Faith and not some easy to stomach watered down version of it.
That’s why there’s more than one teacher in your school.
Agreed. The teachers’ boss – whether that’s the principal or another administrator or a board – sets these rules and enforces these conditions.
That’s nice as a platitude, but ask yourself: how much time do your students get for instruction? And then ask: how much time do Catholics? And further: what percentage of Catholics, at that?
To teach the same subject because with most subjects one teacher is insufficient. To teach other subjects. Not to teach the many things that are the responsibility of the pupils’ parents, guardians or carers.
Okay let us give up and say there are no opportunities to teach Catholics. I am not suggesting priests go around and press-gang people to attend a session of catechism on a regular basis. What I am saying is that he uses the opportunities with which he is provided. These could be his homilies. It can certainly be by the example of the way he lives his life. He can take the opportunity when a couple come to him and ask to be married. There are many regular and occasional opportunities.