CATHOLICISM LITE : Confessions of a catechism teacher.

Four years ago last summer, my wife and I were asked to teach a junior high Parish Religious Education (PRE) class in rural northwest Tennessee. We had moved to this parish only the previous year and had spent our first year content simply to participate in the parish liturgically. Feeling that it was probably time to become more intimately involved in parish life, we said yes when we were asked to do some teaching on Sunday. The three years that followed were a revelation. It's hard to know the extent to which our experience might be considered common, but if it is at all the norm, parish religious education is facing an enormous challenge.

We began our first year of teaching using a religious ed series that we found in the parish library. The good thing about the series was that it played well to the legendary short attention span of today's kids. Each lesson consisted of four or so twelve-minute segments. These segments consisted of surveys (lots of them), one-act plays, discussions, and various other activities, all well designed to keep young energy on task. The only problem we had with this-and it was a big one-was that it was hard to identify anything uniquely Catholic about any of the lessons. Jesus was guaranteed at least one appearance per lesson, thereby qualifying what we were doing as nominally Christian, but most of what we were doing could easily have been done as part of character education in a public school; not much of what we taught would have caused a member of the ACLU the slightest constitutional concern. When it became clear that there would never be much specifically Catholic content to our lessons, my wife and I began looking around for other texts.

The next text we chose was packed with high Catholic content. We were proud to have found it and promptly sent letters home to our kids' parents raving about it. But after just a few short weeks we found ourselves faced with a new problem: There was too much information. It was a perfect amount undoubtedly if we were a Catholic grammar school where religion could be taught every day; but far too much for a PRE class that met for only fifty minutes per week.

The following year, we stubbornly adopted another book from our high- content series, and began something new; to emphasize the importance we placed on this content, we introduced weekly quizzes. As the new school year began, we sent calendars home which mapped out for parents the entire school year-what chapters from the book we planned to cover and when. Classes might be canceled for various reasons or the content might change because of unforeseen circumstances, but students could expect a quiz each week on the assigned chapter. No exceptions. When students missed class, a blank quiz was mailed home to parents and a completed quiz was expected back the following week.

Inflexible as this may sound, we had at least one very strong reason for believing that this policy would be successful. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is quite clear: Parents are the primary educators of their children. Surely our well-educated parents would sit down with their children during the week and read the assignment. Surely they would keep their kids current when they missed a class. Surely they would help their kids to prepare for the quizzes.

Well, no. The quizzes were a disaster all around. An average grade of 40 percent was not unusual. Furthermore, despite the fact that we never made an issue of this in conversation with parents, some of them with whom we had been friendly could barely look us in the eye as the weeks passed. Not a single judgmental word had left our mouths, but there was enough guilt around to pave a parking lot.

To alleviate that problem, last year we tried something new with the quizzes, to make them fail-proof: We sent home a whole term's worth of quizzes on the first day of the quarter. They were essentially the same quizzes we would give out on Sundays, but with one exception: The order of the questions was changed. Teaching was easier, but the results were just as frustrating. The grades proved every bit as bad. Why?

The usual chain of blame in education goes like this: College teachers blame high school teachers, high school teachers blame grammar school teachers, and grammar school teachers blame parents. The temptation to blame parents is indeed overwhelming. It seems so obvious that parents- even the ones who take the initiative to enroll their kids in Sunday school-spend far more time driving their kids to soccer practice than they do teaching them the fundamentals of the faith. And yet, despite what appears to be clear evidence against them, I wonder to what extent we can truly hold parents culpable. The catechism tells us that "unintentional ignorance can diminish or even remove the imputability of a grave offense." Let's put aside the question of whether it is a grave offense for a parent to allow an intelligent eighth grader to receive poor quiz grades in PRE all year long with no fear of adverse consequences. I believe one can make a case that parents who allow this kind of behavior are unintentionally ignorant of just how hurtful this is to our church.

To begin with, there is no consensus in the Catholic adult community that high-content lessons and subsequent quizzes are what we should be offering in PRE. On the contrary, the adult consensus seems to be that young people are simply not ready for any serious study of their faith and that it shouldn't be thrust upon them. After all, we wouldn't want to alienate our young people from the church, would we?

Yet it is far from clear that this consensus has its basis in fact. For some time, questions about the value of contemporary "lite" religious education have begun to emerge, not only in Catholic circles, but also in mainline Christian denominations. In an April 23, 1997, Christian Century article, "The Case for Catechism," Richard Osmer argued that a low-content religious education rooted in children's experiences simply hasn't lived up to its claims of superiority; the younger generation continues to leave mainline churches in depressing numbers. He urged mainline Protestants to consider seriously the adoption of a rigorous catechism in order to stanch the hemorrhage of members. Osmer's article should be required reading for all Catholic educators.

One of the biggest obstacles to changing adult minds about content level is the fact that the contemporary secular education community tells us that education should be not about learning facts, dates, and vocabulary (certainly it should not be about this), but about teaching students more generally how to think. This philosophy seems to act as a powerful undertow on Catholic education: facts, dates, and vocabulary are out, "moral reasoning" is in.

But if we believe that young adults need to listen attentively to the readings at Mass, don't they need to know who the Pharisees were? The Samaritans? We claim to want them to be able to think ecumenically, but doesn't this require that they know a little something about the Reformation? about the doctrinal differences that divide the various Christian denominations? Don't they need to be acquainted with the dogmatic claims of their own Catholic tradition before they can talk intelligently with their peers from other Christian denominations?

When content-lite educational theories hold sway in the broader culture, how easily can we blame Catholic parents for believing that the best thing that Sunday school can do is teach their children how to be nice or that their children will learn the "boring details" of Catholic faith and history later in their lives when they are "ready"?

Certainly another exculpatory fact to consider is that many sincere and actively practicing Catholic parents feel ignorant of the teachings of their own faith. Most of the parents my age attended high school a decade after Vatican II when the social justice message dominated high school curricula. I can't say for sure what my peers were doing in their religious ed classes, but I know I was playing "Guns or Butter" and watching videotapes of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Most of what I learned about the Catholic faith in the years since grammar school I learned on my own, a full ten years after wandering away from the church during college. Can we really blame today's parents for fearing the intelligent questions of their thirteen-year-old as they read an eighth-grade text with their child? How have we as a church helped to prepare parents to be what the catechism says they should be: the "primary educators of their children"?

If the sole reason parents enroll their children in Sunday school is so that their kids can learn how to be nice, then my own experience is that they might as well skip it. The junior high students that my wife and I have taught already seem like nice, respectful youngsters and are probably well on their way to becoming thoughtful, concerned adults. An extra hour of parish fellowship would probably be far more valuable to our children on the niceness front than the hour we spend with them in formal religious education.

If the main thing we want from religious education is to develop a social conscience in our kids, then we might do well simply to send them to programs at any number of progressive mainline Christian denominations.

If the main thing we want from PRE is children with a thorough knowledge of Bible stories and an ability to quote chapter and verse, again, such schools are already up and running. For intensive schooling in the Bible, the Baptists would surely be hard to beat.

But if we want our kids to have a uniquely Catholic education, an education that leaves them knowing something of the rich history of their church, and the specific teachings of the Catholic faith, as well as the kind of good works the Catholic faith enjoins, then there is simply no substitute for sustained parish involvement in religious education. And that means no substitute for high-content programs that require much of adult and child alike. If we are serious about passing on the Catholic faith, isn't this the kind of program we ought to be offering?

John J. Schommer is an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He directed his first parish confirmation class last spring.