Teaching Catholicism: downs & ups over four decades.

Things are different now. For forty years I have been a New York priest teaching the Catholic faith in two diocesan high schools and as an adjunct professor in several colleges and graduate schools. This has entailed living with significant and continuing change: social, ecclesial, pedagogic. Not all the change has been easy, pleasant, or even healthy; some has been near-disastrous. In my experience, as will be seen, current trends are hopeful.

In September 1959, I was assigned to teach in what was then the largest Catholic boys' high school in the Archdiocese of New York. The faculty - forty diocesan priests, fifty religious brothers, and three laymen - taught a student body of 2,200, drawn mostly from lower middle-class Irish and Italian families in the South Bronx. Academically it was a fine school. More than 90 percent of its graduates went to college, many with scholarships. Most of the priests on the faculty had or were working toward advanced degrees.

Religion was no minor subject in that era. Ponderous textbooks were in use in all four years. Topics were formidable: God's existence, the Trinity, creation, the Incarnation, the church, the sacraments (especially the Eucharist), and morality. The teaching of Catholic morality was structured around the Ten Commandments but was defended by natural law arguments, particularly in the field of sexuality. Scripture was used sparingly, often only to provide "proof texts" bolstering the rational argumentation and the magisterial teachings. This traditional approach to religious education was fortified by an extensive program of spiritual activities. The school provided opportunities for daily Mass and frequent confession; weekly Benediction and frequent Marian services were well attended; every year during Holy Week the students took part in a three-day silent retreat. No doubt some of the religious instruction was arid, and some of the retreat sermons were full of hellfire and brimstone. But today most of the school's graduates remain grateful for the quality of the education and religious training they received.

Changes began slowly in the 1960s, gained momentum in the '70s. Many of them were societal and/or economic, but inevitably affected the school's atmosphere and its approach to education, including religious studies. By 1970 the flight to the suburbs, rises in tuition, the opening of other Catholic high schools, and the physical decay of the South Bronx had reduced the enrollment from 2,200 to around 1,200. Ethnic changes in the community the school serves and problems in urban public schools brought increasing numbers of inner-city Latino and black students to the school. Many were non-Catholic and even more from poor, one-parent households. A significant number had language problems, weak academic backgrounds, poor self-discipline, and minimal instruction in religion. Meantime, the collapse of vocations plus leakage from religious orders and the diocesan priesthood reduced the number of teaching brothers to seven and teaching priests to fifteen. Male lay teachers made up the majority of faculty. Most were dedicated and effective; yet the changes in faculty, along with the increased number of non-Catholic students, weakened the once-pervasive Catholic identity of the school.

These decades were times of societal turmoil. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War protests, major political scandals - all these came at the same time as the Second Vatican Council. Social unrest and Catholic reform fed each other and in a way lived off each other. Living in the midst of fundamental social and cultural change, the American church was prodded from within to bring itself up to date.

Not all the results were happy ones. Various programs introduced to "update" every level of religious education in response to Vatican II and to the challenges of the times led to confusion in religious studies. Many were extremely weak in intellectual content; some were introduced to support some specific social, religious, or political agenda. The presentation of Catholic teachings was often selective, emphasizing some, ignoring if not denying others.

This was particularly evident in the field of morality and social justice. Some programs promoted acceptance of "the new morality," calling for a more personal, less legalistic approach to sinfulness. The virtue of love (often vaguely defined) was to be paramount, along with the individual conscience and right of self-determination. Whatever merits this approach may have, it produced near chaos in the realm where the "new morality" had its strongest impact: sexuality. For many high school students (as well as others), it meant that nothing was forbidden, provided you were truly "in love" and "felt" that what you wanted to do was right. Trying to build sexual morality on so vague and subjective a foundation in an already permissive society was a recipe for disaster.

There were also significant changes in Catholic piety and spiritual life during these two decades, some salutary, some regrettable. One could welcome Mass in the vernacular, emphasis on full participation in the liturgy, the trend toward Scripture-based homilies. But the effort to displace the novena/Rosary style of devotional spirituality with something livelier and more relevant, though well-intentioned, sometimes had dubious results, leading to the use of "poster" art, pedestrian readings, and music of questionable quality.

But in 1981, when I was reassigned to a large Catholic coed high school in the North Bronx as chair of its religion department, 1 sensed the stirrings of healthier change. The decade of the '80s was a time of consolidation in religious education. The intellectual content of religion courses became more substantial. The basic truths of Catholicism were again presented, but now with constant references to their foundations in Scripture and tradition. This presentation defines Catholics as members of a faith community that feeds its understanding of faith, morality, and spirituality on the word of God and the tradition that was born of it and that shapes our understanding of that written word. The courses are not simple recitals of Bible stories or literal-fundamentalist readings, but aim at a critical and sophisticated understanding.

Church history is also much more prominent in today's Catholic religious education. Students are invited to understand not only that Catholics are "people of the Book," but that we form a "community of memory." In its 2,000-year history, the church has spread more widely and is more deeply rooted than any other religion. There is no field of human endeavor - political, social, economic, cultural, artistic, intellectual - that has not felt the church's influence. The church has been able to adjust, sometimes slowly and with difficulty, to changing cultural and historical contexts without abandoning the essentials of her message. Students learn, as they should, that necessary adjustments have sometimes come slowly and painfully, in part because the church includes sinners as well as saints, diehard Bourbons as well as visionary reformers.

Teaching Catholic morality in the context of a society that prizes self-fulfillment over self-discipline, that accepts or at lease tolerates premarital sex, abortion, and divorce, and gives relatively little weight to the demands of justice in social, economic, and political realms (racism, poverty amidst plenty) is a daunting challenge. Emphasis in the current approach falls on presenting Christian morality as an imitation of Christ, on an understanding that the more Christ-like we become, the more human we are. The church's valuation of the dignity of every person becomes more credible when the teaching on abortion is presented in the context of the consistent ethic of life, and is thereby linked with the church's approach to the death penalty, questions of war and peace, and the care of the seriously ill.

As I said at the beginning, "things are different now" - and perhaps the most visible difference is that the majority of religion teachers now are laymen and laywomen. Lay teachers are of course indispensable simply because there are no longer enough priests and religious to staff the classrooms. Beyond that, however, the lay religion teachers I have encountered (and not only in my own school) bring a surprising level of professional expertise in theology, Scripture, history, and educational methodology to the task. Most exhibit not only professional competence but strong devotion to Jesus Christ and the church; for them, the work is more a vocation than a profession; many undertake this ministry at serious financial sacrifice. Observing their interaction with students, I sometimes suspect that their lay status makes it easier for them to become spiritual confidants for the students and to model for them the life of Christians "in the world."

I am convinced, then, that this lay participation is a gift from the Holy Spirit, bringing a new presence and tone to American Catholic education. We have reason to be grateful to them, and because of them to be hopeful for the future of the church in the United States.

The Reverend Francis J. Principe is chair of the religion department at Cardinal Spellman High School, Bronx, N.Y.