The long road back.

Restoration of reliable religious instruction

One of Catholic Insight's major endeavours over the last seven years has been to try to show that many of the instructional materials used in catechism classes and the like are inadequate. In 1998, for example, we brought articles concerning the AIDS curriculum in Ontario and the catechetical texts from Ottawa.

In the following article, Dr. David Dooley shows that in the United States renewal and revision are about to move forward now that errors and omissions have been identified. The catechetical developments in Canada over the last 30 years, beginning with the disastrous Come to the Father series of the seventies and its successors, run parallel to those of the United States.

The May, 1998 issue of the American monthly Catholic World Report had a great deal to teach us; this magazine continues to criticize faulty teaching in the Church, but also brings out signs of hope. There are two articles by Donna Steichen, who made a name for herself with her book Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism. Just as she traced in that book the sources of what went wrong, in a lengthy article here, "Can Reform Come?", she shows that, after a generation of disasters brought about by a tight coterie of religious education "experts," Church leaders are beginning to take action.

Experts

No one is more responsible for the state of religious instruction in the U.S., Steichen writes, than Father Gerard Sloyan, former head of the Religious Education Department at the Catholic University of America. His 1967 book Speaking of Catholic Education proved that the toxic ideas of the catechetical "revolution" were fully formed by the mid 1960s. He praised the Dutch Catechism, objected to the use of the term "transubstantiation," replaced personal sin by a "fundamental option" for or against God, and held that First Confession should be preceded by First Communion. He also maintained that children cannot learn doctrine; they can only experience religious emotions; so it is useless to get them to memorize theological propositions. In an essay he published in 1997, he still denounced faithful Catholics as ignorant, rigid, repressed, infantile, censorious, and uncharitable.

One of Fr. Sloyan's disciples, former Christian Brother Gabriel Moran, influenced many in the catechetical movement to reject divine revelation in favour of "ongoing revelation"--in effect the interpretation of one's own experiences as divine revelation. Students could find revealed truth only in their own experiences; they would have to reject any document from the past claiming to be divine revelation, including of course the Gospels.

Steichen discusses many other figures in the decline and fall of catechesis, on the way to a situation which Father Terry M. Odien described in a conference on religious education in February 1998: "You know, we've gone from the Baltimore Catechism to Simon and Garfunkel theology with scissors and paste and making collages. I mean, it's amazing that anyone has any faith, after what we've been through in the last 33 years. It's unbelievable, when you think about it."

Tim Ragan

Over a period of twenty-five years, Steichen shows, a former deacon named Tim Ragan organized more than 90 conferences designed, as he said himself, to foster the spirit of Vatican II by promoting dissent in the Church. They featured bishops like Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee and Kenneth Untener of Saginaw, Michigan, who readily question Rome's decisions and theology; headline dissenters like Swiss-German Hans Kiing, and the American Charles Curran (both denied the status of "Catholic theologian" by the Vatican) or the heretical Rosemary Ruether; anti-Roman feminist nuns like Sister Sandra Schneiders or religious "reformer" nuns like Joan Chittister. A generation of catechetical experts formed by such luminaries as these was partly responsible for what Msgr. Michael Wrenn and K. D. Whitehead describe in their book Flawed Expectations--the attempt to discredit the new Catechism when its English version first appeared, to poison its reception. The attempt failed of course; the Catechism sold in the millions.

Restoring reliable instruction

In a second article, "Teaching the Faith: the Long Road Back", Donna Steichen describes how an American initiative to examine texts to see whether they conform to the Catechism constitutes a first step towards the restoration of reliable religious instruction. Under the chairmanship of Archbishop Daniel Buechlein of Indianapolis, an Ad Hoc Bishops' Committee to oversee the use of the Catechism has been formed. It is weighty enough to include two prominent Cardinals--Bernard Law of Boston and Francis George of Chicago.

The committee's primary task is to protect the copyright of the Catechism. But it also reviews catechetical texts submitted by publishers seeking a declaration that these texts are in conformity with the Catechism. The committee does its work very thoroughly, and it has actually held up publications which are not consistent with the Catechism.

Archbishop Buechlein has compiled a list of ten common errors which appear in catechetical texts. The list starts with "Failure to present the mystery of the Trinity, often by avoiding use of the word 'Father'." (Some texts substitute "Parent God" for "God the Father.")

Neglected doctrines include the divinity of Christ, sin in general, the redemptive meaning of Christ's death, the role of the magisterium--in fact, the essential core of Christian doctrine. Students on whom an education empty of essentials was inflicted over the years, Donna Steichen says, concluded quite logically that the Church had no important truths to teach.

The pointing out of the inadequacies is a hopeful first step to improvement; the committee reviews are the commencement of a long journey back. However slowly regeneration occurs, the Catechism has made it possible for it to happen. Also, as Msgr. Wrenn has pointed Out, the solution to the catechetical crisis must involve the use of episcopal authority.

Common errors

The following are the ten errors cited by Archbishop Buechlein as appearing commonly in catechetical texts:

1. Failure to present the mystery of the Trinity, often by avoiding use of the word "Father."

2. Insufficient clarity about the divinity of Christ, and his centrality in salvation history.

3. Failure to present the Church as established by Christ, with magisterial authority, unity of doctrine, and an apostolic mission.

4. Failure to identify man as inherently spiritual, made in the image and likeness of God, an image disfigured by sin but restored by Christ. The impression is too often given that man is the first principle and final end of his own existence.

5. Insufficient emphasis on human action as subordinate to God's initiative in the world.

6. Inadequate understanding of grace.

7. Inadequate treatment of the sacraments as effective signs of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

8. Failure to teach correctly the doctrine of original sin and its necessary relation to the doctrines of grace, baptism, sin and redemption.

9. Faulty conscience formation and "meagre exposition" of the Church's moral teaching.

10. Inadequate presentation of the transcendent kingdom of God and of Catholic eschatology.