An article in Commonweal by the head of the Notre Dame Theology Department

Perhaps the religious illiteracy of so many otherwise well-educated young Catholics is too familiar to bear mentioning again. One has come to expect that even at elite Catholic colleges and universities, entering students will not know what is meant by the “Immaculate Conception”—hardly anyone knows that anymore. No surprise, either, when students do not know the proper number of natures and persons in Christ, Mary, and the Trinity—what’s an extra nature or two here or there? Besides, who’s counting? It’s not a chemical formula and it doesn’t take rocket science to believe God loves me anyway. As for ignorance of more technical terms, for example, confusing homoousios with a Near Eastern dish made of chickpeas (a good guess), or conflating the temperature at which paper burns with the date of a church council, who can worry? Still, when more than a third of the students have to guess how many Gospels are in the Bible, or think that the phrase “original sin” refers to sex; when more than half have no idea what is meant by “Incarnation” unless it has the prefix re-; when only ten out of a class of fifty know what “Exodus” refers to, or what is meant by the phrase “Real Presence,” and only a slightly higher percentage can give a credible definition of “sacrament”; when one student can convince a large group of classmates that “Catholic Social Teaching” refers to restrictions on same-sex marriage—we can perhaps bear to mention the problem of religious ignorance yet again.

This vast ignorance is not just a question of missing bits of information, retinal holes marring an otherwise excellent field of vision. It is something more like a retinal detachment, a whole field of vision pulling inexorably away toward blindness. Not only are the words gone, the bits of information, but the system in which the words made sense is fading. At the University of Notre Dame, most students still enjoy the required theology courses and have a sense that it is somehow important to take them. But this too will change, as the years go by, and even the residual feel for a “system” recedes. Does it matter?

Maybe not, if one has lost the expectation that Catholics should be effective agents of moral change, bearing witness to gospel values in the triple vocation of Jesus as “priest, prophet, king.”

It’s a good article. He proposes, in the end a renewed pedagogy that emphasizes the basics but also ensures that the basics aren’t merely appropriated and discretes bits of knowledge, but as part of a whole, with meaning, implications and consequences.

The only quibble I have is with the old shibboleth of the Baltimore Catechism raised here. We don’t want to go back to those days, he says. No, we don’t, except for the fact that pre-Vatican II catechesis was not as bereft of context and faith implications as he implies. Yes, it was inadequate – if you want to know how, merely read a bit of Frank Sheed. As I recall in The Church and I, he devotes some space to decrying the shallowness of understanding of those who came to him, eager to work with the Catholic Evidence Guild – and he was reflecting on the 1920’s. He was appalled at the poor level of education of many of the sisters charged with teaching religious education, and the consequences.

However, my small collection of pre-Vatican II religion texts from grade school through high school tells me that the Baltimore Catechism-rote-memory rap is unjustified as a total characterization of the period. The books I have are, of course, very firm on information, but also very explicit on what this means in terms of one’s relationship to God and His creation. Sandra Miesel can and does, speak well to this point, if she’d like to chime in.

(And I’ll add that part of this problem goes beyond the classroom. The classroom is just the beginning. It was assumed that what facts were memorized in the classroom would be built on, elaborated and lived in the life of the Church. That the prayers we prayed, the art we gazed at, the hymns we sang , the homilies we heard and the saints we studied and emulated would flesh out what those ideas meant, ever more deeply as our lives went on and we grew in wisdom and holiness.)

And I think, quite frankly, that one of the cold, hard facts that Dr. Cavadini doesn’t consider is that many in the religious education establishment in this country are opposed to a greater emphasis on cognitive aspects of catechesis. Some of them don’t believe the stuff, others think it’s irrelevant, and still others think it turns kids off from faith. (especially on the high school level). When I did research for my OSV article on the situation with high school textbooks, I picked up a very clear sense from some involved in the process, and who had observed meetings between the committee and publishers that some publishers were very reluctant to simply redo their texts with more of an emphasis on an unambiguous presentation of Catholic believe, even in a greater affective context, because they simply believed that there wasn’t a market for them. Those charged with purchasing texts wouldn’t buy them and they (the publishers) would lose their shirts.