Daphne McLeod has been a constructive thorn in the side of the Catholic education bureaucracy for many years. Few people in England and Wales have a better understanding of the crisis in catechetics or a more incisive programme for sorting out the mess. It is called orthodoxy!
When the hierarchy was restored in 1850, the bishops of England and Wales wrote a joint pastoral letter asking Catholics to build schools throughout the country so the Faith would be taught to succeeding generations of youngsters. They asked for these schools to be built before churches because money was limited, and while Mass could be offered in schools on Sundays they realised that the Faith must be taught on a daily basis by teachers who understood it well if the Church were to survive and grow in this country. In doing this the bishops were obeying Our Blessed Lord’s last solemn command to his Church: “Going, therefore, teach…”A little history
Catholics responded loyally, making real sacrifices to buy land on which they erected simple school buildings, and teachers responded heroically, foregoing government salaries to teach in these schools for a mere pittance until they were officially recognised in 1904. When I started teaching in 1948, the teacher I replaced, who was retiring at 70 having started teaching in 1898, told me how the parish priest would come round on Mondays at playtime to share out the Sunday collection with the teachers. We were in Camberwell where she said it was mostly pennies though, as she was qualified, she told me proudly, “I could have been earning ninety pounds a year, dear.” I feel I was greatly privileged to meet Miss Annie Evans and hear how she and her colleagues happily sacrificed their salaries to help re-establish the Church in this country.
The bishops’ plan worked extremely well because the Faith being taught effectively ensured that the Catholic Church grew by leaps and bounds, and churches were soon being built where Mass was offered daily. In general, from 1850 to around 1970 children in Catholic schools received a well structured and comprehensive instruction in the Faith which inspired the vast majority of them to lead good Catholic lives and have stable marriages or sound priestly vocations. It was mainly oral instruction following a concise syllabus backed up by the exact definitions in the ‘penny catechism’,which were carefully explained, the more important then being committed to memory. This system was supervised by each diocesan bishop, who used a team of his priests to visit every class- room annually and report to him on the childrens’ understanding of the Faith.
This and similar systems were in force throughout the English speaking world and most of Europe. Its great success led Cardinal Spellman of New York to declare at the Second Vatican Council that, “Never before has the Chuch had such a well-informed laity.” No-one contradicted him because the Council Fathers knew this to be true. Which is probably why when in 1965 they prepared their Document on Education, Gravissimum Educationis, they confined themselves mainly to administrative matters and said nothing about altering the content of religious instruction in schools.
The triumph of ignorance
Obviously this system is not in force now and far from “a well informed laity”, the bishops at the European Synod in Rome, October 1999, considered ignorance of the Faith to be one of our greatest problems. Sadly this ignorance extends to clergy as well as laity; it makes proper practice of the Faith virtually impossible and because, by its nature, those suffering from it are totally unaware that they have a problem, it is difficult to correct.
As we have seen, nothing which happened at the Second Vatican Council explains the discarding of a system which was working so well.So where did these disastrouschanges come from?They came after the Council when on 3 January 1966, with all the bishops back in their dioceses, Pope Paul VI created five post-conciliar commissions, including one on Christian Education. These commissions had no legislative authority, merely interpretative powers, and their instructions “were to adhere closely to the tenor of the solemnly approved and promulgated Council Documents.”
Unfortunately the Commission for Education ignored these safeguards as it was chaired by Fr Johannes Hofinger SJ, a disciple of Fr Jungmann who shared his open “disdain for the orthodox interpretation of certain doctrines and proper teaching methods” (see Marthala:Modern Catechetical Movement). So Fr Hofinger had his own agenda which he immediately set in motion, organising six international study weeks for catechists where, first of all, past religious instruction was discredited, then the Church was corrosively criticised, later Revelation was redefined as ‘God speaking to you in your heart’ and so on. These study weeks have been carefully documented by Mgr Michael Wrenn in his book Catechisms and Controversies ( Ignatius Press.)
The ‘new religion’ enthroned
This ‘new religion’ was brought back to England and Wales in 1967 by Fr Hubert Richards and taught in Corpus Christi College of Education until Cardinal Heenan finally closed it in 1972. Unfortunately, by then virtually every teacher of religion in this country had attended the college and most had obediently discarded Catholic teaching and embraced modern catechetics. I had to attend myself and I remember being particularly shocked at the implicit denial of the Divinity of Christ, but I found myself in a minority of one. Catholics had been brought up to honour priests and nuns, accepting what they said without argument, and these ‘reformers’ used that tradition to achieve their aims.
To ensure that only the ‘modern catechetics’ disseminated at Corpus Christi College was taught in our schools and parishes, teams of catechetical advisers were set up in every diocese. These ‘experts’ write the RE schemes teachers are to use, they advise the bishops who delegate their authority to them and now they carry out the OFSTED inspections in schools. This situation, where compilers of textbooks are in a position to mark down a school which doesn’t use their books, is illegal in secular subjects. Not however with RE where schools are threatened with poor OFSTED reports if the inspectors do not find teachers using Icons in senior schools and the revised version of Here I Am in primary schools.
The religious textbooks are a major cause of our problems. Teachers are trained to work from textbooks, so if their books do not reflect the Faith neither will their teaching. There have been many complaints about the errors in these books and new expensive RE schemes are regularly produced and forced on schools, but as they are always written by the same teams of catechetical advisers they repeat the same errors again and again.
Dissecting the problem
So, what are these errors? Basically these schemes deny the Supernatural. Anyone who examines Icons or Here I Am, the current schemes used in Catholic schools, will see that there is little about the attributes of Almighty God taught at any age; children are not informed that they have spiritual immortal souls, the Fall and Original Sin are omitted (so Redemption and our need for a Divine Saviour, Baptism, Sanctifying Grace, the Holy Sacrifice of Calvary and the Mass all go) as are the Immaculate Conception, concupiscience, and so much else. Our Blessed Lady receives only half a page in Icons, while Mohammed has four pages: sin is hardly mentioned, the Sacramental system is largely ignored, and Our Blessed Lord put on the same level as Mohammed, Gandhi etc., while the Holy Catholic Church is treated as just one of many persuasions.
When The Catechism of the Catholic Churchappeared, some of us thought things would improve. But it doesn’t teach ‘modern catechetics’ so it is unacceptable to our catechetical ‘experts’. They sideline it, call it a ‘nine day wonder’ and continue with the new teaching which has proved so disastrous. The results of ‘modern catechetics’ began to show almost at once. Failure to teach about Redemption, the Mass and the Commandments led to the immediate decline in Mass attendance which has continued over the years, accompanied by a similar drop in reception of the Sacraments of Baptism, Penance, Confirmation, Holy Orders and Matrimony.
Towards a solution
So what are parents to do? First they should be careful about sending their children to Catholic schools. It is almost impossible for a Catholic parent to teach his/her children Truths when they are contradicted by the errors taught by their Catholic teachers. Also, the travesty of the Faith now given in most Catholic schools is so effective at discrediting the Church that 92% of Catholic school leavers lapse never to return. Archbishop John Ward, the retired Archbishop of Cardiff, remarked some years ago that Catholics who go to state schools are more faithful to the Mass than those from Catholic schools. I know that my Confirmation candidates are nearly always from non-Catholic schools because at fourteen those from Catholic schools have already walked away from the Church.
Even better than state-schooling is home-schooling, which allows parents to teach not just Catholic practice, as homes have traditionally done, but to give structured lessons on doctrine and morals. Parents are free to use good books such as the new Faith and Life series (Ignatius Press), and there are good priests who will teach groups of home-schooled children regularly. For example, The Traditional Catholic Family Alliance, (contact Mrs Collette Oliver at 101 Midland Road, Wellingborough, Northants NN8 1LU) is fortunate enough to have the help of Fr Andrew Southwell.
We also have the Marian Missionaries, an order of priests and sisters, formed in Argentina in the 1980s to bring the Faith back to countries where the Catholic Church is already established. They are a conservative new order congregation but thoroughly orthodox in faith and teaching. They have foundations in fourteen countries now and have recently been invited to Holland, China and the Phillipines. They run schools in the South American countries and everywhere work in parishes teaching the Faith fully to young children, teenagers, adults and even the old. They have plenty of vocations, so whenever a bishop invites them they always accept. They still await an invitation from an English or Welsh bishop.
Will we be in time?
However there is no room for complacency. Unless action is taken urgently to put the religious instruction in our schools right again, the Church in this country will continue dwindling until it virtually disappears. In any country which fails to carry out the main mission of the Church, “To teach…everything…”, the Church will inevitably die. At present the statistical trend in the UK gives us fifteen to twenty years with a viable Church presence, so there is no time to lose before the failure to obey the injunction, “Going therefore teach…”, results in a self-fulfilling, “Going, going, gone.”
[Taken from the Latin Mass Society's August 2003 Newsletter.]