A friend of mine, a cradle Catholic who doubts her faith, asked me what she should teach her four-year old about religion. “Everything,” I said, “heaven, hell, God, angels, sin, grace, forgiveness, don’t leave anything out.” “How can I do that,” she responded, “when I’m not sure myself?”
Such attempts at parental honesty can leave a child in the lurch. Consider what children lose when they don’t learn Bible stories. They are deprived of a framework in which to think about the big questions — life, death, good, evil, and most especially, God. Their natural spiritual curiosity goes unfed.
Stories of fairies and goblins are not enough. As C. S. Lewis shows in The Chronicles of Narnia, stories and myths can prepare the mind for understanding spiritual reality. The day comes, however, when unicorns are packed away in the toybox.
Thinking about the immaterial world comes easily to children. Once on a long car trip, my then-six-year old daughter suddenly asked me “who made God?” She insisted God, like everything else, must have a cause. I countered that God’s being was unique and uncaused. We argued back and forth, laughing, but her mother and I were appropriately dazzled by this flash of metaphysical intelligence.
My friend also pressed me about how to talk about death. Her child was easily frightened; she didn’t know whether to take her daughter to visit her grandmother’s grave. Wouldn’t death come to mean being buried under the ground? I suggested she use it as an opportunity to talk about eternity, about heaven, about the soul rising to God. “But I don’t really believe that,” she said.
We all know mothers and fathers like this, torn between the urge to pass along the religious training they received, but held back by their own doubts and disappointments. Among Catholics in this country there is the added fear that their children will be infected by the old prejudices and parochialisms of an immigrant church.
As a result, the children get little or no spiritual formation, certainly no spiritual information, before they are let loose on the culture. What happens? Lacking the intellectual measure of a basic catechism, lacking the affective measure of religious awe, they accept whatever the culture at hand serves up to them. Evolutionary materialism becomes the last word on the “scientific truth.” Media images of soulless self-gratification become the height of personal ecstasy. Whatever the pitfalls of early religious training they must be preferable to these!
As a convert from Protestantism, I am always asked, especially by cradle Catholics, what made me enter the Church. They are often perplexed when I tell them about my discovery of Catholicism, the benefits of its sacramental system, the priesthood, the Magisterium, and its unparalleled gifts to the development of our culture. The look in their eyes tells me I am describing a church they have left without ever really knowing it. This is not the church they vaguely hoped would arise from the backdraft of Vatican II — democratized, therapeutically sound, willing to bend with the times.
As we anticipate the 50th anniversary of Vatican II it must be admitted that Jacques Maritain’s prediction has come true: the new pastoral emphasis of the Council was used to subvert Catholic intelligence, character, and culture. Maritain, who was the darling of the young intellectuals and religious who attended the Council until he published The Peasant of the Garonne in 1966, was suddenly branded as a senile, embittered old man who had lost touch with the modern age.
His point was simple and profound — if you lose the mind of the Church you will eventually lose its faith as well. Catholics who cannot affirm intellectually that God exists, created the world, and sent his Son to redeem us will struggle to remain faithful. They also will not know what to tell their children, thus passing on confusion to the next generation.
Some will argue that this is not so bad, at least these children will be able to make up their own minds. On this point, I can only say that children’s religious training is precisely what enables them to make up their own minds when they are older.
Others will argue that these children will lack the vices of the old Catholic ways — they will be more tolerant, more sensitive, more open to different perspectives. Flannery O’Connor commented that our age has achieved its gain in sensibility through a loss of vision. The post-Vatican II generation has not flocked to the new Church with its greater sensibility. Like children of every age we hunger for vision, even if it keeps us awake at night.
This column originally appeared in the October 1995 issue of Crisis Magazine.
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So, I am teaching my kids “Christian Studies” using a very popular (ecumenical- mostly-”High Church”-Protestant) curriculum (I don’t know of any comparable Catholic one). The curriculum is honest enough to point out that there are differences between Catholic Bibles and Protestant ones and lists the books not contained in the Protestant ones. (Tobit, Machabees, etc) and directs the parent or Sunday School teacher to address this in their own way with the child at a level that the teacher feels appropriate.
I dug out all the versions of the Bible I have (children’s Bibles, adult Bibles, Vulgate, some Protesant, some Catholic and one copy of a heretical “Other Bible”) and my copy of Scripture Alone: 21 Reasons to Reject Sola Scriptura by Joel Peters (TAN publishers). We talked about when Jesus was born, when He died, when the last book of the Bible was written, the Church didn’t have a “Bible” in the early years, and which books were in the Catholic Bibles as opposed to the Protestant ones.
I had read Joel Peters book before, but never really had any use for the information, so it wasn’t well cemmented. This time, I did, and actually learned a little something.
So later in the day, two well meaning Protestants ended up on my door step wanting to evangelize me. In the past, I would have simply thanked them for their time and shut the door. This time, I was able to look at their book and mention theirs didn’t contain 1st and 2nd Machabees. Okay, not much, but it was perhaps the only time I have ever been able to say anything half-way intelligent in this kind of situation. And it was all because I had to teach it to someone else.
We were so robbed. When you actually learn about the Church and the faith, it’s fascinating. Saints, crusaders, missionaries, monasteries, empires, virtues, vices, miracles, apparitions, devotions, indulgences, novenas, heaven, hell, angels, demons…. Getting started at age 40, I despair of ever learning more than a small portion of Church history and theology.
Almost all that was taken away from us and replaced with “Jesus loves me” on posters and vague admonitions to try not to sin (though we wouldn’t want to get too specific about what sin means or think about it too much) and to be a good person (though we learned even less about virtue — the practical implementation of “being a good person” — than we did about sin). We learned none of the details, none of the whys and hows that tie the faith together into a coherent whole.
To give our teachers the benefit of the doubt, maybe they did that to try to make it easier for us to understand. But in the process, they made it boring and disjointed and very easy for people to discard from their lives.
I was raised Catholic, by parents who did their best to supplement rather shallow CCD. Homeschooling my HS daughter with a Catholic program that includes religion for every year has been an immense eye-opener. I feel so much more prepared for the questions of my younger children now. If feels like no matter what I learn about our faith and the Church, there is always more. There is no point where the knowledge stops and someone says, “Well, that’s it. We’ve explored this topic as much as possible.”
My 3 yr old will ask, with her eyes very round and solemn, that “Jesus is watching over me right? He’ll keep away anything scary, right? And my guardian angel? And Mother Mary?” She chose holy cards of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Our Lady of Guadalupe to hang above her bed so she could see them at night.
No matter how or what you may teach from, it’s always a little dangerous.
I know this isn’t the general point of this article, but it struck me as I read it that the Montessori approach of wondering along with our children as we read to them the parables …”I wonder who that Good Shepherd is.” “I wonder who is the good neighbor,”… might be of use to doubters when instructing their children. Read them the stories, expose them to the traditions of the church, and wonder with them, rather than instruct them. And of course, pray for faith.
I was wondering with my 2and a half year old who made her, her daddy, the ocean, etc. She seemed to have no clue, and because I am a bad teacher I gave her the answer, to which she responded, “Yeah, God (dod in her dialect) is the best.”
“As a convert from Protestantism, I am always asked, especially by cradle Catholics, what made me enter the Church. They are often perplexed when I tell them about my discovery of Catholicism, the benefits of its sacramental system, the priesthood, the Magisterium, and its unparalleled gifts to the development of our culture. The look in their eyes tells me I am describing a church they have left without ever really knowing it.”
This is what made me really ‘enter’ the Church – and I am a cradle Catholic. Only I grew up in the time when the backdraft of V2 had neutered catachesis and these things were ignored or derided.
I was an atheist for 40 years until I went back and educated myself.