RITE AND REASON: Are the resources devoted to teaching religion wasted?
ADDRESSING
A crowd protesting against the Pope’s visit to Britain last year,
Richard Dawkins fulminated with the passion of a fundamentalist preacher
against the Catholic Church for filling the children’s heads with the
“vile obscenity” of original sin and “the terrifying falsehood” of hell.
Unless
religious education in British Catholic schools is much more effective
than it is in Irish Catholic schools, Dawkins need not worry: most
Catholic children will not have heard of original sin, and will only
have heard of hell in popular culture.
In 2007 the Iona Institute,
a body committed to preserving orthodox Catholic teaching, conducted a
survey among Irish people aged 15 to 24.
Only 5 per cent could quote the
First Commandment, 32 per cent could not say where Jesus was born, and
35 per cent did not know what is celebrated at Easter.
Fewer than half
knew what the Trinity is comprised of, and only 15 per cent knew what
transubstantiation is.
In a response to the survey’s findings, reminiscent of
Father Ted, the Catholic bishops argued that it was unfair to
expect young people to know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and that
“in a stable” should have been an acceptable answer.
Their lordships
clearly favour multiple- choice questions in scripture.
This
pitiful ignorance of the basic facts and tenets not just of Catholicism
but of Christianity raises the question of whether the significant
resources devoted to teaching religion in Irish schools are largely
wasted.
In the 1980s, the imparting of traditional doctrine was
abandoned in Catholic schools and was replaced by a syllabus so broad
and vague that practically anything that is connected, however
tenuously, to religion or spirituality can be taught.
The primary school religious programme,
Alive O , has been ridiculed for its fatuity.
Most
children receiving first Communion are not taught the significance of
the Eucharist in any meaningful way and would not understand it if they
were.
The Church of Ireland sensibly administers Communion and Confirmation together at age 12.
At primary school most children learn very little of the
New Testament. A few prayers are taught, and some of the Commandments.
All
teachers in Catholic primary schools are obliged to teach religion
regardless of their beliefs, but at second level, religion is mainly
taught by specially trained teachers who have chosen to study the
subject.
Despite this training, many seem unable or unwilling to
teach scripture, doctrine or comparative religion in a meaningful way.
Some seem to prefer showing films to teaching, but when I gave my son’s
religion teacher the video of the fine BBC documentary
Jesus of Nazareth , which included contributions from leading
scripture scholars and theologians, she did not show it because she
thought her fifth-years would find it “too advanced”.
My daughter’s teacher, however, showed her class of 15-year-old girls Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ , which produced a significant response in that several girls screamed at the Passion scenes.
Religion,
taken as a subject by the overwhelming majority of second-level
students, is neither catechesis nor a serious study of comparative
religion.
What moral instruction occurs is usually an
unquestioning transmission of Catholic teaching on such subjects as
abortion, divorce and euthanasia.
This leaves pupils ill-equipped to
formulate or defend a position on these issues.
(I have met many
students, some from elite Catholic schools, who see no moral question in
tax evasion.)
With no firm grounding in any religion, or in the
philosophical arguments for secularism, some young people are easy prey
for cults and purveyors of New Age charlatanry.
The Catholic
Church should decide whether religion should be catechesis, and so
taught only to those who wish to learn it, or religious studies, which
would better prepare students for a multicultural world.
The present
system leaves many young people ignorant about the Christian tradition
which, leaving aside questions of personal faith, is central to an
understanding of western civilisation.
Seán Byrne lectures in economics at Dublin Institute of Technology