From Rote to Reality

Most U.S. Roman Catholics who went to parochial school learned the facts of their faith by memorizing them.

Generally, Catholic educators have relied on religious texts based on the 1884 Baltimore Catechism -- a turgid compendium of factual questions and answers that the student was expected to learn by role. Last week the Paulist fathers introduced a new catechism that puts dogma in language that children, rather than theologians, can understand. More important, it tries to relate the student's intuition of the divine to his own youthful experience.

The new catechism series, called Come to the Father, is colorfully illustrated, avoids flat doctrinal pronouncements. The accompanying manual for teachers advises: "We do not tell the children that God is this or that, but we show them what God does. It is not a question of flooding them with a wave of pious words, but rather of transmitting the Word of Life to them in such a way as to nourish their faith."

Following the Baltimore Catechism, a teacher asks, "Who is God?" and the well-drilled child responds: "God is the Supreme Being, infinitely perfect, who made all things and keeps them in existence." When a teacher using Come to the Father raises the subject of God, the child looks in his textbook at a brightly colored picture of the rising sun reflected in a pool of blue water. Then the teacher reads an accompanying lesson adapted from the Bible: "Let there be dry land and water and there was dry land and water. We say to God: Lord, how great and wonderful you are!" Though students are still expected to memorize some Scriptural passages, teachers are advised not to "weary the child by insisting on the repetition of the Word of God."

In classes using the new catechism, children are handed paper and crayons, are encouraged to draw their own conceptions of what they learn, such as Mary Magdalen's joy on Easter when she finds Jesus living, or what the Crucifixion was like. Instructors are warned that "fear is a bad educator"; thus sin should be presented not as "a 'stain' or spot" on the soul but as the act of a person who says no to God.

The Paulist fathers hope that their new catechism--which has been tried out experimentally in one-third of the U.S. dioceses--will become the standard text in American Catholic schools.

Although perhaps the most advanced series now on the market, Come to the Father represents only one aspect of a major revision of religious teaching that involves virtually all U.S. churches. Several other Catholic publishers are bringing out similar new catechisms of their own, and many Protestant denominations have drastically redone their Sunday-school texts in recent years with the same goal in mind: making religion a reality for the child rather than an abstraction.

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