Spiritual Formation and Religious Education at School - Essay Example

Children in church-related schools should not be catechized, but get rigorous, intellectually demanding accounts of religion. The teacher should present the Church’s teaching, and then invite students to critique its strengths and weaknesses. The words of the student become the main focus of reference. (Cunnane, F. pg - 161,162).1 The range of spiritual formation experiences and theological ideologies valued by the catholic teachers within structured programs and also within the day-to-day experiences of a catholic school in the republic of Ireland, must be part of a curriculum that awakens a sense of the sacred in the lives of the young people today. Thus the spiritual formation must be attributed though continual sustenance of the distinctive characteristics of the catholic school under the Irish education system. Thus, the identity of the next generation of Catholics is under continuous surmise and survey. They may either have a strong sense of their Catholic identity, or will they may grow on to reflect a more generic Christian identity, without the distinctiveness associated with Catholicism. And this is where an appropriate catholic school is of great importance that can awaken in them a pure catholic system of values. A number of social commentators such as Dean R. Hoge and James J. Davidson suggest that the Catholic identity of young Catholics is quite troubled2, since faced by a secular and postmodern culture they are disillusioned by such confusing variety. Hoge3 calls it a “culture of choice” where religious affiliations or church memberships are strictly voluntary and to be chosen on the basis of personal preference, people are drifting away from understanding the intrinsic values of spiritual life. Furthermore, many younger Catholics are quite unfamiliar with their religious tradition. And with no idea of their own scriptures, they know little of the history or doctrine of their church, and few would be able to tell the stories of the saints. In his book, Catholicism, Richard McBrien identifies two characteristic foci of the Catholic tradition—one philosophical, the other theological.4 Both the pursuit of Catholicism is in reality pluralistic in its approach to truth. Catholic identity traditionally has included for Catholics a sense for the historical uniqueness of their Church; they understand it as a worldwide, visible community, now almost two thousand years old, with roots stretching back to the church of the apostles. Youths of this generation are not given much encouragement to learn the doctrine; the catechesis they receive only engage their emotions, and does not challenge their intellects. With the loss of the coherent Catholic culture within the youth today their sensibility characterizes ignorance of the basic theological distinctions, including differences among Christian traditions and between Christianity and other religions; and often cannot articulate a central distinguishing tenet of Catholic belief. Michael Gallagher, an Irish Jesuit who has taught literature for twenty years and writes on faith, culture, and spirituality, speaks of “a whole new generation of baptized young adults whose formative experiences with religion or Church are so thin as to be almost non-existent.”5 Thus Gallagher attempts to make one understand the various understandings of Christian faith, the developing understandings of culture, and the symbolic character of each. How do the youth deal with theology within the local culture in the increasingly globalised Irish context? Dr Finola Cunnane, Sister of St Louis, and Director of Religious Education in the Diocese of Ferns, Wexford gives the meaning given of ‘religion’. It is a value-system that must encompass the meaning of life and balance individualism with care for youths and their environment. Being ‘religious’ means living by the value-system of ‘religion’. “Religious education” is again defined as teaching ‘religion’ and teaching to be ‘religious’. ‘Teaching’ in a religious context amounts to showing someone how to behave in a ‘religious’ way. She does not advocate imparting religious truths since there are none, but discussions of experiences must not be excluded. Thus an educational curriculum with a strong sense of dialogical pedagogy, which will provide a forum in which questions are formed, raised and addressed. Religious educators thus must help encourage learners to share their experiences and express their ideas and assumptions about the meaning of the Catholic Church’s traditions for their lives. They must be encouraged to exercise their imaginative and creative abilities with a dialectical interplay, thereby rethinking, re-envisioning and re-appropriating their practices of faith, communal praxis and their present use to them. Catholic catechesis must be replaced by “religious education”, which involves teaching people the traditions of their own religious community, and is the responsibility of the State; parish and family who should model a ‘religious’ way of life that will bring about peace, harmony, and understanding among the peoples and nations of the world. She thus concludes: It is the job of the State to provide “religious education”; it is the vocation of the churches merely to model a ‘religious’ way of life (Cunnane, F. p.35).6 She suggests that religious education should be inter-institutional. From the texts of Deuteronomy 6 and Acts 2, one can infer that religious education, first, is not an abstraction. The content of religious education emphasizes a lived out faith characterized by love, community and sharing, and not just a knowing faith characterized by memorized creedal formulas and prayers. Hence, the educational ministry of the church should pay adequate attention to both the cognitive and affective domains. Both cannot be separated if the desired end of the intellectual analysis of faith content is to be ethical activity. Thomas Groome7 thinks that developmental knowing always involves two totalities. First, of the total person, which in Christian Religious Education he discusses as combining affectivity and rationality. It is holistic wisdom and disposition people have to realize their own ‘being’. And this knowing always takes place with respect to one’s experience of the total life—situation, both personal and social-cultural, which for the individual construes Faith (as part of believing, in addition to trusting and doing). He writes, “Epistemology and ontology, ‘knowing’ and ‘being’ should be united in the philosophical foundations of religious education.”8 Thus, the narrow understanding of the aim of religious education nurturing faith within the context of a narrow understanding of religious and educational purpose is not acceptable anymore. Brennan says: During my time at the university in Dublin, my perception of religion became increasingly negative. I was now immersed in a whole new culture that bore little or no similarity to the culture of my childhood and adolescence9. Thus, in Christian theology, contextualization is the effort to understand and take seriously the specific context of each human group and person on its own terms and in all its dimensions—cultural, religious, social, political, and economic. Thus, theology does not happen in a vacuum, but takes place in the complex daily realities of human life and in the dynamics of interaction with the immediate environment, as well as the entire ecosystem. Thus Brennan gives an insight into the habitus of young Irish Catholics and how they see and understand the world, themselves and being Catholic. As a dynamic process of reflection and dialectical interaction, contextualizing religious education in the Irish society has to do with more than just doctrine or orthodoxy. Thus, since the present system of lived culture of the youth shapes the meaning of their world, religious education in such a context must include those concerns with their quests and with their understanding of the meanings and values of such a world. Largely, the disillusionment of the youth has ensued due to their distorted understanding of the church and the inability of the church to present its clear role to itself or to them and guide them efficiently. People may have been born and raised a Catholic, they may have an ascribed Catholic social identity, they may have inherited a Catholic habitus, but the question is how this identity is actively negotiated by individuals, how it is presented with other social and personal identities, as they move in and out of different social fields and universes of discourses in the course of everyday life.10 Chaplains and Pastors must addresses a changing society with changing pastoral needs where the old certainties of the past being challenged by the socio-cultural shift of our times. Pastoral duty may range from being humanistic, programmatic and spiritual depending on the need of the changing face of the modern culture. As the world exhibits such great diversity, the need for understanding and accepting the cultural differences among all people is tremendous and thus various. Challenge for religious educators is much more critical is to present an effective culturally informed education founded on Catholic faith and an understanding of religious plurality and communal understanding. Hence religious education cannot neglect the political and ideological challenges of this era. Thus Dermot A. Lane puts it rightly: We come up with a view of Catholic Education which is about effecting a creative unity between memory and imagination, between tradition and innovation, a close bond between the liberating memory of Jesus Christ as the Wisdom of God and the imaginative insertion of that healing memory into the understanding of the world today.11 Thus, returning to the source of scripture as well as early liturgical practices where students can demonstrate both sensitivity to various expressions of religious belief in diverse cultures, and a critical understanding of their meaning and their own historical pasts. Youths must express an awareness of the Catholic tradition in the context of historical evolution and critically explore the nature of religious experience and the religious dimension of the human person and engage in theological analysis of fundamental Christian doctrines. This may include understanding of the portraits of Jesus that emerge through analysis of the New Testament texts and theological evolution of belief in Jesus and analyze them alongside the contemporary Christological issues. Thus, based on Church teaching, sound theology, empirical research and proven pastoral practice, the Catholic education of Irish youth must serve to guide them towards a better understanding of their world where the pastoral minister in the role of a teacher must become the effective tool for fostering their spiritual growth that must balance the transcendent and immanent and act towards a rediscovery of narratives and spirituality as languages and contexts for theology. Hence, the reception of the theology (sensus fidelium) by the faith community is the important factor, where the community is constantly changing. Another important factor is the consistency of the theological statement with the religious tradition and its acceptance through faith by the youth swayed by materialism and the world’s vagaries. Thus religious education must ultimately be transformative. The ultimate goal of interpretation and construction is personal and social transformation. It seeks a deep knowledge of the Christian tradition and the contemporary situation, drawing on the best knowledge from a range of disciplines. It is from this deep knowledge that it is possible to achieve a meaningful interpretation and amount to being constructive i.e. through its attempts to interpret the tradition in light of contemporary society new understandings should be developed. Works Cited 1. Brennan, O. “Cultures Apart?” (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 2001), p. 13. 2. Cunnane, Finola New Directions in Religious Education 2004 Dublin Veritas 3. Davidson, James D. and Dean R. Hoge, “Catholics After the Scandal: A New Study’s Major Findings,” Commonweal 131/20 (November 19, 2004) pp 13–18. 2 4. Groome, Thomas . Christian Religious Education: Sharing Our Story and Vision. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980, 8, 15-17. 5. Hoge, Dean R. William D. Dinges, Mary Johnson, Juan L. Gonzales, Jr., Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001). 6. Jenkins, Richard 1996 Social Identity. London: Routledge, pp 102 7. Lane, Dermot. “CATHOLIC PRIMARY EDUCATION INTO THE FUTURE: THE IRISH EXPERIENCE”, 25 March 2006 < http://www.cpsma.ie/Docs/Lane_AGM_06.pdf > pp 2, retrieved as on 25th march 2007 8. McBrien, Richard P. Catholicism (Harper San Francisco, 1994) 1192–1200. 9. Michael Paul Gallagher, Clashing Symbols: An Introduction to Faith and Culture (New York: Paulist Press, 1998) 112. Read More