To Pass On Catholicism More than Teaching Is Needed

Crunchy Con had a very good piece that centers around a interview Amy Welborn did. His post is To pass on the faith, live it. Basically it tells us a hard reality about passing on Catholic culture.

Let me excerpt his excerpt of Amy Welborn:
The problem is that when you look at Catholic history, the faith has never been passed on predominantly in classroom situations. The faith has been passed on in families and in parishes and in communities. You can have really nice catechetical materials in which you have kids learn about a saint each week and you introduce them to various devotions, but if all of that is absent from parish life, and if all of that is absent from the life of Catholics, which it is for the most part…

It's something that any teacher of, particularly, the humanities can sympathize with. Think about the poor teacher trying to teach Shakespeare or Chaucer to kids who go home and are on the Internet for four hours and then are playing video games and doing all kinds of other things. It's not just a religious ed problem; it's a cultural problem. [Emphasis mine -- RD.]What we are trying to transmit in a classroom setting isn't reinforced culturally.

In the Catholic setting, that means it's not reinforced in most parishes. There's no Catholic life that continually reinforces the Catholic faith. Our churches are bare. Kids don't have the opportunity to study murals and pictures of stained glass and they get bored.
Catholic education is getting better in the classrooms but we haven't grappled with the bigger cultural issue of a community's responsibility to transmit the faith outside the classroom setting.

Go to his post and read his thoughts on what Amy is saying. I think she and he hit the nail on the head. That is partly why when New Orleans got devastasted I mourned for how that Catholic culture was weakened. It still existed there. One still has it in rural South Louisiana in a major way and even in the cities of Lafayette and Lake Charles. However it us under siege even there. Often because we threw out so much because we wanted to get "up to date".

In the end the Classroom must be merged with concerted efforts in the family and the community. No easy answers