A Good Question...

“How can we be expected to get the faith from our teachers if they don’t have it or know it?” One of my students, a high school junior, asked this question in a class discussion recently and it caused my heart to break. My only answer was, “That’s a really good question…” … It is. 

The answer is a sad one really… I am not sure that we can expect our students to receive the faith in Catholic schools if the teachers do not have it. A quick response may be to lay the blame on parents who see Catholic schools as the only means for students to receive the faith. Parents who do not live the faith at home or do not make it a priority to pray together and learn the teachings of the Church together. Families who do not live a sacramental life and have forgotten the promises they made at their child’s Baptism. Parents who forget what the Catechism teaches, namely that they as parents, 

“have the first responsibility for the education of their children. They bear witness to this responsibility first by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule. The home is well suited for education in the virtues. This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery - the preconditions of all true freedom. Parents should teach their children to subordinate the "material and instinctual dimensions to interior and spiritual ones." Parents have a grave responsibility to give good example to their children. By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them” (CCC 2223)

That could be the response that is given. Many in the Church, maybe even her leaders, who find it hard to acknowledge their own failures over the last three-quarters of a century, would likely give that answer, but it is incomplete and fails to recognize the fullness of the problem. Faith leaders and teachers in Catholic schools are called to pass on the gift of the teachings of the Church, even if it is made difficult by the failures of the partners with whom we enter into this mission (parents). 

A second response may be to blame the students themselves. Perhaps they will be found guilty of being focused too much on other “gods,” whether it be sports, technology, or the latest social media, instead of being interested in a sort of childish production that slightly resembles something sacred, with explanations and teachings that are mediocre at best, which seem to be the reality in the average parish today. Certainly, leaders in the Church will blame the young people for not being open to structure and authority and for lacking obedience or being too “free-spirited.” These responses seem to demonstrate a clear disconnect between leaders in the Church and the young people. 

A diluted presentation of the truth or an appeal to “authority,” expecting the next generation to assent to the Church because a cleric tells them to, has long since lost its efficacy in passing on the faith to a generation that is increasingly skeptical of hypocritical leadership in the Church, no doubt due in large part to the God-complex of countless leaders in black, purple, and even red, who have found themselves, against the best efforts of their collaborators, exposed for what they really are, abusers. Young people see right through duplicity and can spot a phony a mile away. They also desire real, authentic, deep answers to their questions. Not simplified half-thought answers that appease for the moment, but deep answers that lead to more questions. The students of today have been raised as critical thinkers, and they are just that, critical. They require authentic answers to their real questions.     

There is a deeper question to be examined in all of this… Why do the teachers, who happen to be the same generation or a generation older than most parents, not have the faith?

While there are certainly many components to the question and the answer, one can easily recognize a failure in fully passing on the faith for more than a generation. Once we recognize that we in the hierarchy have failed, which is not common or easy to do, we can and should offer an appropriate apology and move forward in the right direction which includes an authentic presentation of the teachings of the Church, presenting the truth in love. A renewed initiative of formation for Catholic school teachers and perhaps higher standards for those teachers seems to be needed so that the next generation of Catholics can receive the authentic teachings of the Church. How can teachers give the faith if they don’t have it? 

While it is not necessary for one to memorize the Catechism, or to know every detail of the teachings of the Church in order to be an effective teacher, the mission of handing on the traditions and teachings of the Church to the next generation does require one to, at a bare minimum, have a thorough understanding of those traditions and teachings. A more effective handing on of the teachings and traditions requires not only an understanding but a full assent and a love for the teachings and traditions of the Church. To be steeped in the Church and to recognize her as a mother and a teacher, always offering formation for her children, ought to be a necessary quality of a teacher in a Catholic school. 

Msgr. Luigi Giussani wrote in his consummate work, The Risk of Education, 

“Education requires an adequate proposal of the past. Without proposing the past, without an awareness of the past, of tradition, young people grow convoluted or skeptical. If no proposal is made of a privileged working hypothesis, young people will invent one for themselves, in a convoluted way, or else become skeptical. And skepticism is the far easier route, because there they can avoid making even the effort necessary to consistently apply whichever hypothesis they choose.” 

The Church and her beautiful teachings are deeply rooted in tradition, in fact, everything we have comes to us through tradition, even Sacred Scripture was oral tradition before it was transcribed several decades, or even centuries after it had been taught. Have we in Catholic education perhaps forgotten to adequately propose this tradition? What have we proposed instead? A half-way understanding of the traditions perhaps? Or perhaps we have not presented the traditions we find “outdated” or not politically correct. This could be the real answer to my student, an apology for the past, and an authentic promise for the future.  

What should that promise be? That we in Catholic education will give them the fullness of the faith because we believe it and have been positively affected by it.  We should promise that we will stop trying to proselytize through authority and instead propose the authentic tradition in the present age, and answer the questions that help them to more fully understand why the Church teaches what she does. To my students, I promise this.