June 2001 Print

Frank J. Sheed

I take it, as regards the aim of the teaching of Religion in Catholic schools, that we are agreed on something like this: that the indispensable minimum is that the Catholics coming out of our schools should emerge with a tremendous devotion to Christ, Our Lord, with an awareness of Him, a considerable knowledge of His Life and Personality, and a desire to increase that knowledge; if they have got that, they are all right; even if they have got nothing else, they are still all right, they will come to very little harm. But if they have not, all other excellences don't do them a great deal of good. None the less, the other excellences are excellences and to be striven for. It should surely be the aim of religious teaching that, by the time the pupils leave, they should have learned the great doctrines of the Church, up to the level of their capacity to absorb them at that age and with the somewhat scanty experience of life they have so far had; and that they should have acquired such a liking for the doctrines that they will want to go on studying them, roughly pari passu with their experience of life.

Let me take three or four questions that might test how far these aims had been achieved—not necessarily the most important that could be asked, but easy to answer with a yes or no, and in their own way pretty decisive:

SELF-EXAMINATION IN FOUR QUESTIONS

Have You Got the Answers?

Are Catholics, by and large, so equipped with knowledge of the doctrines of the Church, that if some outsider came along and wanted enlightenment, the first educated Catholic he came to would give it to him, would really expound the Church's main doctrines in such a way that the enquirer would think the matter worth pursuing with a priest? Would he, by the time he reached the priest, already have learnt a great deal?

Heaven? - Now, or Later?

Do Catholics really want to go to Heaven? I don't mean, do they want to go at once. I mean have they, with all their love of life, the life of here and now, a real desire to go to Heaven—not simply a desire to avoid hell, but an actual desire, knowing what Heaven is, to embrace it? Would that be a normal state of the Catholics who have been to our schools?

What's Your Pick?

Take a third quite different sort of test. Supposing one of our Catholics were to find upon the table in his bedroom a religious book, say by Dr. Leen or Monsignor Ronald Knox, and a novel—which would he pick up? I realize that there are moods in which every one of us, even you, would rather have the novel. All I mean is: are those the only moods that Catholics have? If so, it means they have no very vivid interest in God, in Christ, our Lord, in our Lady, in all the major facts of reality.

Do You Hurt?

One further test: A Catholic receives the gifts of truth and life that the Church has to give him, through Christ our Lord. Is he in a kind of anguish at the thought that there are others who know nothing of these gifts and are not receiving them? Can he take it quietly, can he go about his business and only occasionally say: "Poor fellows, they are unlucky"? Or is it a matter of anguish that fellow human beings should be starved of the gifts of truth and life that Christ wanted them to have? Is he as much concerned at that fact and conscious that he ought to be doing something about it, as he would be if he heard that fellow creatures lacked bread? If he is not, then it means that bread has a more real value for him than the truth and the Sacraments. This may be so, even if, as a practicing Catholic, he frequents the Sacraments. There may still be a good deal of routine in his own regular Catholic life—though of course, by the mercy of God, that routine is a life-giving routine and will lead him to salvation.

My own feeling is that we do not measure up very well to those four tests. We, as a body, with all our practice of the Catholic religion, are not alive to the Faith in that sort of way. I travel a great deal, more than most, and as a result I meet a far greater variety of people than most; and because I am known to be a Catholic publisher, I hear a great many more religious views. In the Catholic Evidence Guild, I have had 30 years of meeting the incoming members, the people who would like to be speakers. On this mass of evidence, I can only state my own conclusion that even with those who are really devoted Catholics, religion has not for the most part taken in that kind of way—the Sacraments, yes, thank God; the Mass, yes, thank God; but you don't feel the whole Catholic outlook on life profoundly comprehended or really very much adverted to: and of course sadly large numbers have dropped Mass and Sacraments altogether. From meeting so many of my fellow Catholics, I have formed a mental picture of the Religion classes from which they have emerged. That is the basis of my talk this afternoon.

THE ATTITUDE OF THE RELIGIOUS TEACHER

One begins with the attitude of the Religion teacher. I have masses of evidence about that. There are Catholic schools in which Religion is a poor relation on the syllabus. If there is a teacher who would startle the Government Inspector if he caught her teaching Mathematics or English or Latin or French, she is relegated to the teaching of Christian Doctrine; the principle apparently being that the Diocesan Inspector is made of sterner stuff than the Government Inspector and does not startle so easily. You may not believe it, but I have seen such schools.

I will say no more of these base institutions. We are talking about schools that really take Religion teaching as the primary work, the thing for which more than anything else they exist. Now the primary rule of all teaching that is supposed to affect the way in which human beings live is that the teacher is not simply handing out information like a post office girl handing out stamps. The teacher gives herself, with the truth adhering. There is no way of giving the truth without giving oneself. There must be actual self-donation of the teacher, and the truth somehow goes with that self-donation. Everything I have to say assumes that that is taken for granted by every teacher of Religion in a Catholic school.

But let us say two further things. First—if the teacher regards the Religion class as a kind of sacramental, a kind of sub-sacrament, then it would be quite impossible for her either to have any slackness in preparing to give it, or any dishonesty in giving it. It would be quite unthinkable, it would be, in its own sort of way, not exactly a sacrilege—it certainly is not—but something moving in that direction. When I mention dishonesty in giving the lesson, there flash through my mind incidents people have told me of, occasions in class where the Religion teacher tried to bluff when she did not know, or, being caught out in ignorance, lost her temper. Now I know that these things have been exaggerated, time does exaggerate them. But after all, you as teachers know that you live permanently in the appalling certainty that all your lapses are going to be exaggerated. So you have to be terribly careful not to have lapses.

Second—as the Catholic looks back over his Religion classes, there should be no memory of harshness to stain his devotion to religion; whatever may be true in the other classes, there should be no harshness in this class. The amount of resentment one feels over things that took place 30 years ago, a resentment which is sometimes profoundly serious, which sometimes means even the dropping of the practice of the faith, is amazing. I have been in school myself, and I know that there are teachers who are positive lions—their slightest whisper is a roar. I remember a particular teacher who roared so effectively that I will never open a book in his subject again, willingly. Be a lion, if you must, in the other classes, but be a lamb in the Religion class. If children learn nothing else, or retain nothing else, from their Religion classes, let them learn and retain that religion is love. If all the rest goes, let that stay. And it does seem to me that a teacher should examine his conscience to see if there be any incident that might have dimmed the realization in anybody that religion is love. I know that, as a street corner speaker for the Catholic Evidence Guild, I examine mine on that point. There have been occasions when I was sarcastic to a questioner. I have not flogged myself for it, though I should have, because my sarcasm stands between that questioner and the love of God, and I put it there. The love of God cannot be taught with a snarl or a sneer; and if the love of God is not taught religion is not. It would be wonderful if everybody coming from a Catholic school could look back on the Religion classes and say: "They were different. Even Sister So-and-So was a Christian in the Religion class!"

Now I know I speak of something that is your affair and not mine, but I think I would not punish children in the Religion classes if they did not do their homework. I think I would, as far as is humanly possible, leave compulsion out of the Religion class. It is not the same as the other classes. I would not do anything that would give them a resentment toward me, which they would proceed to attach to religion. Try to persuade them, yes; get them so interested that they want to learn, yes. But not compulsion. In the matter of behavior, you cannot of course have the place turned into a bear garden. But my tendency would be not to punish them in the Religion class for any sort of misbehavior that did not tend to disrupt the class. If they are merely day-dreaming, try to be more interesting than their dreams. And, for most faults, use the Religion class to illustrate the value of forgiveness up to seventy times seven. Religion class would be a wonderful place for that.

I do not think the Religion class should be a class at all. It is not simply part of school work. It happens to be in the same building; it happens to be run by the same people; but it is not part of school life, it is something much more profound than that. The teacher in the Religion class is not exactly there as a school mistress, she is there as a maturer member of the Catholic Church, trying to convey, to less mature members, just what treasures the Church has. Compulsion is a thing that rankles. You would be amazed at the number of grown up Catholics who resent having had to go to Holy Communion with all the others. And this for two reasons. Number one: in many cases, it meant sacrilege. They had not the nerve to stand out, they had not the nerve to go to Confession over some sin or other, they had a bad conscience. Not only that, it caused them to associate Communion with a great mass-movement, without any personal choice at all. Consequently, once they left school, they lacked the mass-movement and they gave up Communion. It is the same with this question of religion when it is thought of as part of school life. I have seen it to the point where it is almost heartbreaking. Children, so devoted, so devout, at school. And the moment they leave school they drop religion, because religion was simply one more part of school life. Anything we can do to make children feel that their Religion class is not just part of going to school would be wonderful.

 

TWO WAYS OF TEACHING

It is a commonplace that the teacher in the class room teaches in two ways. She teaches by what she is, and she teaches by what she says. And everybody knows that the first sort of teaching—teaching by what you are—lasts longer, is the more permanent. But not for that reason would you neglect the teaching by what you say. Any teacher who says to herself: "What I am is what matters to the class, not what I say, so I will improvise as I go along," is a charlatan. Surely any Catholic would feel rather that what she is is such a shoddy thing that she had better make up for it by a greater excellence in what she says. Would any of us have the nerve to sit there and say: "I am so excellent a being that what I say hardly matters, all they need do is absorb me"? On the contrary, the teacher really trembles at the thought that so much throughout the rest of the child's life is going to hinge upon the child's reaction to her. It cannot be helped, but it means that you have to be better than yourselves in the Religion classroom.

What I am going to say next, I say with the fullest sense of responsibility. Far too many of the Religion teachers I have met have seemed to me not really competent. You will say that my experience could be of only a small proportion of all Religion teaching. That is quite true. But it is larger than most people have had. I am going to analyze my impressions so that you may judge how far the standard I am suggesting is a right standard.

It seems to me that there are two elements of intellectual competence which should be a minimum for the teaching of Religion.

The Teacher of Religion Should Be Absolutely Soaked in the New Testament

The teacher of Religion should be absolutely soaked in the New Testament, so that she knows what every key chapter in it is about; knows the line of thought of every book of it, could find her way about it blindfold. That seems to me an indispensable minimum and if a teacher just lets the New Testament go by, does not take too much account of it, merely looks it up when questions arise or uses it for texts to prove doctrines, then what she is really doing, by ignoring the Book, is snubbing the Author of the Book. The Author of the Book is the Holy Ghost. And if you snub the Holy Ghost, it is hard to see how you can count upon His co-operation in your class; and without His co-operation, it is hard to see how you will accomplish anything. The teaching of Religion is a kind of dialogue—I was almost going to say between the Holy Ghost and the Holy Ghost—the Holy Ghost in you helping you to say the truth, and the Holy Ghost in the child helping it to understand what you are saying. It really is your work, you are not passive, you are not nothing—but the Holy Ghost is acting in you if you let Him. The same is true of the child—the child is not passive, not nothing, but the Holy Ghost is helping it to understand what you say. Ideally, one should know the whole of the New Testament; the Gospels must be known thoroughly. In addition to reading the four Gospels, one should have a good Harmony of the Gospels, and live with it. That is number one of the qualifications which seem to me to be an indispensable minimum.

The Teacher Should Be Soaked in the Church's Dogmas

The teacher should be soaked also in the Church's dogmas, soaked in them in this sense that she knows them in so far as the Church has expounded them; and further, that she is possessed by them. This experience of having the dogmas of the faith come alive in the mind is a most fascinating psychological thing. It is not my business to appraise the value of teaching the words of the Catechism, but I would like to give a word of warning. The Catechism makes it possible for people to teach doctrine without knowing doctrine. But the teacher who is soaked in dogma, really afire with it, is not in the least likely to confine herself merely to a repetition of Catechism words. The very essence of being possessed by any truth at all is a desire to tell it. To be possessed by a truth and not to long to communicate it would be impossible. The mark of the teacher who is possessed by truth is an almost anguished desire to convey to others what is so rich a treasure to her.

Most of the Religious teachers I have met do not seem to be in that sense soaked in the dogmas; still fewer, one feels, are soaked in the New Testament. For the last 30 years I have been teaching the Faith at street corners. Throughout that time I have been receiving the people who join the Catholic Evidence Guild, who want to be trained as speakers, and finding out what they know. Those who come are not the worst Catholics, obviously. They would not want to speak at street corners to their fellow citizens if they were thoroughly bad Catholics. We have probably a good average lot of Catholics; some of them have just left school, some left school 30 or 40 years ago, some are converts. Except for the recent converts, the effort to find what they know is very depressing. The best of them know the Catechism answers, but the moment one questions them as to the meaning of an answer, there is trouble. They can nearly always get the first answer right, but if, instead of going on to the next question, you question their answer, you trod that the foundation is chaos. Among them, over the years, have been a great number of school teachers and they are just the same as the rest.

Many of those who come to us, the ones most recently at school, have been taught Apologetics and have been taught very well, though too often they have been trained to answer yesterday's questions and not today's, so that when they meet a living objector, the sword of their apologetic breaks in their hand, proves in fact to be no true sword, but only a good imitation. However that may be, there is invariably one most extraordinary thing about their Apologetics. They have learnt the proofs of all sorts of Catholic doctrines, but they do not know, and seem to have no desire to know, what the doctrines themselves mean: they are at once uninformed and incurious about the realities which they are so pleased to prove that the Church has.

Thus they can prove, by evidence internal and external, that the Gospels are authentic. I have hardly ever met one of them who has read the Gospels.

They can prove that the soul of man is spiritual, that man therefore is a union of spirit and matter: but what the union means, how things so disparate are in fact united, they do not know. Over and over again, one has had some such dialogue as this: "Is the soul in every part of your body?—Yes—Is it in your thumb?—Yes—Then, if your thumb were cut off, what would happen to the soul that had been in it?"

A fool of a question, perhaps. But the answers reveal that the vast majority have not a notion of what the phrase "union of spirit and matter" means, so do not know what a man is, and apparently have never even wondered.

They can prove that the Pope is infallible, but they do not know the meaning of infallibility. You can discover this by asking "Why, if the Pope is infallible, does he summon a General Council? If he cannot teach error, why have a council to prevent his teaching error?" To be unable to answer this question (which most of them are) is not to know the difference between being prevented from teaching error and being able to teach truth, and therefore not to know what Infallibility means. But they can prove it all right.

One last example: they can prove from the Gospels that Christ Our Lord is God, but they do not know the meaning of the doctrine whose truth they have so convincingly established, what it means that this man was God. They have not gone into it and have not any curiosity in the matter. You ask, for instance, "Did God die on the Cross?" The answer, happily, is Yes—as I have said the first answer is usually right. But if you go on and ask "What happened to the universe while God was dead?" nearly all abandon the great truth to which they have just assented, and explain that it was not God who died on the Cross but the human nature God the Son had assumed: which roughly is the Nestorian heresy, condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431, one year before St. Patrick landed for the conversion of your ancestors and mine. The true answer, you may say, sounds not so very different from the heresy: need we bother the young with technical distinctions of this sort? But upon this distinction our redemption depends and the young are quite capable of seeing the distinction, and of rejoicing in it.

Students thus drilled in the arguments but unconcerned about the realities have not been taught by teachers soaked in the New Testament or soaked in the dogmas. They come to the Evidence Guild classes and start to learn; and you can see beginning to grow in them the excitement that is born of a sense of being initiated into divine mysteries—an excitement they were quite capable of having at any stage in their career. As the realization comes to life—we see this invariably—there begins also to grow the desire to communicate, to go out and tell these truths to people who have not got them: the feeling that it is intolerable that there should be anybody who has not had at least an opportunity of having them, of knowing these marvelous things. Please do not misunderstand me. I know that one can be a good Catholic, one can be saved, one can be a saint, with very little notion of the content of Catholic doctrine. But it still remains true that, to one who loves God, every new truth learned about God is a new reason for loving Him, and it still remains true that every doctrine contains light for the mind, and nourishment for the soul, and that that light and nourishment remain locked up in it for anyone who has never been taken inside it, to see what is there.

 

CATHOLICISM MEANS THE UNION OF MEN WITH GOD IN CHRIST

The products of our Catholic schools—ten years or more after, you understand, when I meet them—lack two things overwhelmingly. They lack the shape of reality as expressed in the dogmas, and they lack any inside knowledge of what the individual dogmas mean. A great devotion, willingness to do God's will, devotion to the Church's laws, devotion to the Sacraments, devotion to the Mass—these things are there, but side by side with a chaotic picture of what it all means.

I have already glanced at the lack of grip on individual dogmas. Take now the question of the shape of reality. Catholicism means the union of men with God in Christ. That is Catholicism, that is all of Catholicism. That is the fact they should have standing up clear and clean from all the mass of things they know. As they come through school, they have learnt a great number of things, but there is no order, no hierarchy, in the things they have learnt about the faith. They have all sorts of pious practices, good salutary practices, rubbing shoulders, so to speak, with essentials. They hardly know which is which, they are all there together in a kind of—I was going to say rag-bag, but that would be rude—they are all there in a kind of heap. The absolutely essential activities of Catholicism and the quite desirable but non-essential pious practices—all there together—the Trinity hardly larger than Our Lady of Fatima! They need some framework on which they can arrange their knowledge, to which all the rest can be related, and I suggest the simple definition of Catholicism I have just quoted: the union of men with God in Christ. We are incorporated with Christ and thereby united with the Father and with one another.

The union of men with God in Christ is Catholicism; and, that being so, whatever else they are clear or vague about, whatever else they remember or do not remember, they should be absolutely clear on what God is, what man is, what Christ is, what union is. Those four should stand out like a great plateau—you can arrange all the other things around these. Those four they really should know. Do they know them? One small piece of evidence could obviously be collected in our churches: the sermons preached are not preached as to a congregation that knows those four things. The priests must know their people. An occasional priest might under-rate his congregation: but if the clergy as a whole preach only the simplest elements, they are surely uttering their verdict on what their people already know. They say that a dogmatic sermon would be above the heads of the congregation—the majority of whom have had anything from eight to twelve years in Catholic schools: you would think it must be very hard to be above such heads. There is indeed an astounding contrast between what the religious curriculum says is to be taught in school, and what the sermons say has been learnt.

Come back to these things—what God is, what man is, what Christ our Lord is, what union is—union with God in Christ.

TWO INDISPENSABLE ELEMENTS IN RELIGION

I have been suggesting that there are two indispensable elements in Religion Really Taught (to revert to the question you set me): (1) that individual truths should be known in their inwardness, the children should be shown how to get under the skin of the doctrine to find what is there: the words of the Catechism should be broken up into their component sentences; (2) that the truths should be seen as parts of an organic whole, like features in a face, and that face should be known intimately and seen everywhere: the "shape" of reality must become a permanent mental possession, not in the sense of truths known so that one can recall them at need, but (to change the simile slightly) in the sense of major features of the landscape in which the mind is consciously living: if this is achieved, then the student will never be able to see anything without at the same time seeing God and man and Christ and the union men with God in Christ, will never be able to judge of any problem that arises in his life without seeing it in relation to God's will and the supernatural life and the Beatific Vision. In other words he is living mentally in the real universe, which helps him morally, too: for the Laws of morality are the Laws of this real universe, and if one is living mentally in it, one sees that they are, so that intellect helps will in its struggle: whereas to be trying to obey the laws of the real universe, while not living mentally in it, casts the whole burden of virtue on the will.

That the pupils should learn to see Religion so, the teacher must already be seeing it so, and must have given endless thought to the way of sharing her vision with her pupils.

Consider the seeing it first. Any teacher of any subject must know far more than he has to impart: with knowledge it is as with the voice, you get your effects with what you are not using: the speaker at the limit of his voice, the teacher at the limit of his knowledge, each in his own way sounds thin and tinny: what is being held in reserve gives resonance to what is being used. The Religion teacher, then, will be always thrusting deeper into the inwardness of the doctrines. And she will be living ever more consciously and intensely in the seen reality: a teacher will be able to introduce the children into the world of reality in which she herself is wholly living and rejoicing to live, just as she will teach more vividly the geography of a country she has lived in and loved.

Consider now, but all too briefly, the effort of the mind to grow in the art of sharing the vision. There is, of course, the solid groundwork of teaching method. Of that I need not speak. I suggest two further points:

You Know the Dogmas, But Do You Know What They Meant

There should be a continuous thrust of the mind, to discover less obvious but still fascinating implications of the dogmas.

When teaching the Incarnation, for instance, of course you teach them that Christ is God, and that Christ is Man, and as they grow into the doctrine, they begin to see how marvellous a thing it is that God should have taken a human nature, made it wholly His own. But you can go further, and should invite your students to go further, especially your older students. Just think what it must have been to the Man, Christ, to know that He was God—because He had to embrace the knowledge of His own Godhead with a human intellect, a human intellect like ours. And He had to respond to it with human emotions, human emotions like ours. Try to make them see the thing as a kind of psychological challenge to them—that they should see Our Lord not as a doctrine but as a Person.

Take again—as a sort of combination of being soaked in dogma and soaked in New Testament—the famous objection of the street corner heckler to the infallibility of the Pope, that "Christ called Peter Satan." In our early years on the platform, we gave a thoroughly unsatisfactory answer to the question, an answer we had got out of the books. Our answer was this: Christ did say to St. Peter: "Get thee behind me, Satan"; but, we said, the context explains it. Our Lord had told the Apostles that He must go to Jerusalem to suffer and die. Peter, out of his love for our Lord, begged Him not to do so, and our Lord then said to Peter: "Get thee behind me, Satan"; and we explained that the word Satan means tempter and that Peter, out of love of our Lord, was tempting Him not to go through His suffering. And all this was very much to Peter's credit. That was our explanation and it never satisfied the crowd. Why? Because we had explained the words, but we had not explained the violence of the words. Satan does mean a tempter, but Satan means Satan: our Lord knew it, and Peter knew it, and it was a scarifying thing for our Lord to have said to Peter. Why the vehemence, if that was all? Go forward to the Agony in the Garden and you see more profoundly. Our Lord asks His Father the very thing that Peter had suggested to Him. "Don't make Me go through with this suffering." And our Lord feels the anguish of it, so that the sweat runs off like blood. Now, that sweat as of blood is the measure of the temptation that Peter is exposing our Lord to, when he begged Him not to suffer and die. And once you see the sweat as of blood, then you understand the vehemence of "Get thee behind me, Satan."

Take one other example. You can remind your students how every life is fed by its own kind, and cannot otherwise be fed. If you want to feed your bodies, you must persuade some animal to part with a little of its body—some cow to sacrifice a steak, a lamb to sacrifice a chop. The body has to be fed upon matter. If you want to feed your minds, it is no good offering them chops: they must be fed on minds, you must find someone with a richer mind and either by getting him to talk to you, or by reading the book he has written, you feed your mind on his mind, and your mind grows in richness. But there is another life—the supernatural life—and our Lord said that this life is Himself: "I am the Life."—If there is a life that is Christ, and if every life must be fed upon its like, the only food for a life which is Christ is the Food which is Christ. And so you get the Blessed Sacrament.

Providing a Mental Framework for Reality

A most useful way with the class, when you have done your uttermost to help them see what the doctrine is in itself, is to get them to show, both to you and themselves in one act, what it would mean if the dogma were not there. Get them to search their minds with absolute honesty to see what it would mean to themselves if this thing were not so, then to generalize and see what it would mean to mankind. Get them thinking about it, and talking about it. Of course, in almost every dogma class, the major part of the talking should be done by the pupils, guided by the teacher. It is a great thing to get them accustomed to talking easily, freely, and as the most natural thing in the world, upon Religion. It will stand them in good stead, when they go out into the world, if they have acquired this habit. And it will do an immense amount for a world which is perishing for the want of the very truths we could bring, if only we would learn to utter them, if only we would learn to say even a little of what we see. As part of this, children should be encouraged to raise the difficulties that occur to their minds. They have not always been much encouraged in this matter. Take the child who suddenly asks "Who made God?" Boys have told me what happened. Either they were punished for irreverence or they were wept over. They should, of course, have been rewarded, because they were using their minds on one of the great truths.

One way and another, what all this comes to is this: you are trying to give them a mental framework for reality, in which they can live healthily and grow in knowledge and love. They are going out into the world, and they are going to have all sorts of vital experiences which will test the framework—not simply intellectual objections against the Faith, but the sufferings and temptations which no one can avoid.

We must do all that lies in us to see that the framework is so strong and so true that none of life's experiences will ever succeed in smashing through it. The mark of a true framework is that it is stronger for the testing.

 

Editor's Note: In the July 2001 issue of The Angelus we will conclude this article by discussing Mr. Sheed's four-point framework: what God is, what man is, what Christ is, and what union is.

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Frank Sheed was a world-renowned street corner evangelist, lecturer and writer. He and his wife Maisie Ward (herself an acclaimed Catholic author) founded Sheed & Ward publishing house, which printed some of the greatest integrally Catholic literature in America from the 1930's through the 1960's.