THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
The problems surrounding the education of children in their religion are vast. I can only sketch out general themes which I have chosen because they seem to me both the most essential and perhaps the most forgotten.
In this type of education, what takes priority is the place of God in the soul of the child and not the place of the child in the life of God. It is about allowing God to possess in the mind of the child–by preparing it for Him–a place where His lights, His counsels, and His inspirations might be received to the point of not only being accepted by the child, but so desired that he will then of his own volition enlarge that place as much as possible by a heartfelt need to open himself to the action of the supernatural. To do this requires that we place God within reach of the child, to make him understand the importance of God in his life now and forever; to give him a need of God even outside of any religious practice; to give him a spontaneous love of God so that he pursues Him willfully even as he is launched into life on his own. It is therefore not first and foremost about religious exercises. It is about creating and strengthening a state of soul through knowledge of doctrine, through the liturgy, through exercises suited to the natural capacities of the child, both in quality and in quantity.
Consequently, what is worthwhile in the eyes of God (as He is the standard and not what is considered worthwhile in the eyes of men) is only such knowledge, liturgy, and exercises which form these dispositions in the child's soul permanently, for an entire life. These dispositions are what will enable the child to find his role in helping forge a generation capable of bringing about an authentically Catholic world, in his home, in his morals, in his business, in his respect for Sunday, in his suffering, in his death, etc. Regardless of the number of religious exercises he has performed–like them or not–during his school years, the only purpose of these exercises must be to form the disposition of perseverance in the conscious life of the child and not to discourage him, let alone drive him away.
If we assess the problem frankly we must agree that in the service of God three things are key: knowledge (or understanding); love; freedom. As long as these three elements are not prayerfully fostered in religious education on a level with the mind, heart, and sensibility of the child, God will not be understood and so will be forgotten; God will not be served and so will be offended; God will not be desired and so will be disdained. This, then, is the crux of the matter: religious education addresses not merely the brain of the child as does mathematics, but rather his nature as man; religious education therefore concerns things that engage the nature of the child, and not strictly his diploma.
Among the things which characterize the nature of a child are his power of attraction and his need for independence. What is boring repels the child and makes him hate it. What forces the attention of the child automatically exasperates him and creates an antipathy. These problems are resolved by organizing religious education under the trademark of quality, but never the trademark of quantity. Quality engages our nature while sheer quantity stifles it. A student puts up with the quantity of academic studies because at the end of them shines the quality of the diploma obtained. In religious education, however, there is nothing to be waited for. Instead, the nature and the conscience of the child themselves increase in quality more and more day to day.
This end is to be achieved concretely under the two aspects of education in religion, that of duties to God and of personal generosities. The aspect of duties flows from the rights of God over us and from the respect due to the body and soul He gave us. These duties are outlined for us by the commandments of God and the Church, Mass on Sunday and Holy Days, our Easter duty, and the practice of charity towards our neighbor. The aspect of personal generosities is that enthusiasm to add to duty-bound obligatory homage one's free and spontaneous homage by such things as weekday Mass, supplementary prayers, voluntary sacrifices, and broader apostolic activities.
When educators discuss duties with children, they must concentrate their attention on the duties owed to God, even if at the expense of supererogatory ["added-on" practices as opposed to obligatory practices–Ed.] practices, for this is the mind of the Church. But the duties owed to God must be discussed creatively and attractively: 1) by the intelligent presentation of their importance; 2) by the detailed explanation of their exigencies and the virtuous attraction which they contain; 3) by the preoccupation with seeing them respected, and with gaining the free consent of the child.
To "educate" means leading the child to do without the educator by instilling the certitude that his own freedom will take up and continue even better those things which the educator has explained, taught, and taught to love. Before all else our Catholic children must be formed in devotion to duty, though they must be intelligent–not blind–in performing their duties and know that they are means to an end and not an end in themselves. For instance, it is not assisting at Mass which saves; it is knowing why we assist at it and, knowing why, desiring to assist; desiring it, loving to assist. Out of 52 Masses of the year, how many work our salvation?...how many for which I will stand in judgment?
Children must learn the quality of their religious duties by having instilled in them a love for Him to Whom they are dutiful. No tacked-on, arbitrary duties. All duty calls for the love of duty; all love presupposes the knowledge of what we love. Religious duty is not something whose measure we determine ourselves; it is something which we discover, learn to appreciate, and learn to love. These duties come from God through His Church and it is God who has measured out their practical quantity; we are therefore already certain, without adding or subtracting anything from this divine measure, that we are performing a work of education in harmony with our nature and, by its harmony, a work full of the promise of success.
In the practice of duty, however, the quality of the act may be compromised by excess or defect. For example, it is an excess for liturgy to be unnecessarily drawn out, or a defect when it is sabotaged by the thoughtless manner in which it is celebrated or assisted at. I could tell you about an evening prayer in a parish church at which the boys of the local Catholic school were obliged to assist and formed the majority in attendance, during which all present conscientiously dropped off to sleep. I assisted at the prayer myself just to see. Here is what it included:
- Compline
- Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus
- A 15-decade rosary
- Numerous ejaculations
- Adoro Te Devote
- Salve Regina
- Tantum Ergo...
And with this, we expect children to love our Lord?! An exaggerated liturgy, songs dripping with sentimentality, slumping adults, Benediction drawn out in the extreme and of a frequency which takes away from the child all desire for it...? Let me repeat word for word the commentary of one little girl: "Forget prayers when I'm on vacation...the ones at school are already long enough!" The length of the liturgy should be measured according to how a child perceives length. We have to get it through our heads that the practice of religious duties has for its primary and essential consequence the awakening in us of the desire to return, which presupposes that the child is attracted to this duty. A religious exercise perfectly executed leaves us ready for the next one. Likewise, we need to be aware that the two great enemies of duty in religious education are privation and oversaturation.
Good habits and the taste for a thing are only acquired by acts and by acts that are repeated. A child deprived of religious exercises will not have, later on, any reason to begin. We are therefore not to eliminate what God expects, but rather to eliminate what God does not expect. On the other hand, a child who is oversaturated will have every reason to stop. I could tell you the story of a certain general of the French army responding to Fr. Delor, O.P., during the First World War: "Fr. Chaplain, I went to so many compulsory Masses at school that I think I might take the liberty of skipping Sunday Mass." I could also cite the following commentary by one of my soldiers before we parted, after having been through the entire war together: "Fr. Chaplain, I thank you for never nagging me about the Faith and religious practice. That is the reason why I am rethinking the question today."
It is a delicate ideal we must pray to achieve for our children. We must be careful that when inspiring in our children the notion to "please our Lord" we don't insist to the point of indiscretion in pushing them into the confessional or toward Communion! This reminds me of the answer a patient gave to me one day from his hospital bed, "I received Extreme Unction to please Sister." I much prefer the wise principal of a high school, zealous to respect the freedom of conscience of his young men, who organized Sunday Masses in such a way that he could already be sure a few of them would not receive Communion, in order to encourage the timid to stay in their place rather than go to the rail simply out of human respect.
Perhaps you ask the question, "To the duty which is absolutely indispensable in forging a generation–by which I mean a duty understood, loved, and desired–do we need to add supererogatory (non-obligatory) practices?" To the extent these practices have a formational value reinforcing in the child the practice of his duty to completion and spontaneously because of his own personal desire to do so, I answer yes; otherwise I answer no. As regards supererogatory practices, only honest desire for them is able to bring merit and fecundity to them. In good theology, is it honoring God, is it pleasing Him, to bring young souls before Him by force to make them assist at supplementary Masses, Benedictions, and Ways of the Cross, like the indifferent bystanders at Calvary, at the risk, later, of transforming them into executioners? I could tell you about one boy folding his daily paper to the shape of his missal and spending that obligatory Mass reading about the sports page. I could tell you about another one preparing his composition in the chapel during a religious exercise he was forced to attend. Is it our role to stand guard over the children in church as we cause them to offend God? Once again, God takes primacy over us, over our points of view, over our methods. Let's be frank with ourselves.
We only benefit from a ceremony if God benefits from it first by respect and by love, and filling up the chapels of our schools by force during the week would seem the surest means of emptying the churches of our parishes. Ceremonies that bore us will tomorrow be ceremonies neglected. A personal exercise implies that we want to add to the obligatory homage the spontaneous homage of our heart. Worship of this kind calls into play a child's liberty of conscience. You will never convince me that we "form" the conscience of a child, in the philosophical sense of the word, by dunking him into a tub of holy water! Certainly, the educator has a duty concerning these practices. He ought to organize them together with a small number of freely consenting students. He suggests, proposes, and sparks desire, but never insists. I remember an all-night adoration spontaneously requested by an entire troop of Catholic girl scouts during a retreat at which I had taken care to avoid as much as possible any supererogatory religious exercises. There was the proof for me that to obtain much we have to keep well away from forcing anything.
Yet, the facts are there, cruel, stark, and terrible. In spite of the indisputable devotion of our schools, in spite of the skill of our schoolteachers, catechism teachers, and parents, society continues to decline and the forces of perversion are winning out over the forces of Christianization. What do our graduates become once they are launched in life? I dare to pose the following questions:
- What is the percentage of students who continue to practice the Faith?
- What is the percentage of students who have understood the reasons to continue to practice it?
- What is the percentage of those who give absolute priority to God in their family and social life?
- What is the percentage of those who no longer practice at all?
- What is the percentage of those who do not teach their children to practice because their upbringing left them bitter?
- What is the percentage of those who have apostatized?
- What is the percentage of those who have become vaguely anti-clerical? actively anti-clerical? officially anti-clerical?
Admittedly, all sorts of alien and dangerous influences bombard the mystery of the conscience and diminish the responsibility of our graduates, but is a diminution of responsibility the same as entirely eliminating it? First caution: when I consider the enormous role of individual freedom in the question of education in religion, I cannot rush to condemn the education given when, in fact, the fault may lie in the manner in which it was received; too easily students seize upon or exaggerate any errors of method to excuse their infidelity, even their apostasy. The duty of the school is to avoid as many mistakes as possible in order to give the least possible handle to a nefarious tendency toward criticism in the young, often all too eager to interpret religious education to the benefit of their excessively temporal tastes. There is room for methods to evolve with the times. A second caution: the religious education given in our schools is too often the least of parents' concerns, and the family, which ought to complete this education by its example, its approval, and its cooperation, shows no interest since a diploma is not offered nor endangered. For too many parents the order of values is reversed: there is bodily health, worldly success, intellectual success, and–last on the list–supernatural success.
Well, what is my conclusion? Do I advocate a restriction to the bare minimum of religious exercises in our schools? I answer by proposing an excellent experiment: would a school at which the obligatory religious duties are fulfilled to intellectual, moral, and material perfection, with nothing supererogatory, ensure greater perseverance and greater devotion to the cause of God later in life? Would it give rise to spontaneous–and therefore meritorious–practices, not collective but individual?
Out of two schools, one of them piling on devotions, novenas, Ways of the Cross, and the other developing understanding, love, and preparation for religious duty, which would yield souls thirsty for God, resolute fighters, and noble characters? I would like to see the experiment performed but I can already foresee drawing the following conclusions:
- Whatever inscribes the supernatural in the nature of the child by dint of sympathy, attraction, and admiration of that nature for the process of education, is much closer to the goal (than the method of accumulated checklisted practices) by the quality which it yields.
- Whatever is wearisome at school is rejected by students when they are away from school.
- What is done under constraint and by force at school, without attraction of conscience, is abandoned at home.
Families are not exempt from the grave duty of reinforcing at home the religious education received at school by their example, by religious exercises well understood and made a part of life, by their refusals, and by their respect. For a child, nothing can take the place of parents who are profoundly Catholic, upon whose religious attitudes he will model his own, drawn as he is by the open, healthy, and balanced atmosphere which he breathes at school, and happily content with the reasonableness of the measure with which he is initiated into loving God without measure.
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