Catholic schools

In a thought-provoking if rather depressing address given on Monday night in Ely House, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin made an interesting observation, namely that Irish young people are among the most catechised but least evangelised in Europe.

What can he have meant by this? Possibly that young Irish people know about the Faith but don't have the Faith.

Actually even the notion that Irish youth are heavily catechised is only superficially true. They go through school and receive plenty of religious instruction but curiously many seem to leave school with only the barest knowledge of Christianity. Some don't even know the basics, such as the names of the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity.

Perhaps religious education is suffering from the 'Irish language problem'. It has often been observed that despite 14 years of learning Irish many Irish school-leavers still can't speak the language. It is though there is an in-built resistance to learning either religion or Irish. Mind you, to judge from grade inflation, that is, the phenomenon of giving away marks too easily this may be a problem facing more and more subjects.

On the other hand, there remains among some the suspicion that much religious education material is too light on content. This is something Archbishop Martin ought to investigate. There is an irony here, however, namely that modern RE could be light on content precisely in order to teach young people about the experience of faith and about the importance of having faith and living it, as distinct from simply knowing about the faith.

But if this is the aim, then it has evidently failed for whatever reason because there can be no doubting the fact that Irish young people are not evangelised.

Archbishop Martin also wonders whether parents are sending their children to Catholic schools because they are Catholic, or simply because they are good schools. It's a good question and as he points out, we won't really know until there is genuine school choice.

But even then we may not know because they may still send their children to Catholic schools because they are good schools.

However, if there are fewer Catholic schools in the future then they ought to make more effort to be truly Catholic. When the Church starts to transfer some of its primary schools to other patron bodies it ought to ensure as part of the deal that it is given more control over the curriculum of its remaining schools.

Then the gap between catechetics and evangelisation will have to be closed in earnest. The more people know about the Faith, the more likely they are to have the Faith, and the more they have the Faith, the more they will want to know about it.

Archbishop Martin's talk was very sombre and raised more questions than answers but if in the future Catholic schools are more fully Catholic then the future of Catholicism in Ireland may be brighter than we think.