A Rant

I went to my little brother's first Confession a couple weeks ago. On the way into the church, I said to him, "Ready, Henry? Do you know your Act of Contrition?" "No," he said, "they said it was going to be written on a sheet for us so that we didn't have to memorize it." And then last night, I asked Henry and Julia if they ever had to recite prayers by themselves at school. Did the teacher ever test them on it? No, but sometimes the kids who goof around at prayer have to say the prayers by themselves. But only in Kindergarten. Could they recite the Our Father? The Hail Mary? What's grace? What's the Eucharist? What happens to someone's soul at Baptism? What's a Sacrament? Who made you? Why did he make you? Many times, Catholic children can't answer these questions or even recite the simplest prayers. Why aren't they taught these things?

I think it's because so many Catholic teachers and parents are eager for their kids to have a personal relationship with God...to have him as a Friend and a Father. To love him! They don't want to bore their children by making them memorize things they don't understand. They don't want to make studying God distasteful. They want their children to fall in love. Knowing your Baltimore Catechism isn't the same thing as knowing God intimately. You can know tons of things about people without actually knowing them personally or loving them, but that's not enough. If you really want to know someone, you have to speak to them, get to know them. And it's like this with God, too. (Fr. Barron from Youtube has such a great video about this that I just have to post the link. Watch it PLEASE!) Knowing your Catechism is not enough. It's not the end.

....but it's the beginning! It's indispensable! You can know lots of things about someone without actually knowing them, but you can't, can't, can't know someone intimately and know nothing about them! It doesn't work that way! Whenever you meet someone, begin to know someone, you say, "What's your name? Where do you go to school? How old are you? Have any siblings?" You gather little facts about them, and you begin to know them better and better. If you meet someone and only say, "Gosh, I want to be friends with you," over and over again, you will never get there. That's just a weird and unnatural thing to do. Of course parents want their children to love God, but how can they love him when they don't know him? And how can they know him if they know nothing about him? "Gee willikers, kiddo, you should get to know God. He's really a great guy. He loves you a lot. Really."  "...."

Many parents and teachers neglect the foundations of Catholic education. They're so eager to get to what comes after the bare bones that they just neglect the bare bones. The bones are what give the body structure; the foundation is what the rest of the building rests upon. Frank Sheed says, in his book Theology and Sanity, "A maximum love cannot be obtained with a minimum knowledge." (Or at least that's close; I didn't look it up.)

We need teachers, desperately! We need reason! We need good education! G.K. Chesterton says in the introduction to his book St. Thomas Aquinas that each generation seems to be converted by the saint least like itself. "..each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he is not what the people want, but rather what the people need...Therefore, it is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most....So, as the nineteenth century clutched at the Franciscan romance, precisely because it had neglected romance, so the twentieth century is already clutching at the Thomist rational theology, because it has neglected reason. In a world that was too stolid, Christianity returned in the form of a vagabond; in a world that has grown a great deal too wild, Christianity has returned in the form of a teacher of logic."