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Introduction
I will digress here from “In Anticipation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church” to share a bit of my experience in religious education in the 1970s-1990s. The examples I provide below illustrate not exceptions to religious education as I experienced it but rather the norm. They are shared not with the intention of criticizing individuals but to alert people to evils of religious education done badly. I would like to think and hope that all those who led and participated in catechetical programs meant well. But even so, ignorance, pride, immaturity, jealousy, retribution—and any other of the myriad failings we sinners participate in to greater or lesser degrees—can twist our behavior to do more harm than good at times. I believe that happened in too many cases in religious education. I also believe that in recognizing that and in guarding against it, we can develop catechetical programs that are more worthy of the subject matter they are designed to hand on. A good place to start is for catechists to put in the effort to learn about the Catholic Faith before they put themselves forward to teach the Catholic Faith. Having done that, it is also essential to remember that no matter how intelligent one is, and how much time and effort one puts in to learning, and how much one knows, one must beware the intellectual pride that is all too prevalent among those who think they know about the Church and her teachings. One must always remember that what one knows is infinitesimal compared to what one does not know.
All that physical work—besides developing the impressive biceps that I marveled at as a young boy when I sat next to him at the table—along with his intellectual pursuits and an insatiable sense of wonder, helped to make my father into the well-rounded man who would appreciate the need for solid catechesis to live a good and abundant life.
Catechetical Background
My father, James (Jim) Ritzer was committed to religious education. Born in 1931, he was raised with the Baltimore Catechism and, as a young man, competed in Baltimore Catechism quiz-team contests for his Knights of Columbus council. He also attended, through the Knights of Columbus, annual three-day silent retreats, offered by the Jesuits, from the time he was seventeen years old until well into his later years. And I think, when he started attending those retreats as a teenager, he attended with his father. Still, developing a scholastic education did not come easy for my dad. His father, my grandfather, had dropped out of school in seventh grade, if I remember right. Grandpa told me that he had seen, out the window, his friend walking away from school and had asked the sister who taught his class where he was going. She answered that his friend was going home and that he ought to leave too. So he did, and he never went back. Some years later, a college rowing coach saw him working as a landscaper and told him he had one of the best physiques he had ever seen and that he could get him a scholarship to row at the college. He replied, “I’ve got work to do,” and went back to his digging. An intelligent, knowledgeable, and insightful man who read a great deal, attended Latin Mass every Sunday, and daily prayed the rosary, Grandpa might have agreed with Mark Twain that he never let schooling interfere with his education.
And Grandpa might have kept schooling from interfering with my dad’s education too, had he had his way. He introduced my dad to landscaping at a young age. From the time Dad was in third grade, around 1940, he would go out and “shovel dirt” with his father after school until it got dark. Then they would go home and eat supper, and then he would go to bed. School was given a low priority. “Homework,” Dad once said, “there was no time for homework.” Grandpa wanted to make Dad a partner in the business when he was fifteen year old. Dad hated having to tell men far older than he what to do. He once said that he joined the army to get away from home. Decades later, when a friend with a successful family business suggested that Dad start a business so he could have jobs for all the kids, he responded that he had spent half of his life trying to get away from a family business. He said that one of the things he liked most about the army was that he did not have to tell anyone what to do; he could just take orders. Still, that only lasted so long, because he was promoted to the rank of master sergeant.
Dad’s first foray into higher education landed him at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota—which his father expected him to do in his spare time outside of his full-time landscaping work—until he dropped out and joined the army. The philosophy and theology courses he took during his time at St. Thomas made a lasting impression on him. He later enrolled at the University of Minnesota and completed a degree in agronomy with a minor in art after he had married and had his first two children. Four or five years later, in 1966, he left the family landscaping business again—and he and my mother turned their farm, their equity in it, and its mortgage over to the family business—and, starting over from scratch, he took a job in another state as a landscape architect.
So, when Dad was in his mid thirties, he left physical labor for a creative desk job, but one that allowed him to get out into the field now and then to check on how his plans were being implemented. And he still continued to do physical work in the many projects he undertook in remodeling and refurbishing our Victorian house built in 1910. He came to that task with no little experience. He had worked with his father on such projects including digging out, with shovels, and pouring a basement under the family home. He had designed and built his own house when he was in his mid-twenties, all by himself but for some help with the electrical. In fact, he had been sued by the city for plumbing the house without a plumber, but since the work met code and passed inspection he was only sued fifteen dollars. With such experience under his belt, he went to work on our family home. He tore off both front and back porches and built better ones, moved the kitchen to a different room, bumped out the north wall of the house to create a bay of windows, built a recreation room in the basement, replumbed and rewired the house, dug out by hand the back yard and laid out and poured a patio, and shouldered countless other projects. He even considered tearing down the garage and building another, so that he could use the cherry wood of which it was constructed to make furniture. And throughout all of his projects, he maintained the original character of the house, for instance in using maple flooring that he had removed in one project to fashion a countertop in one of the bathrooms.
We continued to watch, indeed were almost incapable of tearing our eyes from the spectacle, as the presenter repeatedly yelled her message while the crowd of late-middle-aged women and at least one man shouted, jumped up and down waving their arms, and moved about in any way that could interfere in this communication
I helped my dad with many if not most of the projects from the time I was young. In fact, I was one of the very few people on the face of the planet that my dad, a perfectionist craftsman, trusted with a paint brush. (My mother enjoyed no such distinction. In fact, I believe even the idea of my mother painting disturbed my father’s very equilibrium in no small measure. On one occasion when I was painting dark-stained cupboards the first coat of a light beige, my parents came in to see how it looked. My mother pronounced it complete and left the room as my father suppressed a grin and gave me a knowing look before he left. I covered it with three more coats.) All that physical work—besides developing the impressive biceps that I marveled at as a young boy when I sat next to him at the table—along with his intellectual pursuits and an insatiable sense of wonder, helped to make my father into the well-rounded man who would appreciate the need for solid catechesis to live a good and abundant life. And that man would naturally recognize the importance of sharing that catechesis for the benefit of others.
Once settled into his new life, Dad put his knowledge of theology and philosophy to work as a volunteer catechist. A priest once reminisced to me about how, when he had been a young assistant pastor at our parish, my parents and several other couples had made up a great team of catechists. I remember how, when my siblings and I were young, our parents held religious education classes at our house and how we would try to sneak a peek, on our way to bed, at all the high-school kids who would gather in our double living room. My mom would credit our dad when she told us how other catechists would be amazed that certain students would attend Mom and Dad’s religious education classes, because when they had been assigned to their classes they had not shown up. Dad believed in teaching substance, no gimmicks. He encouraged questioning and seeking the truth, confident that both would lead one to the Catholic Faith. In our family, he would always challenge us to think critically and would often cite the Baltimore Catechism, Scripture, Church teaching, canon law, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, and other saints and theologians.
With a family of seven children, my parents had plenty on their plates, and so my mother dropped out of teaching religious education. She also made the case to my dad that he should cut back on some of his volunteering so that he could spend more time at home. Dad had been volunteering as the president of the parish council, with the Knights of Columbus, with the St. Vincent de Paul Society, as a catechist, with an organization called the Foresters, with the city historical society, as a lector at church, to name but a few things. He cut it all back to mainly concentrate on two things: the Knights of Columbus and teaching religious education. And thus, he could be found on Sunday evenings at the dining-room table poring through Scripture, catechisms, theological works, church documents, and other sources, planning his religious education class for Wednesday night.
After Dad had been teaching religious education for some thirty years, my mother let him know that she thought he had taught long enough and that he should step out of the way to let others do their share. Dad had two reactions. One was: “You’re never done.” He believed that one has a lifelong obligation to keep giving of oneself that never ends as long as one draws breath. Second, he said that when he showed up to teach religious education—far from the days when men, women, and couples taught—he was the only male catechist there. He said that if he were not there, all the catechists would be women. “What does that teach all the boys who are there?” he would ask. And then he would answer, “That religion is for women.” He felt that even if he were the only man there, he needed to be there. (I just have to wonder to what degree contraception, and the entire culture of death, plays a part in men abandoning their essential role of handing on the Faith to their children. Contraception emasculates men as it defeminizes women, killing the most profound communion and responsibilities of marriage in rejection of fertility and unity, turning spouses, and sexuality itself, into mere playthings and robbing the participants of true adulthood and indeed of their very humanity with a subtlety worthy of its diabolical origin. See “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death.”)
Consequently, the catechesis that should have steeped its participants in at least the basics of Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium, sacraments, saints, and church history was supplanted by a distraction of games, nonsense, silliness, childishness, and a “bag of tricks.”
My siblings and I attended the Catholic school in town up through eighth grade and then attended the public high school (from which I graduated in 1979), which I thought was a good balance. Regardless, there was no Catholic high school in town, so that was not an option. On Wednesday evenings we attended religious education at our parish. I have no memories of learning anything about the Catholic Faith at those classes. I remember playing volleyball and having rap sessions and little else. I told my dad I did not want to attend any more because it was a waste of my time. He told me that he understood but that he wanted me to continue attending to support the religious education program, which he thought was so important. Out of respect for him, I continued to attend. Had I had more sense, I would have attended his class, where something was actually taught and learned, rather than avoid it because he was my dad and I was a teenager.
That was part of the context of religious education for me. I first volunteered as a religious-education teacher while in high school and did so in different places as I got older. I later taught middle-school religion as well as English and history and geography at a Catholic school. After completing a masters in theology, I took a job as a director of religious education in 1991, and entered into what catechesis had devolved into since my father was the last man standing in his parish program. The religious-education programs like the one I directed were led by either a director of religious education (DRE) or a coordinator of religious education (CRE). As I remember it, the distinction was that DREs had degrees in theology or a related field, and CREs did not. The programs relied on volunteer catechists. We were supported in various ways by the diocese. Additionally, our parish was one of five regional parishes that collaborated on various things including matters of religious education. I was in my early thirties at the time, and the catechetical leaders of the other four parishes were all women about in their mid-forties or so, three CREs and one DRE, as I remember it, who had worked together for several years.
To give some sense of my experience as a director of religious education in the early to mid 1990s, I share the following memories:
Experience as a DRE
Catechist’s Bag of Tricks
For the training of catechists, the diocese had developed an impressive outline that consisted of ten topics. I do not remember all of them but they included the fundamentals like Old Testament, New Testament, Sacraments, and Church History. For each of the ten topics, trainers were to present two hours of instruction on that topic, to add up to twenty hours of training altogether.
The catechetical leaders of the five parishes judiciously concluded that we would collaborate on catechist training. I suggested that each of the five parishes take two of the ten topics and prepare the two-hour training for each of them. The director or coordinator could prepare and present the training, or the parish could choose someone else to do so and bear whatever cost that might entail. Then each semester, each parish could offer one or both of their two topics either in a gathering at one parish or in separate gatherings at each of the five parishes to which all catechists from the five parishes would be invited to take whichever of the presentations they wished. That would accommodate all ten topics being presented each semester or each year. If each catechist attended just one presentation each semester, he would have completed the entire training in five years.
I often wondered, when I considered such examples as those described above or inservices of the same ilk that I experienced while teaching at Catholic schools, what respectable priests, given their level of education and maturity, would think if they were required to attend such presentations and be subjected to such fare.
Instead the other four catechetical leaders, at the urging of the two who may have been the least qualified among us, decided that we would give one presentation for the catechists of all five parishes, and it would be called “Catechist’s Bag of Tricks.” As I sat in a dissociative state, all-too-familiar in such meetings, the other catechetical leaders devoted most of the rest of the preparation to how we could make centerpieces for each of the tables out of paper bags filled with “tricks” as in various little toys.
Given my years of experience with religious education, I was not surprised by this development but nonetheless sick at heart. Here we were, members of the Catholic Church founded upon Peter and the Apostles by none other than Jesus Christ himself with all its riches like Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium, Apostolic Succession, liturgies, patristics, theology, history, and on and on, with myriad saints like Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieu, and we were talking about “catechist’s bag of tricks” and table centerpieces. Had we cooperated to offer a substantial catechist training, we still would have been only scratching the surface of the eternal richness of the Catholic Faith that stretches off into infinity. One could spend his entire life studying one tiny aspect of the Catholic Faith, and still just be scratching the surface, and yet we were not even going to be attempting to scratch that surface.
I floated through this preparation and the event itself as if through some out-of-body experience in which I was required to participate but was utterly incapable of being a part. In addition I felt a certain degree of responsibility, apprehension, and guilt about catechists from my parish attending the event. A day-care director whom I knew—who had long been away from the Church but was edging back toward it and had signed up to be a catechist at one of the other parishes as part of the volunteer work that would help her get her son into its school—was in attendance. As the “training” had worn on, I had caught glimpses of her and had seen in her expression that same mixture of bewilderment, wonder, disbelief, consternation, and vexation that I had regularly experienced at such “religious-education” events. Therefore, I was not at all surprised when she approached me at the end of the event and, barely able to contain her fury, locked her wide eyes on mine and seethed, “I got a baby sitter for this!” Head down, I muttered, “I know, I know,” as she stormed away. I was in complete agreement with her about the waste of time and the insult to hers and other’s maturity and intelligence, but what further impressed itself upon me was that the attendees had not only been deprived of a presentation of the richness of the Catholic Faith but had, in its name—and in silly, vapid, nonsensical blather—been subjected to a misrepresentation of what catechesis truly ought to be. Paradise lost, maybe not; but opportunity lost, profoundly. And incalculable damage done, however casually accomplished.
Running Interference
On another occasion, I attended with other leaders of parish catechetical programs, a workshop on how to give Confirmation retreats presented by a catechetical director who was considered something of a guru on the topic. After being instructed on how to stage various games that were supposed to be all the rage with high-schoolers (though I would not have expected third graders to participate in them), we arrived at the pinnacle of such games “Running Interference.” And we were all invited to stand and gather in a space cleared in front of the presenter. I could not bring myself to join the group and enjoyed a rare sense of silent camaraderie with a fellow catechetical leader when a quietly dignified Native-American woman seated across from me also refrained from participating.
It was just plain creepy that catechetical leaders would want to—and think they had some kind of right to—invade a young person psychologically and spiritually, and then actually attempt to do so after wearing down the child’s natural defenses against it.
Without a word to each other, we sat and watched as one person was chosen from the crowd to stand against the back wall with the crowd between the presenter and her. Then the others were informed that the presenter was going to try to communicate a message to the person at the back of the room, and all those in the crowd that stood between the presenter and the woman in the back, should do all that they could to make sure the message did not get through. Then the bedlam commenced. We continued to watch, indeed were almost incapable of tearing our eyes from the spectacle, as the presenter repeatedly yelled her message while the crowd of late-middle-aged women and at least one man shouted, jumped up and down waving their arms, and moved about in any way that could interfere in this communication. One person turned the lights off and on, which later drew high praise from the presenter for its originality and ingenuity. As the participants, flushed from their recent exertions, returned to their seats, the presenter explained that this was how it was with our relationship with God, who is continually trying to communicate with us while the world continually throws up all kinds of interference to keep the message from getting through.
I leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions.
Musical Chairs
At another training of religious education leaders, we were taught yet more games that were supposed to instruct high schoolers in religious education. One game, taught by a former religious sister, a variation on musical chairs, had male and female students circle around, while music played, a group of too-few chairs. When the music stopped they were to sit on the chairs. But those who did not find chairs were not put out of the game, as was the custom, but were instead instructed to sit on another person who had managed to sit in a chair. Here we were being instructed to have high-school students, boys and girls, randomly sit on each others’ laps. I believe the idea was that it would help break down barriers. Indeed, I suspected it would. The glaring impropriety was completely lost on those leading the training.
Pictionary
The five parishes also presented a program on human sexuality. I asked my pastor to excuse our program from participating in it. He denied the request. (I successfully insisted on our not participating the following years.) Thus our parish’s program would be included. While the catechetical leaders from the five parishes were planning the sexuality program, I heard from each of them that their parents had not taught them about sexuality. They shared stories about how their parents had avoided doing so and about the awkward and inadequate ways they had been left to learn about it instead. I shared that my parents had instructed us age-appropriately about sexuality as we had grown up, and that when we were approaching puberty, my dad had explained the biology of sexuality in the context of Catholic morality to us boys as my mother had to the girls. The other leaders respectfully marveled at that.
A digression within this digression: One area in which even responsible, mature parents and educators were deficient in our generation, was teaching where to stop. During the catechism gap, television programming that represented the popular culture evolved from Leave It to Beaver, The Andy Griffith Show, My Three Sons, and The Dick Van Dyke Show to Happy Days at the wholesome end of the spectrum. And if Happy Days (laughably voted “Greatest Show in the History of Television”) taught anything, it was that dates were for “making out,” with no clear boundaries indicated. Much of the rest of television and film during the catechism gap made it clear that there were no boundaries, and that sex before marriage was “fun” and exciting, and normal, with no attention given to the multitude of detrimental consequences like out-of-wedlock pregnancy, abortion, sexually-transmitted diseases, psychological and spiritual trauma even to the point of spiritual death in mortal sin. The promoters of the sexual revolution were not there to pick up the pieces of lives shattered by fornication. In such an environment, young Catholics wondered and discussed with their peers how far it was appropriate to go within a spectrum that ranged from holding hands to the very threshold of intercourse, with none too few finding that once the threshold was reached it was all too easy to fall over it. Not a few Catholic couples who believed that sexual intercourse outside of marriage was wrong found themselves at the altar with a baby on the way. It was not until I was in my thirties that I heard Molly Kelly set the line at affection, be it in something like holding hands or a kiss, making it clear that arousal properly belonged within the bodily and spiritual communion of marriage. Now that made sense, expressing affection without moving into arousal, a worthy guideline for one endeavoring to practice chastity. It was not about where to stop but about not getting started in the first place.
They had not grown up in the catechism gap; they did not know the deep hunger and need of the generation that had been deprived because of it.
The program that the parishes produced drew, for the most part, from programs of previous years, so that I, as a newbie, was allowed to observe more than participate. I cannot recall all that I observed, but as usual, games were the order of the day. In one game I remember, students were required to draw cards from a deck that described a morally challenging situation in which teens might find themselves. Then they were to discuss what they thought about it. Never in the process was there any Catholic morality applied to indicate what would be the appropriate way of handling the situation. They would talk about it, share their opinions, however well or poorly informed, and then they would move on. Thus did this sexuality program instruct young people in the detrimental art of moral relativism.
But then there was Pictionary, a knockoff of the popular game of that name. Here—we were to understand, according to the snickering catechetical leaders—was the game that would really break down barriers. (You must understand that breaking down barriers was all too often the goal of such approaches to religious education.) To play this game, students were paired with their parents and gathered into small groups. Then they would take turns having one of each pair pick a card and draw what was described on the card while the other tried to guess what it was. The cards described various things sexual including genitalia. Forgive me for thinking that parents can have mature and responsible conversations with their children about human sexuality without drawing explicit pictures in a game with several strangers sitting around a table. If you agree with that, you would have fit in no better than I did in the “catechetical” setting in which I found myself.
Lock-ins
And there were Lock-ins. Thank God (and I mean that) I managed to escape religious education without ever participating in one of these. As I understood it, lock-ins were events where students were locked in to a school or parish hall or gym or some such building with catechetical leaders and chaperones, and then they would—you guessed it—play games, maybe watch popular movies (many of which were hardly appropriate for Catholic religious education), drink soda pop and eat junk food, and stay up all night without sleep. Apparently this was really the setting in which you could “get the kids to talk,” when they were sleep deprived and strung out on sugar and caffeine. Because, as I heard often enough, that was the real purpose of religious education, to get the kids to talk, to get them to lay open the most private parts of their inner selves in the midst of all their peers, under pressure to do so, while all were temporarily given to feeling sensitive to one and all. Never mind that those encouraging, indeed manipulating, this divulging were not priests, counselors, psychologists, or psychiatrists. Never mind that at least some of the peers to whom these teenagers were coerced to divulge their deepest selves would be shortly reverting from their momentary sanctity to the kind of cruelty that adolescents can visit upon each other. Never mind that normal young people, who had been compelled to reveal to the group things most private, would leave the event with an unsettling sense of being violated. Never mind any of that. These catechetical leaders knew that their role was to get these kids to spill their guts to themselves and their peers, sinners all, with no consideration of the impropriety of it or of the harm that could be caused by it.
Get the Kids to Talk
The “get the kids to talk” thing always struck me, in my core, as inherently wrong. It brought to mind interrogators in Communist regimes I had read about, who would manipulate prisoners into a relationship with their very torturers. It just struck me as so perverse, indeed, diabolical. It was just plain creepy that catechetical leaders would want to—and think they had some kind of right to—invade a young person psychologically and spiritually, and then actually attempt to do so after wearing down the child’s natural defenses against it. We recognize the evil of adults violating children’s bodies; why would we then allow adults to violate their minds and souls? It is one thing if a young person seeks out an adult whom they have come to trust to share private matters (and even then there should be guardrails), but they should never be coerced to do so. And it is strikes me as wrong even among adults. I remember one time many years later and many miles away, when, though I usually avoid them, I participated in a men’s program at our parish that was surprisingly pretty good. But at one session, after the presentation, the participants were instructed to, in their small groups, share personal experiences about the topic. Though I was not the small-group leader, I immediately said to my group of great guys, that before we started, no one should feel any kind of compulsion to share anything that he was not comfortable sharing, that the Church recognizes the propriety of privacy in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and that we should abide by that same propriety. Our leader was grateful that I had said something, and others in the group indicated that they were relieved of a sense of compulsion to share something they might have later regretted having shared.
Not only do catechists and all others now have the Catechism of the Catholic Church available to inform and enable them to hand on authentic Catholic teaching, they also have it available to challenge erroneous teaching, much to the chagrin of those who would subvert authentic teaching, of whom there were and are far too many inside and outside the Church.
Conclusion
I often wondered, when I considered such examples as those described above or inservices of the same ilk that I experienced while teaching at Catholic schools, what respectable priests, given their level of education and maturity, would think if they were required to attend such presentations and be subjected to such fare. It formed in my mind over time that they assiduously kept apart from such events and insulated themselves from such nonsense by no accident. Right or wrong, I had a sense that they knew that there was something just plain weird about the education milieu and those who orchestrated it. And they were right; the education milieu and those who orchestrated it were weird. And destructive, as can be seen in how the disciples of John Dewey, the teachers unions, and the Department of Education have driven down our education system from one of the best in the world to one of the worst. And the incentives, ideologies, and methods used to do so infected Catholic education and catechesis—whether in schools or religious education programs—during the catechism gap by no accident and for no good. Consequently, the catechesis that should have steeped its participants in at least the basics of Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium, sacraments, saints, and church history was supplanted by a distraction of games, nonsense, silliness, childishness, and a “bag of tricks.” I believe that, however well intentioned the catechetical leaders who created and presented the so-called religious education exemplified above, they did more harm than good. Indeed, I believe that that which is exemplified above was not religious education at all but a diabolical counterfeit. And it should be no surprise then that often enough the creators and presenters of that which is exemplified above were hostile to the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church that they resolutely avoided, and hostile to those who believed in it and would teach it, as I can personally attest.
Still there were grounds for hope. While I was directing a religious education program, the Catechism of the Catholic Church was published and promulgated. I was honored to be selected to serve on the diocesan committee for the implementation of the Catechism. There I worked with the auxiliary bishop who chaired the committee, the diocesan director of religious education, the diocesan director of Catholic schools, a parish priest, and another religious education director who was a religious sister. These were mature, intelligent, knowledgeable, kind, and enjoyable individuals who took the implementation of the Catechism seriously. Still, because the next youngest person on the committee was probably at least ten years older than I was, they did not have the perspective I had on the event. I remember them all looking perplexedly at me when I told them all that the Catechism was going to fly off the shelves when it finally came out. They had not grown up in the catechism gap; they did not know the deep hunger and need of the generation that had been deprived because of it. Thus they were surprised as I was not when, after the Catechism was first published in French in 1992, it sold so fast that the bookstores at the Paris airport could not keep the shelves stocked with it. Had it not been published by six (if I remember right) publishers in the United States in 1994, and thus each of their editions counted separately, it would have been the number-one best seller in the U.S. at the time. The Catechism of the Catholic Church closed the catechism gap, and the Catechism remains. Not only do catechists and all others now have the Catechism of the Catholic Church available to inform and enable them to hand on authentic Catholic teaching, they also have it available to challenge erroneous teaching, much to the chagrin of those who would subvert authentic teaching, of whom there were and are far too many inside and outside the Church.
May the Catechism prove a valuable resource for you too.
Thank you,
P. A. Ritzer
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By P. A. RitzerPhoto by Jesus Loves Austin on Unsplash
Introduction
I will digress here from “In Anticipation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church” to share a bit of my experience in religious education in the 1970s-1990s. The examples I provide below illustrate not exceptions to religious education as I experienced it but rather the norm. They are shared not with the intention of criticizing individuals but to alert people to evils of religious education done badly. I would like to think and hope that all those who led and participated in catechetical programs meant well. But even so, ignorance, pride, immaturity, jealousy, retribution—and any other of the myriad failings we sinners participate in to greater or lesser degrees—can twist our behavior to do more harm than good at times. I believe that happened in too many cases in religious education. I also believe that in recognizing that and in guarding against it, we can develop catechetical programs that are more worthy of the subject matter they are designed to hand on. A good place to start is for catechists to put in the effort to learn about the Catholic Faith before they put themselves forward to teach the Catholic Faith. Having done that, it is also essential to remember that no matter how intelligent one is, and how much time and effort one puts in to learning, and how much one knows, one must beware the intellectual pride that is all too prevalent among those who think they know about the Church and her teachings. One must always remember that what one knows is infinitesimal compared to what one does not know.
All that physical work—besides developing the impressive biceps that I marveled at as a young boy when I sat next to him at the table—along with his intellectual pursuits and an insatiable sense of wonder, helped to make my father into the well-rounded man who would appreciate the need for solid catechesis to live a good and abundant life.
Catechetical Background
My father, James (Jim) Ritzer was committed to religious education. Born in 1931, he was raised with the Baltimore Catechism and, as a young man, competed in Baltimore Catechism quiz-team contests for his Knights of Columbus council. He also attended, through the Knights of Columbus, annual three-day silent retreats, offered by the Jesuits, from the time he was seventeen years old until well into his later years. And I think, when he started attending those retreats as a teenager, he attended with his father. Still, developing a scholastic education did not come easy for my dad. His father, my grandfather, had dropped out of school in seventh grade, if I remember right. Grandpa told me that he had seen, out the window, his friend walking away from school and had asked the sister who taught his class where he was going. She answered that his friend was going home and that he ought to leave too. So he did, and he never went back. Some years later, a college rowing coach saw him working as a landscaper and told him he had one of the best physiques he had ever seen and that he could get him a scholarship to row at the college. He replied, “I’ve got work to do,” and went back to his digging. An intelligent, knowledgeable, and insightful man who read a great deal, attended Latin Mass every Sunday, and daily prayed the rosary, Grandpa might have agreed with Mark Twain that he never let schooling interfere with his education.
And Grandpa might have kept schooling from interfering with my dad’s education too, had he had his way. He introduced my dad to landscaping at a young age. From the time Dad was in third grade, around 1940, he would go out and “shovel dirt” with his father after school until it got dark. Then they would go home and eat supper, and then he would go to bed. School was given a low priority. “Homework,” Dad once said, “there was no time for homework.” Grandpa wanted to make Dad a partner in the business when he was fifteen year old. Dad hated having to tell men far older than he what to do. He once said that he joined the army to get away from home. Decades later, when a friend with a successful family business suggested that Dad start a business so he could have jobs for all the kids, he responded that he had spent half of his life trying to get away from a family business. He said that one of the things he liked most about the army was that he did not have to tell anyone what to do; he could just take orders. Still, that only lasted so long, because he was promoted to the rank of master sergeant.
Dad’s first foray into higher education landed him at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota—which his father expected him to do in his spare time outside of his full-time landscaping work—until he dropped out and joined the army. The philosophy and theology courses he took during his time at St. Thomas made a lasting impression on him. He later enrolled at the University of Minnesota and completed a degree in agronomy with a minor in art after he had married and had his first two children. Four or five years later, in 1966, he left the family landscaping business again—and he and my mother turned their farm, their equity in it, and its mortgage over to the family business—and, starting over from scratch, he took a job in another state as a landscape architect.
So, when Dad was in his mid thirties, he left physical labor for a creative desk job, but one that allowed him to get out into the field now and then to check on how his plans were being implemented. And he still continued to do physical work in the many projects he undertook in remodeling and refurbishing our Victorian house built in 1910. He came to that task with no little experience. He had worked with his father on such projects including digging out, with shovels, and pouring a basement under the family home. He had designed and built his own house when he was in his mid-twenties, all by himself but for some help with the electrical. In fact, he had been sued by the city for plumbing the house without a plumber, but since the work met code and passed inspection he was only sued fifteen dollars. With such experience under his belt, he went to work on our family home. He tore off both front and back porches and built better ones, moved the kitchen to a different room, bumped out the north wall of the house to create a bay of windows, built a recreation room in the basement, replumbed and rewired the house, dug out by hand the back yard and laid out and poured a patio, and shouldered countless other projects. He even considered tearing down the garage and building another, so that he could use the cherry wood of which it was constructed to make furniture. And throughout all of his projects, he maintained the original character of the house, for instance in using maple flooring that he had removed in one project to fashion a countertop in one of the bathrooms.
We continued to watch, indeed were almost incapable of tearing our eyes from the spectacle, as the presenter repeatedly yelled her message while the crowd of late-middle-aged women and at least one man shouted, jumped up and down waving their arms, and moved about in any way that could interfere in this communication
I helped my dad with many if not most of the projects from the time I was young. In fact, I was one of the very few people on the face of the planet that my dad, a perfectionist craftsman, trusted with a paint brush. (My mother enjoyed no such distinction. In fact, I believe even the idea of my mother painting disturbed my father’s very equilibrium in no small measure. On one occasion when I was painting dark-stained cupboards the first coat of a light beige, my parents came in to see how it looked. My mother pronounced it complete and left the room as my father suppressed a grin and gave me a knowing look before he left. I covered it with three more coats.) All that physical work—besides developing the impressive biceps that I marveled at as a young boy when I sat next to him at the table—along with his intellectual pursuits and an insatiable sense of wonder, helped to make my father into the well-rounded man who would appreciate the need for solid catechesis to live a good and abundant life. And that man would naturally recognize the importance of sharing that catechesis for the benefit of others.
Once settled into his new life, Dad put his knowledge of theology and philosophy to work as a volunteer catechist. A priest once reminisced to me about how, when he had been a young assistant pastor at our parish, my parents and several other couples had made up a great team of catechists. I remember how, when my siblings and I were young, our parents held religious education classes at our house and how we would try to sneak a peek, on our way to bed, at all the high-school kids who would gather in our double living room. My mom would credit our dad when she told us how other catechists would be amazed that certain students would attend Mom and Dad’s religious education classes, because when they had been assigned to their classes they had not shown up. Dad believed in teaching substance, no gimmicks. He encouraged questioning and seeking the truth, confident that both would lead one to the Catholic Faith. In our family, he would always challenge us to think critically and would often cite the Baltimore Catechism, Scripture, Church teaching, canon law, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, and other saints and theologians.
With a family of seven children, my parents had plenty on their plates, and so my mother dropped out of teaching religious education. She also made the case to my dad that he should cut back on some of his volunteering so that he could spend more time at home. Dad had been volunteering as the president of the parish council, with the Knights of Columbus, with the St. Vincent de Paul Society, as a catechist, with an organization called the Foresters, with the city historical society, as a lector at church, to name but a few things. He cut it all back to mainly concentrate on two things: the Knights of Columbus and teaching religious education. And thus, he could be found on Sunday evenings at the dining-room table poring through Scripture, catechisms, theological works, church documents, and other sources, planning his religious education class for Wednesday night.
After Dad had been teaching religious education for some thirty years, my mother let him know that she thought he had taught long enough and that he should step out of the way to let others do their share. Dad had two reactions. One was: “You’re never done.” He believed that one has a lifelong obligation to keep giving of oneself that never ends as long as one draws breath. Second, he said that when he showed up to teach religious education—far from the days when men, women, and couples taught—he was the only male catechist there. He said that if he were not there, all the catechists would be women. “What does that teach all the boys who are there?” he would ask. And then he would answer, “That religion is for women.” He felt that even if he were the only man there, he needed to be there. (I just have to wonder to what degree contraception, and the entire culture of death, plays a part in men abandoning their essential role of handing on the Faith to their children. Contraception emasculates men as it defeminizes women, killing the most profound communion and responsibilities of marriage in rejection of fertility and unity, turning spouses, and sexuality itself, into mere playthings and robbing the participants of true adulthood and indeed of their very humanity with a subtlety worthy of its diabolical origin. See “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death.”)
Consequently, the catechesis that should have steeped its participants in at least the basics of Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium, sacraments, saints, and church history was supplanted by a distraction of games, nonsense, silliness, childishness, and a “bag of tricks.”
My siblings and I attended the Catholic school in town up through eighth grade and then attended the public high school (from which I graduated in 1979), which I thought was a good balance. Regardless, there was no Catholic high school in town, so that was not an option. On Wednesday evenings we attended religious education at our parish. I have no memories of learning anything about the Catholic Faith at those classes. I remember playing volleyball and having rap sessions and little else. I told my dad I did not want to attend any more because it was a waste of my time. He told me that he understood but that he wanted me to continue attending to support the religious education program, which he thought was so important. Out of respect for him, I continued to attend. Had I had more sense, I would have attended his class, where something was actually taught and learned, rather than avoid it because he was my dad and I was a teenager.
That was part of the context of religious education for me. I first volunteered as a religious-education teacher while in high school and did so in different places as I got older. I later taught middle-school religion as well as English and history and geography at a Catholic school. After completing a masters in theology, I took a job as a director of religious education in 1991, and entered into what catechesis had devolved into since my father was the last man standing in his parish program. The religious-education programs like the one I directed were led by either a director of religious education (DRE) or a coordinator of religious education (CRE). As I remember it, the distinction was that DREs had degrees in theology or a related field, and CREs did not. The programs relied on volunteer catechists. We were supported in various ways by the diocese. Additionally, our parish was one of five regional parishes that collaborated on various things including matters of religious education. I was in my early thirties at the time, and the catechetical leaders of the other four parishes were all women about in their mid-forties or so, three CREs and one DRE, as I remember it, who had worked together for several years.
To give some sense of my experience as a director of religious education in the early to mid 1990s, I share the following memories:
Experience as a DRE
Catechist’s Bag of Tricks
For the training of catechists, the diocese had developed an impressive outline that consisted of ten topics. I do not remember all of them but they included the fundamentals like Old Testament, New Testament, Sacraments, and Church History. For each of the ten topics, trainers were to present two hours of instruction on that topic, to add up to twenty hours of training altogether.
The catechetical leaders of the five parishes judiciously concluded that we would collaborate on catechist training. I suggested that each of the five parishes take two of the ten topics and prepare the two-hour training for each of them. The director or coordinator could prepare and present the training, or the parish could choose someone else to do so and bear whatever cost that might entail. Then each semester, each parish could offer one or both of their two topics either in a gathering at one parish or in separate gatherings at each of the five parishes to which all catechists from the five parishes would be invited to take whichever of the presentations they wished. That would accommodate all ten topics being presented each semester or each year. If each catechist attended just one presentation each semester, he would have completed the entire training in five years.
I often wondered, when I considered such examples as those described above or inservices of the same ilk that I experienced while teaching at Catholic schools, what respectable priests, given their level of education and maturity, would think if they were required to attend such presentations and be subjected to such fare.
Instead the other four catechetical leaders, at the urging of the two who may have been the least qualified among us, decided that we would give one presentation for the catechists of all five parishes, and it would be called “Catechist’s Bag of Tricks.” As I sat in a dissociative state, all-too-familiar in such meetings, the other catechetical leaders devoted most of the rest of the preparation to how we could make centerpieces for each of the tables out of paper bags filled with “tricks” as in various little toys.
Given my years of experience with religious education, I was not surprised by this development but nonetheless sick at heart. Here we were, members of the Catholic Church founded upon Peter and the Apostles by none other than Jesus Christ himself with all its riches like Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium, Apostolic Succession, liturgies, patristics, theology, history, and on and on, with myriad saints like Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieu, and we were talking about “catechist’s bag of tricks” and table centerpieces. Had we cooperated to offer a substantial catechist training, we still would have been only scratching the surface of the eternal richness of the Catholic Faith that stretches off into infinity. One could spend his entire life studying one tiny aspect of the Catholic Faith, and still just be scratching the surface, and yet we were not even going to be attempting to scratch that surface.
I floated through this preparation and the event itself as if through some out-of-body experience in which I was required to participate but was utterly incapable of being a part. In addition I felt a certain degree of responsibility, apprehension, and guilt about catechists from my parish attending the event. A day-care director whom I knew—who had long been away from the Church but was edging back toward it and had signed up to be a catechist at one of the other parishes as part of the volunteer work that would help her get her son into its school—was in attendance. As the “training” had worn on, I had caught glimpses of her and had seen in her expression that same mixture of bewilderment, wonder, disbelief, consternation, and vexation that I had regularly experienced at such “religious-education” events. Therefore, I was not at all surprised when she approached me at the end of the event and, barely able to contain her fury, locked her wide eyes on mine and seethed, “I got a baby sitter for this!” Head down, I muttered, “I know, I know,” as she stormed away. I was in complete agreement with her about the waste of time and the insult to hers and other’s maturity and intelligence, but what further impressed itself upon me was that the attendees had not only been deprived of a presentation of the richness of the Catholic Faith but had, in its name—and in silly, vapid, nonsensical blather—been subjected to a misrepresentation of what catechesis truly ought to be. Paradise lost, maybe not; but opportunity lost, profoundly. And incalculable damage done, however casually accomplished.
Running Interference
On another occasion, I attended with other leaders of parish catechetical programs, a workshop on how to give Confirmation retreats presented by a catechetical director who was considered something of a guru on the topic. After being instructed on how to stage various games that were supposed to be all the rage with high-schoolers (though I would not have expected third graders to participate in them), we arrived at the pinnacle of such games “Running Interference.” And we were all invited to stand and gather in a space cleared in front of the presenter. I could not bring myself to join the group and enjoyed a rare sense of silent camaraderie with a fellow catechetical leader when a quietly dignified Native-American woman seated across from me also refrained from participating.
It was just plain creepy that catechetical leaders would want to—and think they had some kind of right to—invade a young person psychologically and spiritually, and then actually attempt to do so after wearing down the child’s natural defenses against it.
Without a word to each other, we sat and watched as one person was chosen from the crowd to stand against the back wall with the crowd between the presenter and her. Then the others were informed that the presenter was going to try to communicate a message to the person at the back of the room, and all those in the crowd that stood between the presenter and the woman in the back, should do all that they could to make sure the message did not get through. Then the bedlam commenced. We continued to watch, indeed were almost incapable of tearing our eyes from the spectacle, as the presenter repeatedly yelled her message while the crowd of late-middle-aged women and at least one man shouted, jumped up and down waving their arms, and moved about in any way that could interfere in this communication. One person turned the lights off and on, which later drew high praise from the presenter for its originality and ingenuity. As the participants, flushed from their recent exertions, returned to their seats, the presenter explained that this was how it was with our relationship with God, who is continually trying to communicate with us while the world continually throws up all kinds of interference to keep the message from getting through.
I leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions.
Musical Chairs
At another training of religious education leaders, we were taught yet more games that were supposed to instruct high schoolers in religious education. One game, taught by a former religious sister, a variation on musical chairs, had male and female students circle around, while music played, a group of too-few chairs. When the music stopped they were to sit on the chairs. But those who did not find chairs were not put out of the game, as was the custom, but were instead instructed to sit on another person who had managed to sit in a chair. Here we were being instructed to have high-school students, boys and girls, randomly sit on each others’ laps. I believe the idea was that it would help break down barriers. Indeed, I suspected it would. The glaring impropriety was completely lost on those leading the training.
Pictionary
The five parishes also presented a program on human sexuality. I asked my pastor to excuse our program from participating in it. He denied the request. (I successfully insisted on our not participating the following years.) Thus our parish’s program would be included. While the catechetical leaders from the five parishes were planning the sexuality program, I heard from each of them that their parents had not taught them about sexuality. They shared stories about how their parents had avoided doing so and about the awkward and inadequate ways they had been left to learn about it instead. I shared that my parents had instructed us age-appropriately about sexuality as we had grown up, and that when we were approaching puberty, my dad had explained the biology of sexuality in the context of Catholic morality to us boys as my mother had to the girls. The other leaders respectfully marveled at that.
A digression within this digression: One area in which even responsible, mature parents and educators were deficient in our generation, was teaching where to stop. During the catechism gap, television programming that represented the popular culture evolved from Leave It to Beaver, The Andy Griffith Show, My Three Sons, and The Dick Van Dyke Show to Happy Days at the wholesome end of the spectrum. And if Happy Days (laughably voted “Greatest Show in the History of Television”) taught anything, it was that dates were for “making out,” with no clear boundaries indicated. Much of the rest of television and film during the catechism gap made it clear that there were no boundaries, and that sex before marriage was “fun” and exciting, and normal, with no attention given to the multitude of detrimental consequences like out-of-wedlock pregnancy, abortion, sexually-transmitted diseases, psychological and spiritual trauma even to the point of spiritual death in mortal sin. The promoters of the sexual revolution were not there to pick up the pieces of lives shattered by fornication. In such an environment, young Catholics wondered and discussed with their peers how far it was appropriate to go within a spectrum that ranged from holding hands to the very threshold of intercourse, with none too few finding that once the threshold was reached it was all too easy to fall over it. Not a few Catholic couples who believed that sexual intercourse outside of marriage was wrong found themselves at the altar with a baby on the way. It was not until I was in my thirties that I heard Molly Kelly set the line at affection, be it in something like holding hands or a kiss, making it clear that arousal properly belonged within the bodily and spiritual communion of marriage. Now that made sense, expressing affection without moving into arousal, a worthy guideline for one endeavoring to practice chastity. It was not about where to stop but about not getting started in the first place.
They had not grown up in the catechism gap; they did not know the deep hunger and need of the generation that had been deprived because of it.
The program that the parishes produced drew, for the most part, from programs of previous years, so that I, as a newbie, was allowed to observe more than participate. I cannot recall all that I observed, but as usual, games were the order of the day. In one game I remember, students were required to draw cards from a deck that described a morally challenging situation in which teens might find themselves. Then they were to discuss what they thought about it. Never in the process was there any Catholic morality applied to indicate what would be the appropriate way of handling the situation. They would talk about it, share their opinions, however well or poorly informed, and then they would move on. Thus did this sexuality program instruct young people in the detrimental art of moral relativism.
But then there was Pictionary, a knockoff of the popular game of that name. Here—we were to understand, according to the snickering catechetical leaders—was the game that would really break down barriers. (You must understand that breaking down barriers was all too often the goal of such approaches to religious education.) To play this game, students were paired with their parents and gathered into small groups. Then they would take turns having one of each pair pick a card and draw what was described on the card while the other tried to guess what it was. The cards described various things sexual including genitalia. Forgive me for thinking that parents can have mature and responsible conversations with their children about human sexuality without drawing explicit pictures in a game with several strangers sitting around a table. If you agree with that, you would have fit in no better than I did in the “catechetical” setting in which I found myself.
Lock-ins
And there were Lock-ins. Thank God (and I mean that) I managed to escape religious education without ever participating in one of these. As I understood it, lock-ins were events where students were locked in to a school or parish hall or gym or some such building with catechetical leaders and chaperones, and then they would—you guessed it—play games, maybe watch popular movies (many of which were hardly appropriate for Catholic religious education), drink soda pop and eat junk food, and stay up all night without sleep. Apparently this was really the setting in which you could “get the kids to talk,” when they were sleep deprived and strung out on sugar and caffeine. Because, as I heard often enough, that was the real purpose of religious education, to get the kids to talk, to get them to lay open the most private parts of their inner selves in the midst of all their peers, under pressure to do so, while all were temporarily given to feeling sensitive to one and all. Never mind that those encouraging, indeed manipulating, this divulging were not priests, counselors, psychologists, or psychiatrists. Never mind that at least some of the peers to whom these teenagers were coerced to divulge their deepest selves would be shortly reverting from their momentary sanctity to the kind of cruelty that adolescents can visit upon each other. Never mind that normal young people, who had been compelled to reveal to the group things most private, would leave the event with an unsettling sense of being violated. Never mind any of that. These catechetical leaders knew that their role was to get these kids to spill their guts to themselves and their peers, sinners all, with no consideration of the impropriety of it or of the harm that could be caused by it.
Get the Kids to Talk
The “get the kids to talk” thing always struck me, in my core, as inherently wrong. It brought to mind interrogators in Communist regimes I had read about, who would manipulate prisoners into a relationship with their very torturers. It just struck me as so perverse, indeed, diabolical. It was just plain creepy that catechetical leaders would want to—and think they had some kind of right to—invade a young person psychologically and spiritually, and then actually attempt to do so after wearing down the child’s natural defenses against it. We recognize the evil of adults violating children’s bodies; why would we then allow adults to violate their minds and souls? It is one thing if a young person seeks out an adult whom they have come to trust to share private matters (and even then there should be guardrails), but they should never be coerced to do so. And it is strikes me as wrong even among adults. I remember one time many years later and many miles away, when, though I usually avoid them, I participated in a men’s program at our parish that was surprisingly pretty good. But at one session, after the presentation, the participants were instructed to, in their small groups, share personal experiences about the topic. Though I was not the small-group leader, I immediately said to my group of great guys, that before we started, no one should feel any kind of compulsion to share anything that he was not comfortable sharing, that the Church recognizes the propriety of privacy in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and that we should abide by that same propriety. Our leader was grateful that I had said something, and others in the group indicated that they were relieved of a sense of compulsion to share something they might have later regretted having shared.
Not only do catechists and all others now have the Catechism of the Catholic Church available to inform and enable them to hand on authentic Catholic teaching, they also have it available to challenge erroneous teaching, much to the chagrin of those who would subvert authentic teaching, of whom there were and are far too many inside and outside the Church.
Conclusion
I often wondered, when I considered such examples as those described above or inservices of the same ilk that I experienced while teaching at Catholic schools, what respectable priests, given their level of education and maturity, would think if they were required to attend such presentations and be subjected to such fare. It formed in my mind over time that they assiduously kept apart from such events and insulated themselves from such nonsense by no accident. Right or wrong, I had a sense that they knew that there was something just plain weird about the education milieu and those who orchestrated it. And they were right; the education milieu and those who orchestrated it were weird. And destructive, as can be seen in how the disciples of John Dewey, the teachers unions, and the Department of Education have driven down our education system from one of the best in the world to one of the worst. And the incentives, ideologies, and methods used to do so infected Catholic education and catechesis—whether in schools or religious education programs—during the catechism gap by no accident and for no good. Consequently, the catechesis that should have steeped its participants in at least the basics of Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium, sacraments, saints, and church history was supplanted by a distraction of games, nonsense, silliness, childishness, and a “bag of tricks.” I believe that, however well intentioned the catechetical leaders who created and presented the so-called religious education exemplified above, they did more harm than good. Indeed, I believe that that which is exemplified above was not religious education at all but a diabolical counterfeit. And it should be no surprise then that often enough the creators and presenters of that which is exemplified above were hostile to the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church that they resolutely avoided, and hostile to those who believed in it and would teach it, as I can personally attest.
Still there were grounds for hope. While I was directing a religious education program, the Catechism of the Catholic Church was published and promulgated. I was honored to be selected to serve on the diocesan committee for the implementation of the Catechism. There I worked with the auxiliary bishop who chaired the committee, the diocesan director of religious education, the diocesan director of Catholic schools, a parish priest, and another religious education director who was a religious sister. These were mature, intelligent, knowledgeable, kind, and enjoyable individuals who took the implementation of the Catechism seriously. Still, because the next youngest person on the committee was probably at least ten years older than I was, they did not have the perspective I had on the event. I remember them all looking perplexedly at me when I told them all that the Catechism was going to fly off the shelves when it finally came out. They had not grown up in the catechism gap; they did not know the deep hunger and need of the generation that had been deprived because of it. Thus they were surprised as I was not when, after the Catechism was first published in French in 1992, it sold so fast that the bookstores at the Paris airport could not keep the shelves stocked with it. Had it not been published by six (if I remember right) publishers in the United States in 1994, and thus each of their editions counted separately, it would have been the number-one best seller in the U.S. at the time. The Catechism of the Catholic Church closed the catechism gap, and the Catechism remains. Not only do catechists and all others now have the Catechism of the Catholic Church available to inform and enable them to hand on authentic Catholic teaching, they also have it available to challenge erroneous teaching, much to the chagrin of those who would subvert authentic teaching, of whom there were and are far too many inside and outside the Church.
May the Catechism prove a valuable resource for you too.
Thank you,
P. A. Ritzer
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