A Personal Reflection on "Catholic" Education (Part 2)

I was mentally preparing my next post when I read this:

John Paul II's remarkable rapport with young people began in the "John Paul, Superstar" phase of his pontificate... As the pontificate unfolded, it was no longer possible to view this simply as a variant on the adulation lavished on pop celebrities. Age, Agca's bullet, and the effects of illness made it necessary to think of the Pope as something more than a rock star in a white cassock. Why did this rapport with the young continue, even intensify? Several reasons suggest themselves. The Pope took young people seriously as persons, paying them the compliment of seeing them as people struggling with the meaning of life. When speaking with the young, he did not take the edge off a Christian message he clearly lived himself. Perhaps most importantly, he didn't pander to young people, challenging them to settle for nothing less than moral grandeur. At a time in Western history when virtually no other world figure was calling young people to bear burdens and make sacrifices, John Paul touched the youthful thirst for the heroic and related it to the human search for God. It made for a potent style of evangelization. - George Weigel, Witness to Hope, p. 494

I couldn't pass up a chance to comment on this. But first, I highly recommend Weigel's book; some of the man's foreign policy ideas that are a bit sketchy, but his biography of John Paul II is superb. The book is long--almost nine hundred pages, plus footnotes--like the pontificate which it describes in detail, but Weigel doesn't linger: he carries the narrative effortlessly. It's also the sort of book that should appeal to non-Catholics as well. John Paul II was a 20th century giant, and anyone who wishes to understand that century would do well to study the man who became John Paul II.

If you were expecting me to explain how Pope John Paul II held a tremendous appeal for me as a young person, you'll have to beg me to write fiction; it just wasn't so. I knew who the Pope was; that he was rather old; that he spoke quite a few languages. I knew that many people thought that he was tremendously holy and wonderful; and that many others thought he had gone senile and should step down. I also knew he opposed the War in Iraq. Being a good Republican at the time, this last point stuck with me; whatever esteem I had for the Pope promptly dissipated. I dismissed him and his wise words by offering the rhetorical question: What on earth did the old man in Rome know about terrorism and Saddam Hussein?

Seeing how the Polish priest lived under Nazi and Communist occupation, the answer is: quite a lot.

We'll have to get back to the Iraq business later; believe it or not, it is fairly important in all this. Keep in mind, for the present, that I was a rather clueless Catholic, indeed, clueless generally. This is fairly common in the teenage years, caused, most likely, by acne and aggressive repression of feelings toward the fairer sex. It's as plausible as anything.

Worse, I had no idea that I was so clueless. For all my faults, and there were many, I followed politics intensely. Grown men, with nationally syndicated talk shows, were offering the same platitudinal nonsense that I was. If you regularly listen to talk radio, my condolences, you'll find that they still are.

As an aside, I like talk radio, but it should be listened to sparingly. Talking points are no substitute for reading real books. If you want to be convinced that you're right about things, find a host who agrees with you; if, on the other hand, it is truth that you seek, you're going to have to hit the books.

At this point, you might ask why I quoted Weigel if I'm not going to do anything but recommend his book. I would thereupon inform you that the challenges of which he speaks did not apply to the religion classes in which I enrolled. Now, generally speaking, high school was a bit boring. I rarely studied for a test, and if I did, it was for half an hour, tops, so it would be dishonest for me to suggest that I was always challenged in high school. Yet, often the reason I didn't study had more to do with my arrogance that with my intelligence. In any event, the teachers didn't pander to us in most of my classes.

The same could not be said for religion class. The teachers were, I regret to say, only a bit more sane than those who taught English, and, in general, very, very... let's go with dull. I truthfully can recall little to nothing that I learned from religion class. We were either taught things that we had learned in second grade; or we focused on something that had nothing to do with Catholicism--you know, like watching the Matrix; or we took a nap, I mean, meditated.

This isn't a dig against meditation, but attempting to get a class of tired high school students to find something spiritually edifying out of the endeavor is to engage in an exercise in futility.

I pause for two hypothetical interjections which I shall provide. First, isn't it unreasonable to expect high school religion teachers to meet the standards of the Pope? And second, so what if the material used in religion class isn't intellectually challenging?

The first question can be answered fairly easily. While it is unreasonable to expect everyone to possess the qualities of someone like John Paul II, as Catholics, we are all called to holiness. Dante puts some Bishops in Hell, and there have been lay saints; it is very possible for an ordinary person to be more holy than a Pope, even, I daresay, a Pope as holy as John Paul II.

More importantly, though, the teachers I had weren't even vaguely like the Pope in their methodology. Looking back, I'm not sure how many of them really understood what the Faith was all about--or fervently believed in it. I can count one of seven teachers who may have had the Faith. He was a soft-spoken guy who taught to the lowest common denominator. I don't know if he was overwhelmed by the apathy and ignorance with which he was presented, or if he just wasn't cut out for teaching.

As to the second question, religion should be intellectually challenging for a variety of reasons.

First, if something is simple, it's going to be regulated below anything which is more complex. I'm not certain this is fair, but it's the way things work. No one who has taken a calculus course is going to be fired up about pre-algebra. The Jesus-Loves-You children's books are likewise little esteemed once you've stumbled upon Chesterton. On a cross-disciplinary note, math and science were more important to me because they required me to use my mind in a way religion didn't. Even those who would have had a fairly open mind toward Catholicism, such as myself--you'll remember that I would have considered myself a Catholic at the time; I was a bad one, but I didn't know it--quickly tuned out the rambling

Second, it's dishonest. To present the Catholic Faith as less intellectually fulfilling than--heaven forbid--physics, is ridiculous. I'm not saying that esoteric lectures are the way to go, but neither is reading from a text better suited to eight year-olds. Religion seeks to satisfy man's deepest desires, and to answer his most probing questions. I can't speak for all faiths, but Catholicism's answers are deeply challenging, not only to understand, but to act on--thankfully. And the satisfaction one gets from the answer of Jesus Christ--for all of the Church's answers stem from the mystery of the Incarnation--is a tremendous thing. It's unfortunate that my instructors lacked this satisfaction; or were perhaps so thrilled with the eight year-old version that they couldn't imagine a higher wisdom.

Third, it leaves a wayward Catholic searching for a way back nothing to work with. I regained my faith because of the Grace of God, working, in part, through my mom's purchase of a delightful little tome called Orthodoxy by the aforesaid Chesterton. I hadn't heard of the man until I read his book. In four years of high school religion classes, we read a mediocre piece of historical fiction about Mary. Props for recognizing the Incarnation as important; negative points for trying to make it seem "cool" by couching it in poor fiction.

Aside from that... nothing. Some of the English classes read Dante's Inferno, and a few people read Flannery O'Connor. I'm not about to lambast either of them. In four years, some of the classes read part of the greatest poem ever written, and a few people read a short story or two by one of the masters of the twentieth century, but that's it? Even if a lot of the stuff went over our heads, at least we would have known it was there if we needed it. Instead, I knew about the Catechism and the Bible, and that was about it.

Fourth--because there's no way it's last, but I'm running out of steam--the challenges posed by religion should be the toughest because they're the most important. Being able to integrate a function is nice, but it's utterly inessential. Being able to love one's neighbor is not only much harder than calculus, it's much more important. I don't want to imply that I worshiped math and science during high school: I didn't; and in truth, I'm a somewhat reluctant computer engineer. What I did do, partially because of my own flaws, and partially because I was poorly served in my education, was elevate all of the other disciplines in relation to religion. That's precisely backwards.

I'm going to stop here for now. If Doom and Gazoombo want to add to my list, I'd appreciate it. This is turning out to be far less polished than I'd like, but it's going reasonably well.

Next time, unless something else distracts me, I want to talk about how religion should cover all disciplines in ways I thought it couldn't, and how its failure led me to see a substitute for a more total discipline in an unfortunate place.