The Religious Education classroom in a secular world?

The environment in which Religious Education is taught in Catholic schools in Australia today has changed dramatically over the last sixty years.

Culturally, this reflects the significant changes in society globally and the impact of religious affiliation locally.

Gone is much of the tribalism, homogeneity and compliance that so identified the Catholic faithful pre-Vatican II and into the late 1970s.

Those days belong to a holy-picture past which no longer fits the times.

Christianity now

Today 39 per cent of Australians now identify themselves as No religion whilst there has been a discernible growth in the other major world religions.

Whilst Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, remains the most common religion in Australia, Christianity has fallen.

Those identifying as Christian went from being 88 per cent of the Australian population in 1966 to just 44 per cent today.

According to the 2021 Census, Catholics now form only 20 per cent of the population.

Whilst the numbers of students attending Catholic schools has grown at a steady rate, the religious composition of school communities has changed significantly.

Just over half of Catholic primary students (58.2 per cent) and Catholic secondary students (56.3 per cent) are nominally Catholic, whilst just under half (48.1 per cent) of Catholic primary and similarly of Catholic secondary students (43.7 per cent) attend either a government secondary school or a private (not Catholic) school (ABS, 2016).

For a Catholic student to attend a school that was not Catholic would have been unheard of in the 1960s era in which we grew up.

With big families and discounts for successive children, the Catholic schools of the 1950s-70s were at their peak affiliation with a large proportion of religious sisters and brothers taking on the teaching load.

The contemporary classroom

Beyond the diversity in composition of the contemporary Catholic classroom are other broader challenges facing Catholic schools in a world context which is variously described as post-Christian and increasingly secular and individualist.

Communal attitudes of shock, anger and shame at a Church that covered up paedophilia in the past decades has stripped the institution of much of its moral authority.

Clericalism, hierarchical intransigence, and the lack of female voice within the Church have accelerated disillusion and disappointment amongst the laity.

What is becoming increasingly apparent in today’s society is that the story of Jesus of Nazareth and the claims of Christianity are no longer common knowledge.

The Catholic school

The framework of faith that was so central to Catholic life when we were growing up has been marginalised.

Our student cohort may be confessed, neutral, resistant, or hostile; they may enjoy another faith tradition, or they may have no tradition or an indifferent inclination to any transcendent belief system.

However, the Catholic school has a place for them all.

At the same time, the Catholic school has become the ecclesial face of the Catholic Church in the 21st Century.

Catholic schools are schools for all. With that invitation comes the reality that students will have various faith experiences and backgrounds and that a one-size-fits-all pedagogy of the 1950s and 1960s is no longer appropriate for learning or spiritual growth.

As we grew up, we mixed with other Catholics, knew our prayers and feast days and shared common understandings that made connections with each other easy.

We did not dare miss Mass or Holy Days of Obligation and the rosary was recited with regularity.

We lived and breathed the Catholic cosmology and did not question it.

We learned the catechism by rote, undertook the sacraments with reverence and respected the liturgy, even when we did not quite understand it.

The inputs and experiences we had were relatively innocent.

We were not seduced by the smorgasbord of distractions that consume today’s teenager.

Technology was the family phone in the hallway and the small black and white TV on the back porch.

Things were done en famille and any sort of privacy was a luxury, as most big families had two or three children sharing the same bedroom.

Children did not have rights or opinions and education was delivered without differentiation or much acknowledgement of learning needs, cultural background, or family situation.

It was factory floor functional with teacher as know-it-all and students as empty vessels into which facts and fictions were poured.

By contrast

Fortunately, today’s students have an education system that recognises the individual in the learning equation much more readily and responsively.

We understand that the growth of personal agency is one of the positive outcomes of education, as is an increasing realisation of the soft skills of interpersonal transactions – especially in a world where technology can mitigate the face-to-face encounters needed for good socialisation and communal cohesion.

What we have today is a growing continuum of tolerance for various beliefs and practices.

Differentiation is now the key to many scenarios.

Personal agency and initiative from the individual are accepted and often expected.

Rather than being passive recipients of knowledge, the student is now in the centre of their own learning world.

However, the situation regarding religious education and the passing on of the faith tradition has changed unrecognisably.

Greg Sheridan has noted that Christianity is almost in existential crisis in the West, and Australia is about to become, if it has not already, a majority atheist nation.

Gerard Windsor has contended that the progress of the West from general belief to general unbelief has been inexorable.

As long ago as 1993, Marcellin Flynn in researching the culture of Catholic schools between 1972-1993 noted the influence of the secular materialist culture of Australian society as impacting on student interest in religious education.

Imagine then, thirty years on, the layers of complexity, disaffiliation and competing worldviews that are now apparent in the average Catholic school classroom.

We are reminded starkly of Pope Francis’ observation that we live in not only an era of change, but a change of era.

The challenge for the RE teacher today is that many of the children do not have a familiarisation with Catholic beliefs emanating from their own homes.

We speak often of the parents as first educators in faith, but the reality is that this is true in only a small percentage of cases.

The religious socialisation of the past has been greatly diminished by increasing secularisation and new patterns of socialisation are emerging in the digital age where new tribes and affiliations and niche groups are the current homes for identity and belonging.

Cultural shifts have now prioritised personal ascendancy over the communal contract.

A pluralising, detraditionalising and individualising cultural context is now taken as normal by the majority of people.

As such, the school is now the place for evangelisation of the next generation of Catholics.

We have a big job ahead of us as we fulfil our mission of educating those one in five children in Australia who attend our schools (NCEC, 2017).

This is the challenge for Catholic school leadership who need to prioritise and honour the nature and purpose of the RE classroom as the school maintains its raison d’etre.

If it is on the timetable with Maths and English and Science it needs a revitalised respect.

How do we ‘do’ our mission in schools?

The question for us is how do we maintain this unique and irreplaceable aspect of our schools, while we compete for numbers and results in a marketplace that commodifies almost everything?

How do we maintain the integrity of the subject at senior secondary levels when the students see it as an intrusion in the timetable, rather than an opportunity for reflection, increased religious and life knowledge, discussion, and some necessary soul-building?

How do we strengthen our distinctive Catholic identity in a world where schools can suffer from a diminution of vision and mission when this is not enacted routinely by those in the school community as a part of the daily fabric of school life?

How do we assist the RE teachers who have twenty-five or more students in these core classes, whilst their peers have smaller class sizes and more overt investment in their subject because students feel these relate more directly to academic achievement and their future pathway?

Our responsibility and privilege in the Catholic classroom is to nurture the human being in front of us, welcoming them, and fostering in them the knowledge and growth that gives their unique and precious life meaning.

Ideally, that is done within the Catholic context as host tradition, but we no longer indoctrinate or believe that other Christian denominations have a less guaranteed way to God. Thank God, those divisive partisan days are over and we Christians, of different stripes, are so much more collegial in our faith.

Ecumenism has opened many doors to understanding.

We know that much enrichment can come from learning about other faith traditions, recognising in them other paths to the transcendent and the common care for others.

Beyond the Christian belief system, we also know that we have much to learn and appreciate in the multicultural, multifaith world that is Australia today.

We also know that there is a great invitation for us to become conversant with Indigenous spirituality which honours country as mother as we immerse ourselves in stories of ancient Dreaming.

This openness to dialogue and understanding is practical and pragmatic in shaping the future egalitarianism and inclusion that will build a thriving sense of national identity and social cohesion.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart offers a way forward as we look to the First Nations people as original custodians who can share the secrets of stewardship and kinship across this wide brown land, we all call home.

As teachers, we are in a front-line position to see exactly what comes from the home via faith knowledge and practice.

We can see the confessed and the cultural Catholic who return to the gospel values as foundational to the growth of character and its implications for the common good.

We also invite enrolments from those who want the values and standards offered by a good education offered in a school which is faith-based.

There is a general acknowledgement that Catholic primary schools are good with discipline and standards and offer a warm sense of inclusion.

They get the building blocks right for later development in this sector or others.

At both primary and secondary levels, Catholic schools offer hospitality and the opportunity for evangelisation, as well as an openness to dialogue reflecting the context of the times.

The expectation is that students who enrol in the Catholic school understand and accept that religious education and their participation in this curriculum and the school’s liturgical celebrations is a given, even if they have no religious inclination or adherence elsewhere.

There is an expectation that respectful reciprocity will be the attitude of those other students (and staff) who attend a Catholic school.

Most students today see themselves as spiritual beings who have their own ways of making meaning.

This spirituality is personalised and idiosyncratic and picks and mixes from a variety of sources, traditional, new age, emerging or other. Some have called this the supermarket approach, where the student takes what they want and rejects those ideas or practices that do not fit in with their lifestyle or aspirations.

It would seem that religion is seen as institutional and occasionally oppressive, whilst spirituality is very much a personal confection of ideas, attitudes and practices.

There is a movement away from all sorts of traditional structures as new configurations and blendings take root and the past is viewed with suspicion and/or irrelevance.

With so much activism, some well-intentioned, others less so, at work geo-politically and with mood swings orchestrated by 24/7 social media, we must be mindful of finding that equilibrium that can bring about the common good.

We must be truth-tellers in our own spheres, building up the Kingdom, whilst acknowledging that the institution has been severely damaged, and its former influence dissipated.

We have our challenges ahead and one of those is to ensure that our students have the capacity to think for themselves and to not be swayed by the loudest voice, the virality of social media, the issue de jour or the fear of having a dissenting opinion.

We need to renegotiate a way to open up the Good News for them so that its universal story of love and redemption becomes meaningful for the reality of their lives.

The God question

As we look to the future of the Catholic school, we are reminded that its duty is to constantly raise the God question.

This can be done through respectful dialogue as the teacher speaks to the assorted class members about meaning, belief and values, some of which may well be counter cultural.

This teacher will be in tune with the times and have entry points that will enrich and enliven class discussion and action.

There will be room for robust debate, but no room for indoctrination.

Columnist for National Catholic Reporter and Franciscan priest Daniel P. Horan gave a thoughtful consideration to the world inhabited by the young people we teach. He poses the question:

What if our starting point in thinking about what it means to be a person in communion with God, oneself and the world was not reduced to external expressions of institutional belonging, but instead began with attention to humans’ inherent capacity for God?

He refers to Ronald Rolheiser’s description of spirituality from The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality: ‘Long before we do anything religious at all, we have to do something about the fire that burns within us.

What we do with that fire, how we channel it, is our spirituality’.

We are in a privileged and responsible position in the RE classroom and at the Catholic school to help with that channelling, with that formative and purposeful finding for the student that they have a spiritual dimension, individually sparked and motivated, sometimes with a religious language and framework, sometimes without it, sometimes borrowing and reshaping it for today’s lived reality.

We recognise how vastly the world has changed in the last six decades and that we need new tellings and appropriations of our long-held narratives.

We cannot continue as we were and must adapt, spiritually and strategically, to continue to tell the salvation story of Jesus of Nazareth; to make it known and meaningful for a contemporary audience.

We know that the Christ story is front and centre and that we are contemporary disciples sent forth on a distinctive mission.

Teachers

We need the next generation of committed Catholic teachers who can dialogue gently and respectfully with a changing world, holding onto the deep anchor of faith in sometimes turbulent waters.

We know that these teachers will often be the most influential religious educators for the child, as parents have been outsourcing this aspect of their upbringing for almost as long as we have been teaching!

We may be in the last few years of our RE teaching mission in schools, but we care that our work goes forward; better, brighter, realisable, and influential for a new generation.

So, it is important that we plan for the project of Catholic education, imagining possibilities, charting new territory, being provoked, and challenged by the world around us and finding our place, perhaps as that bold minority to which Greg Sheridan referred.

We must be motivated to do what we can, where we can.

We also know that serious conversations need to be had within the local and national leadership, both clerical and educational, to recognise the gravity of the situation and the urgent need to invite, train, professionalise and support the next generation of RE teachers.

Our next generation of RE teachers can be thought-leaders and influencers, way beyond the ephemerality of the TikTok meme or being Insta-famous.

They can influence, form, and transform the child in front of them by holding onto our foundational convictions and responding with hope and discernment in the light of the secular pluralist world we now live in.

We hope that the joys and mystery of the Catholic imagination and what it stands for is rekindled for the next generation of the faithful.

We learned in our long-ago Catholic education the primacy of loving God and loving neighbour.

That lesson remains absolute and inviolate.

However, it may well be delivered very differently today in response to a world that has changed irrevocably.

Contested space

Our young people today have different inputs and outputs, and we must respond to those authentically.

We need new ways to assist in their best becoming if we are to balance change and tradition in a world whose certainties are less sure than they once were.

Our hope and prayer is that this mediated lesson of an integrated living between faith and culture takes seed and blossoms in the hearts and minds, actions and behaviours of the generations who come after us.

We finish writing this just as Pope Francis celebrates the 60th anniversary of the opening of Vatican II on 11 October 1962.

As we have noted, the world is in a different place and the role of institutional religion in the public square is contested.

There is increasing pressure for groups and corporations to adopt mission and vision statements prioritising secular or citizen values.

For some, this may well create a tension between their private faith stance and their public role. Christopher Middleton SJ notes that there is a widespread perception that Christian viewpoints are being excluded from the public square.

In The Weekend Australian, Frank Brennan SJ argues that we need to ‘advocate without accusation, disagree without disrespect and see differences as places of encounter, rather than exclusion’.

Catholic identity

So, as we forge ahead, it may well be that secularisation has impacted to such an extent that to publicly avow faith is seen as oppositional to a more secular worldview.

This may yet have implications for Catholic schools, their selection of employees in the light of equality and/or discrimination and how to energise the faith creatively and committedly for the betterment of all in a time when faith is disparaged or seen as irrelevant and anachronistic.

These elements go to the heart of Catholic identity.

We need to find places of reconciliation when irreconcilable differences threaten to divide us.

We need to find those mutual meeting places as we mould and form the next generation of Catholics and those young people of goodwill, of no faith or other faith traditions, who companion us in different ways.

We have challenging times ahead in our Catholic education sector.

However, we live in hope that a new generation of teachers, and most especially the Religious Education teacher, will be able to exercise their own authentic witness, specialist, moderator experience for the flourishing of all in the contemporary Catholic classroom.

We have great faith in this educational enterprise.

It is vital to the mission of the Church and to the holistic, humanising and spiritual growth of all the young people we are privileged to teach in this Great South Land of the Holy Spirit.

• Dr Bernadette Mercieca is currently teaching at Our Lady of Mercy College, Heidelberg. She has previously worked as a sessional at ACU and is a research assistant at Victoria University.
• Ann Rennie teaches at Genazzano FCJ College, Kew. She has a regular column in Australian Catholics and contributes to a variety of media outlets.
• First published in Eureka Street. Republished with permission