RITE AND REASON:Are the resources devoted to teaching religion wasted?
ADDRESSING A crowd protesting against the Pope’s visit to Britain last year, Richard Dawkins fulminated with the passion of a fundamentalist preacher against the Catholic Church for filling the children’s heads with the “vile obscenity” of original sin and “the terrifying falsehood” of hell.
Unless religious education in British Catholic schools is much more effective than it is in Irish Catholic schools, Dawkins need not worry: most Catholic children will not have heard of original sin, and will only have heard of hell in popular culture.
In 2007 the Iona Institute, a body committed to preserving orthodox Catholic teaching, conducted a survey among Irish people aged 15 to 24. Only 5 per cent could quote the First Commandment, 32 per cent could not say where Jesus was born, and 35 per cent did not know what is celebrated at Easter. Fewer than half knew what the Trinity is comprised of, and only 15 per cent knew what transubstantiation is.
In a response to the survey's findings, reminiscent of Father Ted,the Catholic bishops argued that it was unfair to expect young people to know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and that "in a stable" should have been an acceptable answer. Their lordships clearly favour multiple- choice questions in scripture.
This pitiful ignorance of the basic facts and tenets not just of Catholicism but of Christianity raises the question of whether the significant resources devoted to teaching religion in Irish schools are largely wasted.
In the 1980s, the imparting of traditional doctrine was abandoned in Catholic schools and was replaced by a syllabus so broad and vague that practically anything that is connected, however tenuously, to religion or spirituality can be taught.
The primary school religious programme, Alive O, has been ridiculed for its fatuity.
Most children receiving first Communion are not taught the significance of the Eucharist in any meaningful way and would not understand it if they were.
The Church of Ireland sensibly administers Communion and Confirmation together at age 12.
At primary school most children learn very little of the New Testament.A few prayers are taught, and some of the Commandments.
All teachers in Catholic primary schools are obliged to teach religion regardless of their beliefs, but at second level, religion is mainly taught by specially trained teachers who have chosen to study the subject.
Despite this training, many seem unable or unwilling to teach scripture, doctrine or comparative religion in a meaningful way. Some seem to prefer showing films to teaching, but when I gave my son's religion teacher the video of the fine BBC documentary Jesus of Nazareth, which included contributions from leading scripture scholars and theologians, she did not show it because she thought her fifth-years would find it "too advanced".
My daughter's teacher, however, showed her class of 15-year-old girls Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, which produced a significant response in that several girls screamed at the Passion scenes.
Religion, taken as a subject by the overwhelming majority of second-level students, is neither catechesis nor a serious study of comparative religion.
What moral instruction occurs is usually an unquestioning transmission of Catholic teaching on such subjects as abortion, divorce and euthanasia. This leaves pupils ill-equipped to formulate or defend a position on these issues. (I have met many students, some from elite Catholic schools, who see no moral question in tax evasion.) With no firm grounding in any religion, or in the philosophical arguments for secularism, some young people are easy prey for cults and purveyors of New Age charlatanry.
The Catholic Church should decide whether religion should be catechesis, and so taught only to those who wish to learn it, or religious studies, which would better prepare students for a multicultural world. The present system leaves many young people ignorant about the Christian tradition which, leaving aside questions of personal faith, is central to an understanding of western civilisation.
Seán Byrne lectures in economics at Dublin Institute of Technology