Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 5:30pm

PopeWatch: Catholic Education

 

From the only reliable source of Catholic news on the net, Eye of the Tiber:

 

 

Facing financial ruin due to the high cost of trying to provide their son with a good Catholic education, sources confirmed Thursday that parents of high school freshman Johnny Irving, Tom and Lisa, are quite impressed with their son’s growing knowledge of every tenet of every religion, but Catholicism.

According to the freshman’s parents, Irving has gained an immense amount of knowledge about the Koran, The Analects of Confucius, and the Book of Mormon in his class Fundamentals of Catholic Doctrine 101.

“It’s breathtaking the amount of non-Catholic knowledge he’s learning in his Catholic Doctrine class,” Lisa Irving told EOTT. “We’re about a paycheck or two away from filing for bankruptcy just so Johnny can learn about everything but Catholicism at a Catholic school, but it’s so worth it. He always comes home telling us interesting things about Catholic teaching like how according to the Church the most important doctrine is coexistence. And how the Church teaches that it’s pointless to evangelize since a person’s own consciousness, being infused by a higher spirit, stirs within him or her at birth and sanctifies every belief, whim, or desire that person has. I didn’t know that. Probably because I went to Catholic school when classrooms had crucifixes and whatnot in them.”

 

Lisa went on to say that, though her son still has never heard of the Nicene Creed, that he had memorized several verses from the Koran that incidentally mention Jesus, and that through Buddhist teachings, he has come to learn about Christ the bodhisattva.

“Listen, some people might think $40,000 for a four-year high school education seems absurd, ” Lisa Irving went on to say. “But tell that to me when my son graduates summa cum laude, which of course he will graduate with since every student in that fine scholastic institution graduates with that honor.”

At press time, Johnny is studying for his midterms in one of the school’s mandatory classes, Advanced Being Nice.

 

Go here to read the comments.  PopeWatch attempted to contact the Vatican for comment but was met with a menu in which he had to declare his religion.  After the robotic female voice had reached the 50th choice, Reformed Orthodox Zorostrianism, without having reached Catholic, PopeWatch gave up.

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T. SHaw
T. SHaw
Saturday, May 20, AD 2017 11:16am

I must confess that I went (too often drinking when I should have been thinking) through a Catholic college wheree ach year three credits of Theology were required. I earned three of them for a course on Islam taught by a Bulgarian priest who had been in a labor battalion with the Axis forces in Italy. FYI they were white-washing the filthy paganism back then, too.

It is Armed Forces Day. Greet theme ever with grateful hearts.

Clinton
Clinton
Saturday, May 20, AD 2017 1:40pm

During my college years, my parish was a huge old church,
run by members of an order once famous for its missionary work, but
now sadly heterodox and decadent. I volunteered to teach CCD, and
another volunteer and I were assigned to teach the high schoolers. The
workbooks we were given to use had been purchased at great expense from
a convent publishing house and were short on information and long on
new age psychobabble. We quietly shelved them and taught from a
catechism.

These were good kids, and some had been in Catholic schools their entire
academic lives. But they were almost utterly ignorant of the basics of
the Faith. The Trinity? Never heard of it. Real Presence? Appalled and
disgusted. I had the students raise their hands if they thought Jesus was
a man, but not God. Half the class. God, but not a man? The other half.
What about both God and man? One hand.

It wasn’t that these kids were jerking my chain and pretending to not know
these things– the basics of the Faith were almost completely unknown to
them. Their parents had put them through Catholic schools, and had them
attending CCD, all with the understanding that they were being taught these
things– and they were not. I cannot speak to why the parents weren’t
talking with their teens to find out what they’d learned, or reinforce and
explain articles of faith. But I can say that this affluent parish with 3(!) priests,
a seminarian doing his diaconate year, and both a paid Liturgist and a Director
of Religious Education on staff seemed unperturbed with the status quo.
Those kids had had their birthright– the Catholic Faith– traded for a mess
of porridge and the parents and staff at the parish didn’t appear to see
the problem.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Saturday, May 20, AD 2017 4:59pm

Clinton, my parents wasted their money on so called Catholic education in the 1970s.
I got the Internet in early 1999 and learned more in three months than I learned in eight years of Catholic school and CCD.

John Schuh
John Schuh
Sunday, May 21, AD 2017 5:33am

Sad but true. I did not catch on to what happened until the ‘90s when I met a Louvain priest and Bible scholar who I realized had lost his faith.

David
David
Monday, May 22, AD 2017 8:49am

My local Diocese’s newspaper has a weekly section entitled “Our Catholic Youth”. The pages are dedicated to the 5-8% of catholic school children who attend private school in the Diocese. Costs for such schooling have risen to $6K per child for each year of grade school and $12K per child for each year of high school. The local Diocese high school imports 30% of it’s students from two neighboring diocese as it is located near a major highway, and 20% of it’s students are non-catholic. Each year Pro Life essays are promoted by the Diocese but only for those in attendance at the Diocese schools. Those in attendance at the Diocese high school are pushed to attend the most expensive colleges across the country, in the words of the high school president “students attendance at elite colleges ($$) is the measure of the quality of the high school”. The student’s then gain the diocese high school a reputation, while incurring a lot of debt. Judging by the alumni newspaper (I attended the HS 35 years ago when things were quite different), few marry, and those that do typically have only 1 maybe 2 children.
– Typical students are white, upper middle class with no more than one sibling.
– My wife and I having been promoters of NFP, know many who use NFP in the area and know of no parents who have children in the schools who do not use contraception. We in fact are laughed at for being promoters of NFP and having four children.

I recently stopped receiving the Diocese newspaper, the hypocrisy was just too much.

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