(The Nationalist, 5 January 2007)
When Jesus was on earth, his primary audience in teaching and miracles was adult. The gospels, from start to finish, are about many and varied activities of his, virtually all of them involving adults. Children are rarely mentioned at a significant level: in Luke 18.16, Jesus welcomed them, and he held up a child as an example of someone who will enter the kingdom of heaven.
In the church, much of our focus is on children, and adults usually come a poor second. Contrast the effort made, especially in the past, for the education of children with the low priority accorded adult education. (In passing, it’s worth mentioning that there is a dangerous gap between the scholars’ understanding of the bible and that of the ordinary church member. The Christmas story illustrates this. But that’s a topic for another time.)
Should we be baptizing children at all? It is not uncommon in baptisms that when the priest asks the parents if they are prepared to bring their child up in the faith, they say yes, even though they have given little recognizable indication of practising it. Sometimes they do not join in reciting the Our Father, through ignorance, shame, or embarrassment. Their older children, whom they also promised to bring up in the faith, have grown up in ignorance of it, because the parents have done nothing to teach them. Can the parents’ promise to educate this particular child in the faith then be taken seriously? Who is the more dishonest, the parents who make a promise they have shown no intention of fulfilling, or the priest in pretending to take that promise seriously by baptizing the child? Such a situation belittles baptism, demoralizes the priest, and reinforces the parents’ perception that, in matters of faith, a token will do.
Tokenism, or formalism, in religion, going through the motions, was one of the things Jesus criticized most severely in the gospels. It was a major part of his constant battles with the Pharisees. In Ireland, the days are long gone when it could safely be taken for granted that there was an atmosphere of faith and prayer in the home which would nurture the child’s religious life. Is it not time for a reality check?
I believe that most parents have opted out almost entirely from their children’s religious education. They leave it to the school. (Do the teachers believe what they are asked to teach?) Yet those parents want their children to receive the sacraments as they grow up. Does not that powerfully reinforce the idea, common among children, that religion is all hypocrisy?
There are parents who want to pass the faith on to their children. My experience is that what children retain from their religious education is what they received at home, and little from the school. Faith is caught more than taught.
Would it not be more honest and realistic to leave the Catholic education of children in the hands of parents, who, in terms of church teaching, are the primary educators of their children, with a little – only a little – support from the parish, and let the children make a decision to ask, or not, for baptism and the other sacraments, when they reach maturity? That would likely result in a large loss of numbers, but might that not be better than what we are doing at present? Jesus said, ‘The truth shall make you free’. (John 8.32)