Catholic Homeschoolers

Are we really teaching religion?

Here you'll find a transcript of a talk given by Frank Sheed to teaching nuns in Ireland. In it, he asks these four questions, the answers to which should serve as a barometer measuring the effectiveness of the religious instruction that has been provided:

(i) Are Catholics, by and large, so equipped with knowledge of the doctrines of the Church, that if some outsider came along and wanted enlightenment, the first educated Catholic he came to would give it to him, would really expound the Church's main doctrines in such a way that the enquirer would think the matter worth pursuing with a priest? Would he, by the time he reached the priest, already have learnt a great deal?

(ii) Do Catholics really want to go to Heaven? I don't mean, do they want to go at once. I mean have they, with all their love of life, the life of here and now, a real desire to go to Heaven — not simply a desire to avoid hell, but an actual desire, knowing what Heaven is, to embrace it? Would that be a normal state of the Catholics who have been to our schools?

(iii) Take a third quite different sort of test. Supposing one of our Catholics were to find upon the table in his bedroom a religious book, say by Dr. Leen or Monsignor Ronald Knox, and a novel — which would he pick up? I realize that there are moods in which every one of us, even you, would rather have the novel. All I mean is: are those the only moods that Catholics have? If so, it means they have no very vivid interest in God, in Christ, our Lord, in our Lady, in all the major facts of reality.

(iv) One further test: A Catholic receives the gifts of truth and life that the Church has to give him, through Christ our Lord. Is he in a kind of anguish at the thought that there are others who know nothing of these gifts and are not receiving them? Can he take it quietly, can he go about his business and only occasionally say: "Poor fellows, they are unlucky"? Or is it a matter of anguish that fellow human beings should be starved of the gifts of truth and life that Christ wanted them to have? Is he as much concerned at that fact and conscious that he ought to be doing something about it, as he would be if he heard that fellow creatures lacked bread? If he is not, then it means that bread has a more real value for him than the truth and the Sacraments.