Vatican II: Expériences canadiennes – Canadian experiences

Religious Education: From Dogma to Method

448 religious education: from dogma to method Myrtle Power and John van den Hengel, saint Paul University A pproaches to religious education had begun to change in the Western Church long before the Second Vatican Council gathered in 1962. The heritage of the famous Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent, with its various national editions and its memorization method of question and answer, endured generally until the 1960s, but voices for transformation had been gathering strength decades earlier.1 There were various reasons for the transformation of the catechetical method. One reason stands out as a powerful driving force behind the catechetical movement. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the massive reshaping of the religious landscape in Europe brought on by the Enlightenment had begun to pervade popular consciousness .2 The Enlightenment was no longer the language and worldview only of the elite. Enlightenment consciousness, with its narrowly defined epistemology, its reduction of reality to the measurable and the empirical, and its reshaping of the economic life, had shown its power 1 The original Roman Catechism that issued from the Council of Trent was not in the form of questions and answers. It encouraged a methodology adapted to the hearers. Only with Robert Bellarmine, at the end of the sixteenth century, did the catechism take this form. Liam Kelly, Catechesis Revisited: Handing on Faith Today (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2000), 27. 2 See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007). 449 myrtle power & john v an den hengel to wipe away the horizons of religious worldviews. The everyday lives of people had begun to dissolve their previous dependencies on nature and God, leading them to adopt the view that their future depended on technological solutions and human know-how. As a result, the language of the catechisms, which presumed a selfunderstanding and worldview of the pre-critical age, began to lose its power of persuasion. The schema of the previous worldview was no longer the common self-reference for an increasing number of people. With this loss of a religious culture and the emptying out of the ostensive reference of religious language and rituals of faith, Catholics found themselves more and more in a religious wasteland. They were being pushed in two different directions. By the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, some religious educators became convinced that the traditional religious language had lost its rootedness in life and common experience. The questions of the catechism were no longer authentic questions; their underlying foundation had been eroded. The search began for a new approach. To explore the pivotal role that Vatican II played in reshaping the catechetical process, we begin by presenting briefly the catechetical renewal movement prior to Vatican II both in Europe and in Canada. Two women, Françoise Darcy-Berubé and Christiane Brusselmans, are recognized as bringing this renewal movement to Canada. The article then describes the impact of Vatican II on religious education, particularly through the documents that subsequently interpreted the teachings of Vatican II. The article illustrates how the Canadian catechetical process incorporated the orientations of the Vatican documents in the Born of the Spirit series, published by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) for use in Canada.3 In conclusion, the article proposes that the principles of a practical hermeneutics, inspired by the philosophy of Paul Ricœur, underlie the Canadian catechetical process. 3 The Born of the Spirit series of catechetical resources is the successor to the Viens au Père or Come to the Father series initiated by Françoise Darcy-Berubé and the catechetical team assembled in Montréal in 1962. The Born of the Spirit series (CCCB) had its origins in English-speaking Canada in 1978 and, in its second edition, is still in use in Englishspeaking Canada. 450 vatican ii the Preconciliar “Catechetical Movement” The preconciliar catechetical movement recognized the need for the Church to move out of its ahistorical self-understanding with its eternal verities and to link up with the emerging historical worldview. The first stirrings of this movement are found in the nineteenth century. It began in Central Europe. There, a search was undertaken to find better methodologies to teach the doctrines of the faith.4 For many, this search for new methods came from a realization that the approach of the national catechisms was no longer up to...