Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

WOMEN AND CATECHETICS IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC TRADITION

873 l Religious Education WOMEN AND CATECHETICS IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC TRADITION Mary L. Putrow THE DEVELOPMENT OF religious education in the Roman Catholic tradition is permeated by three interrelated realities. From New Testament times to presentday practice, whether it be in the home or in a more formal situation, women are at the heart of Christian education. Also, unless women were members of religious congregations, few accounts of their work have been preserved. Finally, in most historical accounts women seldom receive due recognition for their work. Mary Charles Bryce, a historian of religious education, suggests in “Pioneer Women in Catechetics” that many times priests and bishops have been given credit for work that women have done. Today women make up the majority of persons engaged in all aspects of religious education. While this phenomenon provides women places of influence, there is also growing concern about the feminization of religion , that is, seeing religion as the domain of women and children only. For 2,000 years the practice of handing on the faith in the Catholic Christian tradition has had various names: catechesis, religious instruction, religious education , religious formation, faith formation, Christian formation, and occasionally, Sunday School. Today there is a movement to reclaim early Church vocabulary, using the word catechesis and its derivatives. Catechesis is described as the development of a living, active faith through instruction. Most professionals, regardless of the vocabulary used, would insist that religious education today, besides transmitting the teachings of the Church, must include formation in Catholic Christian life. In the period of time between the early Church and the arrival of Catholics in the New World, the mode of instruction in the faith moved from purely oral teaching to the use of the written word in the form of a catechism , a summary of Jesus’ teaching as interpreted and practiced by the Church. Most catechisms employed a question-and-answer form of instruction. Initially, adults were the primary focus of religious education; with time the focus shifted to children and remained so until the present. Although today many would still equate catechesis with children, the contemporary official Church documents, particularly in the latter part of the twentieth century, strongly insist that adult catechesis should be at the center, not the periphery , of the teaching endeavors of the Church. 874 l MULTIDENOMINATIONAL MOVEMENTS—RELIGIOUS EDUCATION The Age of the Catechism When the early European immigrants arrived on the shores of the United States, among their limited possessions one frequently found a catechism written in their native tongue. Instruction in the faith became synonymous with catechism, and the proliferation of catechisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries signaled a strong faith among the immigrants to the United States, even though for Christianity’s first 1,400 years a common written catechism as such was basically unknown . “Throughout the Colonial Period of more than a century and a half, Catholics had only their long standing traditions of family prayer, the catechism learned and recited in the home, and, where available, the liturgy to preserve the faith of their children” (Collins , 49). When work moved out of the home and into the shop and factory, the home became the domain of the woman. The image of children learning their prayers at their mother’s knees could be said to be the symbol of catechesis during the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries . “The prevailing concept of woman as the moral guardian was most likely as true among the middle-class Catholics as it was in the rest of middle-class America. No evidence exists to contradict this presumption” (Dolan , 244). Religious education, and the continuation of the faith, was naturally a primary concern among Church leaders in the United States. In the statutes of Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore, Maryland, in 1784 one finds an insistence that persons “know the faith” if they are to be married in the Catholic Church. Carroll’s pastoral letter assigns the primary role of catechists to parents; however, in reality “parents” meant mother. Besides faith and moral development in the home, a traditional form of religious education was the Sunday School, more simply called “catechism.” Carroll had mandated that catechism instruction for adults was to be given following Sunday evening prayer and that children should be given instruction following the Sunday Mass. This formal teaching was the prerogative of the ordained priest. In areas where there were no clergy and no churches, a sporadic “catechism” was held whenever missionaries came through...