Regarding the Leuven Catholic Identity project -...

StimulusPaper

September 2010

Regarding the Leuven Catholic Identity project a consideration of the Leuven → CECV Enhancing Catholic School Identity Project from the perspective of Catholic Education in South Australia

a Stimulus Paper prepared by Paul Sharkey

Confidential DraftNot for Dissemination

Draft 1.00

Application: Paul Sharkey Director of Catholic Education 2 | Page

Table of Contents

purpose and structure of this paper ....................................................................................................... 3

1. the cultural analysis ...................................................................................................................... 3

1.1. detraditionalisation ............................................................................................................ 4

1.2. pluralisation ........................................................................................................................ 6

1.3. expressivism ....................................................................................................................... 7

2. the hermeneutic orientation ........................................................................................................ 9

2.1. Catholic identity options in response to the cultural context .......................................... 11

2.1.1. three ‘un‐hermeneutic’ options .......................................................................... 11

2.1.2. recontextualisation: the preferred Catholic identity option ............................... 13

2.2. the hermeneutic strategy of engagement ....................................................................... 15

2.2.1. an open and interrupted narrative ...................................................................... 16

2.2.2. a playful dialogue ................................................................................................ 17

2.2.3. a second naïveté .................................................................................................. 19

3. the empirical instruments .......................................................................................................... 20

3.1. The Melbourne Scale ........................................................................................................ 21

3.2. the Victoria Scale .............................................................................................................. 25

3.3. the Post‐Critical Belief Scale ............................................................................................. 27

4. implications for practice ............................................................................................................. 30

4.1. recontextualising the Religious Education classroom – the hermeneutic‐communicative model ................................................................................ 30

4.2. recontextualising the Catholic school .............................................................................. 32

4.3. recontextualising the system ........................................................................................... 32

4.4. recontextualising our ecclesial forms ............................................................................... 32

5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 32

Appendix A 50 years of Religious Education ...................................................................................... 33

Appendix B an integrated ecclesial community ................................................................................. 36

6. References ............................................................................................................................. 41


purpose and structure of this paper

This paper reflects on a significant project currently being undertaken by the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria in partnership with the Catholic University , Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium). The project is worth reflecting on in our context firstly because of the quality of cultural and theological reflection upon which it is founded and secondly because of the empirical and practical instruments that are being developed to help schools understand their Catholic identity and take action in relation to it. Those involved in this project are to be commended for their foresight and for the quality of the project outcomes currently being realised.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the Project from the perspective of our South Australian context and to consider options for our future involvement.

The paper is written in four parts.

Part I – cultural analysis: detraditionalisation, pluralisation and expressivism

Part II – hermeneutic orientation of the project: the hermeneutic qualities that engage our dialogue partners

Part III – empirical instruments: the questionnaires and scales which map a school’s Catholic identity

Part IV – implications for practice: the methods and instruments that shift a school’s Catholic identity

1. the cultural analysis

Notwithstanding the difficulty of some of the Belgian language, the experience of many educators is that the Leuven analysis speaks powerfully to our Australian context of Catholic Education. This section of the paper situates the Leuven analysis of culture in an Australian context by engaging with research that is already familiar to us from other sources. The position advanced in this paper is that these quite diverse sources reinforce and complement each other and may be drawn upon to develop a coherent picture of what is happening culturally with young people in Australia at this time. The Leuven‐CECV project not only helps educators to understand what is happening culturally, it provides leaders of Catholic schools with instruments to map their school’s religious identity and strategies to take action in relation to it. These practical issues are addressed in later parts of this paper but an appreciation of the cultural and hermeneutic foundations of the project is necessary before the empirical instruments and practical strategies might be understood.

Many educators in Catholic Education in South Australia will be familiar with the Spirit of Generation Y project that was partly funded by our Commission and undertaken on a nationwide basis with young people across Australia. 1 The current reflections also draw upon research undertaken by the ACBC Pastoral Projects Office which was published in a report entitled Catholics Who Have Stopped

1 The Spirit of Generation Y project which was a major national study conducted between 2003 and 2006

into the varieties of spirituality among Australian young people. Three of the four members of the research team published a book entitled The spirit of Generation of Y: Young people’s spirituality in a changing Australia (Mason et al, 2007). The fourth member of the research team, Philip Hughes, analysed the data separately and supplemented it with further research conducted in a number of schools. His research provides the second of the empirical studies used in this section of the paper. Hughes published his research in a book entitled Putting life together: Findings from Australian youth spirituality research (Hughes, 2007).


Attending Mass (Dixon et al, 2007). Many of us are also familiar with the cultural analysis of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, courtesy of the ongoing research of Fr James McEvoy. Although the Leuven, Canadian and Australian research programs have their origins in geographically distant places on the globe and although they were undertaken in the context of very different academic disciplines, they are seen in this paper as illuminating what is happening culturally for the families and students who are in our educational care at this time. By understanding more deeply the cultural context of our families, those of us who lead Catholic schools are better equipped to forge a Catholic identity for our schools that is appropriate and effective for our age.

With the above in mind, Part I of this paper divides into the following three sub‐sections: detraditionalisation, pluralisation and expressivism.

1.1. detraditionalisation

As indicated above, our current cultural context is characterised by the Leuven project partners as being detraditionalised and pluralised. This cultural analysis has its primary source in the work of Lieven Boeve, Dean of the Faculty of Theology at Leuven. Boeve’s characterisation of our cultural context as being detraditionalised is considered in this section of the paper and his understanding of pluralism is presented in the next.

Boeve’s understanding of detraditionalisation needs to be distinguished from theories of secularisation which have been advanced in recent decades. Secularisation theories seek to explain why religious traditions have a waning influence in many western cultures. A review of the significant research literature on secularism lies beyond the scope of this paper but the term ‘detraditionalisation’ is used here instead of ‘secularisation’ for two reasons. Firstly, detraditionalisation refers not just in the religious domain but to changes occurring across culture. History professors, for example, complain that their students are less familiar with the cultural classics as each year goes by (Boeve, 2003, 5). Secondly, ‘Christianity has not been replaced by a secular culture, but by a plurality of life options and religions – among which the secularist (atheist position is only one)’ (Boeve, 2003, 27). Whilst statistics such as those presented below make it abundantly clear that people are currently ‘un‐churching’ in significant numbers at this time, what is emerging is much more complex than simply the disappearance of religion, a disinclination to religiosity or the demise of spirituality (Boeve, 2003, 16). ‘Detraditionalism’ is the preferred term in these reflections for what is currently unfolding in our culture as people move out of traditional religious expressions into diverse and new ways of constructing their life‐worlds.

A key indicator of detraditionalism from a Catholic perspective is Sunday Mass attendance. Anyone who has been a member of a typical Catholic parish in Australia will be in a position to observe the decline in attendance Mass rates over recent decades. This anecdotal impression is confirmed by data gathered by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference Pastoral Projects Office which indicates that weekly Mass attendance dropped by more than 11% over the five year period 1996 to 2001 (from 864,000 to 765,00). The researchers indicate that this decline is likely to continue for some time to come ‘as the higher rates of attendance associated with older attenders are unlikely to be reached by younger Catholics as they get older’ (Dixon et al, 2007, 3). The phenomenon of declining attendance at Church services in Australia over the second half of the twentieth century is by no means restricted to the Catholic faith. A 49% decline of the population attending religious services at least monthly has occurred in the years 1966 to 1998 – a decline from 39% of all Australians in 1966 to 20% in 1998.

Whilst cessation of weekly Mass attendance is an early step in the process of disengagement, a later indicator is the religious affiliation that respondents self‐nominate in the national census. 775,000


people aged 15 to 24 identified as Catholics in the 1991 Australian census whereas only 715,000 nominated as such in 2001 – an 8% decline over that decade (Dixon et al, 2007, 4). The decline continues to be evident in later census reports. Researchers in the Spirit of Generation Y project were surprised that as many as 48% of the Generation Y cohort in their research stated that they did not belong to a religious tradition and the researchers noted that this figure is 13% higher than indicated in the 2006 census (Mason et al, 2007, 138). The rise of a ‘secularisation of consciousness’ is so ‘rapid and major’ that the researchers conclude that a ‘cultural revolution’ took place in Australia in the 1960s and 70s (Mason et al, 2007, 315). The declining engagement with religion among the Boomer generation since the 1970s continued to a level greater than anticipated and their children have continued the secularising trend off the low base (Mason et al, 2007, 315).

Mason et al report that ‘the majority of those under the age of 25 have little interest in the spiritual trajectory of their lives’. As has been indicated, Hughes moved away from the term ‘spirituality’ in his work with young people as it was not a concept that resonated for them. Only a minority (about 41%) of Generation Y are involved in the three types of spirituality identified by Mason and his co‐researchers. The remaining 59% have vestiges of religious orientation from early childhood socialisation in the family but only a low level of commitment to the inherited worldview and only nominal or marginal involvement in groups or associations which embody it (Mason et al, 2007, 17). The worldview, beliefs, values and ethos of Generation Y are so in conflict with the doctrine and style of religious organisations that the researchers found it difficult to see how Generation Y would seek spiritual nourishment from most of the churches as they are now (Mason et al, 2007, 125). Significant shifts will need to occur if members of this generation are to engage with Church life and practice. This shift will be particularly challenging to orchestrate because as is evident from the data presented below in Figure 1, the number of priests available for full time parish ministry continues to decline as their average age increases. In the absence of interventions to reverse current trends, the number of priests available for active ministry in the Archdiocese of Adelaide is expected to halve over the next decade. The situation in the diocese of Port Pirie is no better. The reduced numbers of young men seeking admittance into the seminary provides a further example of the disengagement of young people from the Church.

Figure 1: age and number of priests in the Archdiocese of Adelaide

As has been noted, a detailed consideration of the research literature on secularisation lies beyond the scope of this paper. Given statistics such as those quoted above, it is not surprising that some sociologists have developed secularisation theories based on loss or decline to explain the radical ‘unchurching’ that has been so pronounced in western cultures such as Australia. The decline

Archdiocese of Adelaide

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22

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20

40

60

80

2009 2015 2020

Full time parish priests

Average Age

Data from Leap Ahead [Brochure]. (2009).


theories of secularisation have been challenged in more recent times because the evidence indicates that the cultural picture is much more complex than simply a rejection of monolithic religious tradition into a homogenous secular ‘faithless’ culture. This issue is considered further in the section which follows on pluralisation.

Suffice to say at this point in the analysis that statistics such as those that have just been reviewed make it abundantly clear that Catholics have been disengaging from their Church in alarming numbers. Clearly those of us who are concerned with the religious identity of our Catholic schools need to work in different ways, given the detraditionalisation which has occurred. If fewer people are actively engaged in the life of the Church beyond school, there are fewer families who will provide the catechesis from the home and parish that we have traditionally expected for the young people who come to our schools as students. Similarly there are likely to be fewer staff who enter Catholic education with the formation needed to focus and strengthen the Catholic identity of the school. The difficulties are further compounded by diminishing resources in parishes in terms of pastoral leadership, finances and people who are equipped, motivated and young enough to reach out to younger families and draw them into the life of the Church beyond school.

One of the benefits of the Leuven‐CECV project is that it provides a way to understand what is happening culturally at this time and what the identity options are in response to those cultural shifts. The second theme in the analysis concerns the pluralisation of culture. The cultural shift is not, as the decline secularising theories would have it, unilaterally from a dominating Christian cultural narrative into a dominating godless narrative. The picture is much more complex than that and those who lead Catholic schools have a rich mixture of opportunity and challenge in the detraditionalised, pluralised environment.

1.2. pluralisation

The research quoted above makes it abundantly clear that a large‐scale disengagement with religion has been occurring over the past half‐century in Australia. Writing in a Belgian context that shares much in common with the Australia situation but is in an even more advanced state of disengagement, Boeve has offered the following conclusion: ‘the idea of “tradition” … as a given reality, into which people are initiated in order to receive their identity rather than constructing it, becomes lost’. In Boeve’s analysis, the outcome of modernisation is not a secular society without religion, it is a ‘dynamic multi‐religious society, full of complexity and ambiguity’ (Boeve, 2007, 26).

Christianity has not been replaced by a secular cuture, but by a plurality of life options and religions – among which the secularist (atheist) position, in all its variants is only one – that have moved in to occupy the vacuum left behind as a result of its diminishing impact (Boeve, 2007, 27).

Boeve argues for a pluralisation cultural model, rather than a secularisation model and the differences between the two are represented below in Figure 2 and Figure 3. In Boeve’s analysis, the cultural shift is not a straight line from active religious engagement at one pole towards atheistic humanism at the other. The culture currents are much more complex than this and present ‘a plural arena of interacting religious positions’ comprised of such groups as the following:

Chrstians, atheists, agnostics, post‐Christians, the indifferent, Muslims, Jews, the adherents of New Age, individualists, etc. Identity construction and reflection on one’s fundamental life option takes place within this space, and every choice we make in this regard establishes itself as a position within the same space (Boeve, 2007, 28).

Identity construction takes place within a multiplicity of possible life options – the classical Christian tradition has lost its overall and pre‐given unquestioned position (Boeve, 2007, 28). Young people


create their identities eclectically, interactively, iteratively and incrementally. Whilst the previous generation can become nostalgic for the totalising Catholic environment of their childhood where the faith community kept a watchful eye of their Catholic socialisation, the young person today constructs his or her identity in the midst of diverse currents such as the media and the virtual communities of social networking in what Boeve has described as a ‘kaleidoscopic ideological arena’ (Boeve, 2004, 233).

Analysis in terms of secularisation

Figure 2: analysis in terms of secularisation (Boeve, 2007, 27)

Analysis in terms of pluralisation

Figure 3: analysis in terms of pluralisation (Boeve, 2007, 28)

The Catholic school leader’s image of the prevailing culture affect the leadership that he or she offers in the religious domain. Those leaders who subscribe to the secularism theory of decline represented in Figure 2 will enact strategies in their school to counter such a linear progression into godlessness. Those leaders who accept Boeve’s image of the ‘ideological kaleidoscope’ represented in Figure 3 have a different understanding of the dynamics at play in the religious identity of their school and will take action accordingly. Some of these options for action are considered in Part II of this paper. Before reflecting on these options, this cultural analysis section of the paper concludes with a consideration of Charles Taylor’s characterisation of our culture as being expressivist in nature.

1.3. expressivism

Fr James McEvoy observed in a recent review commissioned by the South Australian Commission for Catholic Schools that ‘the strong links between society and the sacred that characterised both the mediaeval and modern periods are no longer possible’ (McEvoy, 2007).


… understandings of religion have changed amidst massive cultural change. … In this new time, it is impossible to return to the enchanted medieval age or the modern age shaped by the value of design (McEvoy, 2007).

McEvoy drew heavily in his Review on the work of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor who has characterised our cultural context as being ‘expressivist’ in nature. A key feature of the expressivist cultural context, and therefore of the mission of the Catholic school is that ‘the religious life or practice that I become part of not only must be my choice, but must speak to me; it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this’ (Taylor, 2003). The project of synthesising culture, faith and life is framed in the following terms in Taylor’s analysis and McEvoy’s recommendations to the Commission.

The fundamental understanding at work is, ‘that each of us has his or her own way of realising one's own humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one's own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority’. Conforming for conformity's sake not only makes little sense in this outlook, it amounts to an abandonment of one's own personal journey (McEvoy, 2002, 404).

McEvoy’s first recommendation in his review was for the following to occur within Catholic Education in South Australia:

… to think strategically about and develop programs aimed at leading students, staff and principals who are in the care of CESA into a fuller understanding of and expression of Catholic faith. … This task would extend to every dimension of school life so that students are constantly invited into an integration of culture and faith and come to understand every aspect of human knowledge in the light of the gospel (McEvoy,2007).

In an expressivist culture, individuals work over a lifetime to discover and fashion out their own humanity, as distinct from conforming themselves to models imposed by external authorities. The details of Taylor’s philosophical analysis of culture fall outside the scope of these present reflections on the Leuven‐CECV project. His characterisation of our cultural context as being expressivist in nature and his rejection of the secularisation theories based on decline does however complement Boeve’s analysis. Whilst neither of these analyses rely upon the findings of empirical research conducted in Australia, an examination of that research reinforces the expressivist characterisation that Taylor has made.

One of the students involved in the Spirit of Generation Y research made the following comment: ‘I think everyone’s welcome to believe what they want’. Another said: ‘everyone is open to their own opinion, but I don’t think it’s right to force your opinion on others’. Comments such as these were thematic in the Generation Y research, leading one of the researchers to make the following finding.

Young people believe strongly that they hold the responsibility for their own beliefs and spirituality. This issue goes to the heart of how young people see religion. Firstly, the vast majority of students interviewed believed that spiritual beliefs, practices and attitudes were the responsibility of each individual. There was a widespread sense of independence and self‐ownership. As one student commented, ‘…it’s a very personal thing’. Freedom of choice, being entitled to your own opinion, believing what you want to believe in, making decisions for yourself, and being respected by others for these choices, were all mentioned. … There was an assumption that if people did not own their own spirituality, it was not really theirs. … Deciding what to believe is not a one‐off process, … rather it is a process in which young people seek out


and come across new information and ideas and bounce these off what they already know and believe, and re‐evaluate and redefine these beliefs accordingly (Hughes, 2007, 126).

Young people in Australia enjoy considering issues, as long as they are not told what to believe: ‘Their hackles are raised, when it is suggested to them that they should believe this or that’ (Hughes, 2007, 107 & 192). The young people that Hughes spoke with looked at him blankly when he asked them what gave them meaning in life. He found that categories such as ‘spirituality’ or ‘meaning’ were not prominent in their lexicon. Notwithstanding the title of the underlying research project, Hughes ended up not using the term ‘spirituality’ in the title of his book, instead calling it ‘Putting Life Together’. He did this because when it came to the domains of spirituality or meaning, the young people he spoke with talked more in terms of putting their beliefs together themselves in a creative fashion.

The theme of ‘being free to choose your own beliefs’ was also present in the report written by Hughes’ co‐researchers in the Spirit of Generation Y project. They found that the majority of participants responded in the affirmative to the statement that it was 'okay to pick and choose your religious beliefs' and a majority of respondents also affirmed the statement that ‘morals are relative, there are no definite rights and wrongs for everybody’. Australian young people are also very reluctant to declare that only one religion is true – only 13% of respondents supported this statement (Mason et al, 2007, p. 302). The researchers were surprised at the high level of eclecticism among respondents, even among those who described themselves as following one of the traditional religions, such as Christianity (Mason, et al, 2007,p. 307).

The paradigm has shifted from identity formation within the context of commitment to a particular religious tradition to individuals putting beliefs together themselves from disparate sources. Hughes argued in his report that this leads to a certain ‘vagueness of faith’ which he attributes to cultural pluralism which ‘lays the responsibility’ for decisions in matters of faith on the young people themselves (Hughes, 2007, 192).

The challenge for Catholic educators is to find a way to contribute effectively to the identity formation of young people in the detraditionalised, pluralised and expressivist cultural context. The strong orientation within the Faculty of Theology at Leuven is to address this challenge in a hermeneutic way. Some of the contours of this ‘hermeneutic way’ are now considered in the section which follows.

2. the hermeneutic orientation

A simple definition of hermeneutics is that it is ‘the art of interpretation’. One could however spend a lifetime exploring what this means theoretically and its implications for the religious identity project. Even a brief encounter with the various hermeneutical approaches being explored at great depth by professors in Leuven opens up a wealth of possibilities for educating at the interface between faith and culture in our time.

If Catholic faith is understood to be a series of static, universal and unchanging truth claims and if Religious Education is understood to be a process of imparting those claims as they were formulated in a particular epoch, there is little need for interpretation – and therefore little need for hermeneutics. The teacher simply passes ‘the faith’ on to the student as a Catholic package of truths which require interpretation neither by teacher nor student, only memorisation and assent by all those who experience the Catholic educational process. If however Catholic faith is understood as being born anew in each age, ever old and ever new, then it will need to be re‐interpreted in each age, especially when significant cultural shifts occur. Those who accept that our age is characterised


by expressivism where individuals need to fashion out their own identities will understand that Religious Education is a space that is ‘interpretation rich’. Those who appreciate the pluralisation and detraditionalisation which has occurred in culture over the past half century will understand the need to build many different types of bridges to engage students in all their diversity with the richness of Catholic faith. They will understand that these bridge‐building projects cannot be undertaken by the teacher alone, they must be projects that unfold in partnership with students who are active agents in their own identify formation. They will also understand that the expressivist, detraditionalised and pluralised context means that students will ‘put life together’ (to use Philip Hughes’ phrase) in a wide variety of ways.

Philip Hughes in his analysis of the data from the Spirituality of Generation Y research project has found that Australian young people make a distinction between two types of knowledge: the agreed knowledge of Science and other knowledge which is more a matter of preference and opinion. By and large, students accept the claims of science and the basic picture of the world it presents. The timelines established by historical method, the spatial dimensions of geography and astronomy all fall within the area of agreed knowledge which is represented in the centre of the diagram in Figure 4 below. Around this area of agreed knowledge however is a ‘grey area’ where there is no agreement, only personal preference and taste. Knowledge in the grey zone is a matter of personal opinion where individuals put life together, each in his or her own way. Hughes found that religion belonged very clearly in the grey zone for Australian young people. He found that this need to engage critically with traditions and actively construct an identity was strong within the prevailing Australian culture but not evident in a parallel study he undertook in Thailand. He found in his interviews of Buddhist and Christians that religious faith is not something to be questioned and that the very idea of questioning religion seemed strange to them (Hughes, 2007, 132).

Whilst young people in Australia accept the findings of science as being agreed knowledge, religion falls into quite a different category – a grey zone – where claims reduce merely to a matter of preference and opinion. The contours of this grey zone are represented below in Figure 4.

Figure 4: two categories of knowledge in the young person's world (Hughes, 2007, 125)


Whilst knowledge in the arena of science was seen to be determined by evidence and founded on the authority of experts, knowledge in the arena of religion was seen as one in which personal decisions must be made, picking and choosing what to believe (Hughes, 2007, 126). This finding was confirmed by the other researchers associated with the Gen Y research project. The following quotation captures well the expressivist orientation of young people (and not only the young) at this time.

Many people (and not only the young) now regard religious or spiritual beliefs as having nothing to do with the realm of history, fact or 'hard reality'; but instead as each person's imaginative construction of their world … While this view clashes violently with the Traditional view of religion as (also) making statements about reality, Gen Y's view is coherent, free from self‐contradiction, and has one aspect with which traditionalists would enthusiastically agree: faith is more than intellectual assent to a series of propositions; it does involve the life of imagination and feeling as well. The traditionalist would of course add that nonetheless, faith is not reducible to pure subjectivity (Mason, et al, 2007, 325).

When it comes to matters of religion, ‘truth’ means what is true for me and Generation Y is quite comfortable with truth being something quite different for every individual and there is little sense of truth being determined or constrained by any standard external to the individual (Mason, et al, 2007, 324).

In a seminal article for the Leuven‐CECV approach, Boeve identified three options that a Catholic school could take in terms of its religious identity in this expressivist, pluralised and detraditionalised cultural context. These options are considered in the next section.

2.1. Catholic identity options in response to the cultural context

In an article reflecting on the religious identity of a Catholic university, Boeve (2006) identified four options for Catholic institutions to respond to the pluralisation and detraditionalisation of the cultural operating environment for their schools. Three of the options were seen to lead eventually to a secularisation of the school and one option – the option of recontextualisation – was seen as being the only one able to strengthen the Catholic identity of the school at this time. The recontextualisation option employs hermeneutic strategies of engagement with students and these are also considered in this section of the paper. The first three options considered immediately below are labelled ‘un‐hermeneutic options’ because they are not informed by the hermeneutic principles and practices recommended in this project. Whilst the first of the un‐hermeneutic strategies explicitly intends to secularise the school, the remaining two seek to foster a Catholic identity but because they are ineffective in the current cultural context, they lead to a secularisation of the school by default.

2.1.1. three ‘un‐hermeneutic’ options

A central plank in Boeve’s analytic platform is that there is a widening gap between the prevailing culture in Belgium and Catholicism as a religious worldview. Boeve identified four options that could be taken in response to this widening gap. The first three of these options are grouped together here in this section because they are seen by Boeve as providing an ineffective response to the cultural situation and therefore have the effect of secularising the religious identity of the Catholic school. The fourth option – the recontextualising option – is considered in the next section at some length because it is the one seen by Boeve as providing the means for focusing and strengthening the religious identity of the school at this time.


The first of the three options below is to secularise the school whereas the other two seek to build up its religious identity, but have the reverse effect over time because they fail to grapple with the reality of the culture in which the school’s religious identity is constructed. Those who are familiar with Boeve’s analysis will realise that verbs have been used as labels in place of his compound nouns. The labels for the three options have been re‐framed in this way to bring into sharp relief the choices that school leaders have before them as they address the challenges facing the religious identity of the school in which their religious leadership is excerised.

1. secularise: abandon all claims to Catholic identity, remove explicit references to Catholic faith and transform the University into a pluralistic educational institution in which the originating Catholic identity takes its place among other fundamental life options and no longer enjoys any particular primacy or privilege (Boeve, 2006, 247)

2. reconfessionalise: reassert an explicit and distinctive Catholic identity by moving away from the prevailing culture and reshape the institution so that is ‘for Catholics and by Catholics’ – the Catholic profile in such an institution may vary from highly conservative and defensive to open and communicative (Boeve, 2006, 250)

3. harmonise: reformulate Catholic faith so that it appeals to a wider audience – this entails a stripping away of the particularity of elements of Christian faith, including its mythological framework and presenting it in its human significance – a particular emphasis is placed on a conglomeration of so‐called Christian values that harmonise with the perceived ‘prevailing culture’ of humanitarianism (Boeve, 2006, 250)

It is inconceivable that any leader of a Catholic school would publically commit themselves to a strategy of secularisation of their school. Indeed, if they embarked upon such a course, there would be swift action to correct it. Options two and three are more likely to be taken by leaders because their goal is to strengthen the religious identity of the school – by moving away from culture into a particular understanding of Catholic faith in the reconfessionalising option and by moving towards culture in an attempt to integrate Catholic perspectives in the harmonising option.

The reconfessionalising option is problematic because the research reviewed in Section 1 above makes it clear that Australian young people will be unlikely to accept an identity for themselves that is not co‐constructed by them. The harmonising option is also problematic because it compromises essential element of Catholic faith for the sake of being more ‘accessible’ for the students. Whilst this option can seem attractive, the problem is that essential elements of Christian faith are removed, or hollowed out and a reductionism occurs which empties Catholic faith of its inner structure and vitality.

Those who are familiar with Boeve’s analysis will recognise that I have used a label for the third option above that differs from one Boeve employs. I have called the third option ‘harmonise’ rather than ‘Teaching values from a Christian perspective’ which is the label Boeve uses (2006, 251). I have done this because my experience is that it is not just so‐called Christian values or ethics which are included in the consensus package. A range of reductionist versions of Catholic ritual, sacred text and doctrine are included in reductionist forms in the consensus ‘Catholic’ packages produced in the third harmonising option and whilst it is true as Boeve notes in another text (Boeve, 2004, 237) that the harmonising option does highlight many consensus values, it is not reducible to them.

The recontextualising option is preferred and considered at greater depth in the next section. Boeve notes that this option consists of balances which are ‘so delicate that distortion or misrepresentation occurs easily’ (Boeve, 2006, 254). Those who are familiar with the recontextualising option understand how easily it can be confused with the reconfessionalising or harmonising projects. The


differences are subtle but very significant in terms of their long‐term effect on the religious identity of the school.

2.1.2. recontextualisation: the preferred Catholic identity option

The recontextualising option promotes Catholic identity in all its particularity by means of an ongoing dialogue within the contemporary, pluralised and detraditionalised cultural context. This approach provides Catholics in the institution with the opportunity to deepen and reflectively clarify their own faith in dialogue with others, rather than denying the specificity of their own commitment in a reductionist project which homogenises difference into an ‘indifferent sameness in a broader, all‐embracing consensus’ (Boeve, 2006, 254). The recontextualising approach not only acknowledges plurality, particularity, narrativity, it welcomes these realities as an enrichment of the learning process. 2 The hermeneutic space advocated in the sections which follow provides educators with a space in which to employ the recontextualising approach in their educational practice.

One way of understanding the need for Boeve’s recontextualisation option is to reflect on the insight that every new cultural context ‘challenges the Christian tradition to reformulate its offer of meaning in a credible manner’ (Boeve, 2003, 7). This is so because Christian faith is not detached from the context or culture of believers but interwoven with it. When the context or culture changes, so too does the Christian faith that is expressed in it (Boeve, 2007, 3). When the culture changes rapidly, educational approaches need to move just as swiftly. Pope John Paul II captured the relationship between faith and culture rather succinctly when he said that ‘a faith that has not been fully inculturated is a faith that has not been fully received’ (John Paul II, 1982). Boeve’s method provides a way to ‘reformulate the Christian offer’ in ways that respond to the pluralised and detraditionalised culture of our time.

An accessible way for educators to understand the recontextualisation approach is to contrast it with the life‐centred catechesis that was used by many religious educators in the 1970s and 80s. The major approaches to Religious Education over the past 50 years in Australia are surveyed in 0 and reference is made in that survey to the ‘4 Point Plan’ approach from the Melbourne Guidelines.

2 This presentation of Boeve’s strategy of recontextualisation has not delved into the agenda he has with

modern correlation theology because the concern here is with what educators are doing in their schools, not with the methods employed by theologians in their academic discipline. Clearly the two activities are related but the focus in this paper remains with the educational project, not the debates unfolding in some theological quarters. In proposing his recontextualising method, Boeve has argued for an end to modern correlation theology, a way of doing theology which includes such substantial figures as Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx and David Tracy. Given the status of these figures, it is not surprising that his call has been strongly criticised in many quarters, not least from those who embrace the correlation method and believe that they are every bit as engaged with the cultural context as Boeve is. Boeve himself is clear that his method is not ‘anti‐correlational’ and although he prefers to avoid the correlation label altogether, has described his method as ‘post‐modern correlation’ (Boeve, 2004, 245). Boeve’s preferred term for his approach is recontextualisation. For Boeve, the postmodern sensibility is attuned to heterogeneity and radical historicity and is suspicious of totalising frameworks and therefore ‘calls attention to the limits, contextuality, particularity, and contingency of any construction of meaning’ (Boeve, 2004, 242). The postmodern mindset is always concerned to avoid dealing with plurality, otherness and difference in closed, hegemonic ways. The contribution Boeve makes to this project is that he challenges Catholic educators to move deeply and carefully into the cultural plurality of those enrolled in the school and to fashion out a religious identity that is genuinely responsive to it. The correlation debate does not need to be a stumbling block for involvement in the project. In fact it is clear that project members from Leuven have a variety of positions themselves in the correlation debate and what is shared in common is a concern to fashion out a hermeneutic approach that is genuinely responsive to the detraditionalised and pluralised cultural circumstances of our time.


A religious educator employing the approach to teach the Eucharist might ask students to reflect on experiences of celebration in their own lives and then connect (correlate) those experiences to the Eucharist as a celebration in the context of Catholic faith. This correlating method is relatively straightforward when the students come from similar Catholic backgrounds and have some experience of the Eucharist. In a context like this it is possible to create a simple link (monocorrelate) between the life experience of the student and the aspect of Christian faith being taught. When the student backgrounds diversify however and the experience of the Eucharist diminishes in a detraditionalised context, the correlating task becomes much more complex and monocorrelation is no longer possible. Those who developed the life‐centred approach to religious education can claim, with some legitimacy, that their approach does not have to be employed in a reductionist fashion and there is no reason why the approach cannot be used in a way that respects the particularity of both the religious tradition and the diverse life experiences of those who engage with it. Having acknowledged this possibility, the practice is also recognised where teachers either strip away essential aspects of the tradition in order to render it more accessible for students or seek to homogenise the life experience of the students and create artificial links between that homogenised experience and some element within the tradition.

The effect of cultural detraditionalisation is to open a gap between culture and faith and this means that the correlating ‘bridge’ must traverse a wider span. In a pluralised cultural context, the bridge does not just go in one direction however and the correlating task becomes more difficult again when multi‐correlations must occur with students from quite diverse backgrounds. Concepts such as family, celebration, meal, faith, community, Jesus have many different meanings, or even no meaning for the students in their diversity of backgrounds. Pluralism and detraditionalisation does not mean that correlation is impossible, it means that it becomes a much more complicated dance than it once may have been. Educators need to become more sophisticated in their approach to ensure that they are engaging with the diverse backgrounds of their students and they cannot presume that the students are all committed to, or even aware of the aspects of Christian tradition that are being correlated. Religious education becomes multi‐correlational in the detraditionalised and pluralised cultural context.

The process of recontextualisation begins by confronting plurality and otherness and the goal is for it to locate Christian faith in a pluralised arena (Boeve, 2007, 41).

The result is no longer a presupposed consensus on truth and justice but rather a tense conversation carried out respectfully and dedicatedly between a multiplicity of voices. Through this conversation, Christians become acquainted with the particularity of their own and other narratives, not to be viewed as something that needs to be overcome at all costs, but rather as the condition in which people live, work and give meaning. They participate in the inter‐ideological conversation, starting from their own narrative that speaks of a God who interrupts and causes interruption when narratives are closed shut (Boeve, 2004, 252).

A mono‐correlating approach in the hands of less expert teachers rides roughshod over the diverse experiences students have had of life and faith and seeks to impose a ‘false consensus’ and a reductionist narrative insensitively over those diverse experiences. Pollefeyt notes in his review of mono‐correlating pedagogies that students became ‘extremely allergic’ to the exclusive and repeated linking of human experience with Christian tradition (Polleyfeyt, 2008a, 13). Boeve’s recontextualising methodology seeks to respond with acuity and sensitivity to the particularity of each student’s narrative and to the particularity of the faith tradition being correlated. Rather than seeing the pluralised / detraditionalised context as an impediment, Boeve sees it as bringing opportunity and energy into the pedagogical process. Recontextualisation in a Religious Education classroom seeks to situate the Christian narrative within the rich diversity of fundamental life options evident in the lives of the students with a view towards bringing the particular Christian


tradition to life (Pollefeyt, 2008a, 16). The new multicorrelational approach is not criticising correlation per se, but the way in which correlation theology has been used by some teachers (Pollefeyt, 2008a, 13).

The following imperatives can be indentified in the writings of Bove and Polleyfeyt which advocate for the recontextualising project.

1. contextual necessity: classrooms are not homogenous places – they are more like ideological kaleidoscopes (Boeve, 2004, 233)

2. pedagogical necessity: the students glaze over and are allergic to attempts by teachers to correlate their human experiences to a closed Christian narrative (Polleyfeyt, 2008, 13; Kelly, 2004, 291) – when one first addresses the experience of the young person, their response is often enthusiastic – however the monocorrelative didactics brings the shutters down as the students are aware of the hidden agenda of their teachers and have an allergic reaction to the programmed and strategic approach to human experience – they feel their experience is being manipulated (Pollefeyt, 2008b, 310)

3. theological necessity: God is always larger than we can imagine – the genuinely open encounter with the other can provide the opportunity for God to become visible in a unique way at the border between our narrative and naming of God and that of the other (Boeve, 2004, 250)

4. political necessity: whenever a single narrative is imposed, victims are made – whenever a narrative profiles itself as a meta‐discourse, other narratives are either suppressed, expelled, quashed or silenced (Boeve, 2004, 250).

Every leader of a Catholic school that I know of would be clear that the education their students experience needs to be meaningful for them and authentically engaged with the Catholic tradition. The Leuven‐CECV project presents a clear message that hermeneutic approaches need to be taken if this is to occur in our time.

2.2. the hermeneutic strategy of engagement

It is the task of a hermeneutical pedagogy of religious education to support methods which stimulate the possible correlations between human experience and religious traditions and world views and which make these correlations serve the identity construction of the learning subject, the class, the school, the church and/or society. Through confrontation with conflicting interpretations of reality students are made aware of their religious and ideological presuppositions and those of others. Thus, not the Christian tradition is the courses' point of departure, but the tensions and conflicting interpretations present in the class room (Polleyfeyt, 2009, 36).

The acknowledgement of particularlity, plurality and narrativity are of paramount importance in the hermeneutic approaches being advocated in the Leuven‐CECV project. The Catholic faith is never watered down in the hermeneutic approach, rather its essential features are foregrounded and highlighted in a hermeneutic dialogue with the students. The religious identity of the school is not advanced by homogenising the ‘otherness’ of the variety of worldviews in the school community, it is animated by a capacity to bring out the conflicting interpretations and worldviews and to engage them skilfully with elements drawn from the Catholic tradition. Some of the characteristics of that hermeneutic engagement are now considered.


2.2.1. an open and interrupted narrative

We recall from the reflections at the outset of this paper that ours is an expressivist age where individuals create their own path, rather than surrendering to conformity with a model imposed from the outside. Research into the outlook and practice of Australian young people indicates clearly that Australian young people develop their beliefs by coming across new information, bouncing new ideas off what they already know and redefining their beliefs accordingly (Hughes, 2007, 126). The get their ‘hackles up’ when beliefs are imposed upon them (Hughes, 2007, 192). The teaching process cannot be overly didactic and for any message to have resonance, it must be delivered in a way that suits the learner (Mason, et al, 2007, 339).

Given findings such as these, Boeve’s call for an open narrative has a particular appeal. He argues that Christianity has no future as an all‐encompassing meta‐narrative but only as an open narrative: a narrative that is not closed but allows itself to be interrupted time and again by a God who gets involved in history but is not captured by it (Boeve, 2003, 175). The open narrative offers orientation and integration but does not seek to incorporate everything into its own narrative in a totalitarian way. Master narratives have no appeal in the expressivist context but an open invitation into a search for truth by religious educators grounded in the Catholic tradition has the potential to create dialogical and playful spaces where students and teachers alike discover the truth which is disclosed in the learning process. Religious educators bring their own tradition, images and concepts into the teaching and learning process but they understand these elements of their belief system have been developed in specific, concrete, historically‐situated contexts. They also understand the need for their students to be given the open space to develop their religious identities within their own specific, concrete and historically situated contexts. ‘When the narrative closes itself and determines to enclose God, openness disappears and God withdraws’ (Boeve, 2003, 175). An open narrative calls each dialogue partner to harness the power of the alterity of the other to recognise the elusive God who always beckons further (Boeve, 2003, 106).

An awareness of the ‘contingent particularity’ of our own narrative does not have to lead to a relativist position. On the contrary, an awareness of the uniqueness of our narratives ‘compels us anew to take them seriously. … An open narrative is aware that it should be taken seriously on its own grounds’ (Boeve, 2003, 94). Skilled religious educators know how to create learning spaces which allow the subject matter to catch the learners/players/dialogue partners up into its truth and rather than being imposed as a master‐narrative, Religious Education is a continuing invitation which beckons the learners further into the truth of the subject matter. Boeve introduces the category of ‘interruption’ into his account of theological method because he believes it signifies an intrusion that opens a closed narrative without destroying it.

Ultimately, the resurrection of the Jesus who died on the cross is the paradigm of interruption. God interrupts the closing of Jesus’ narrative by the religious and political authorities and radically opens it. … Following Jesus means engaging the challenge of the other who interrupts our narratives (Boeve, 2007, 47).

Within this paradigm, pluralism is not an impediment for Religious Education, it is the context in which it unfolds. The Christian narrative is not destroyed by pluralism, it is challenged and interrupted and has the potential to become the locus in which God is revealed in new ways. Religious education calls its participants into a praxis of ‘being both interrupted and interrupting – respecting the very otherness of the other while at the same time also becoming the other of the other, questioning, challenging the other criticising him or her when he or she tends to become hegemonic’ (Boeve, 2007, 48).


The category of interruption takes a middle path between two polarities in theological method by holding continuity and discontinuity together in a ‘tensive relationship’ (Boeve, 2004, 246). As has been noted above (Section 2.1.1), one response to pluralised and detraditionalised culture is to attempt to harmonise Catholic faith with the prevailing culture so that it appeals to a wider audience. This approach was rejected because it stripped essential elements of the faith away, particularly its transcendent dimensions. A ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ movement has emerged in theology which seeks to correct the perceived excesses of engagement with culture. Theologians of this persuasion believe that theology has been ‘infected’ by its engagement with culture and thereby disempowered by it. These theologians have replaced the principle of continuity between faith and culture with one of rigid discontinuity. In this schema theological discourse is at odds with modern human discourse and the solution is to move away from culture to offer a radical (conservative) counter narrative which has a ‘more original dependence on God’ (Boeve, 2007, 37). Boeve proposes the category of interruption because he believes Christian faith is neither a ‘counter culture’ nor a partner of culture (Boeve, 2007, 41). Boeve argues that by adopting a methodology which embraces the interruption of the other and is much more sensitive to difference and particularity, it is possible to create an open narrative which is characterised not by the removal of correlation but by the multiplication of it.

Leaders of Catholic schools whose professional practice is informed by hermeneutics understand that the Catholic identity of the school is created neither by withdrawing from culture nor by being subsumed by it. Boeve’s notion of interruption is a metaphor for the need to hold continuity and discontinuity together in a ‘tensive relationship’. The interruption does not close the conversation, it simply alerts the dialogue partners to the many junctures where new voices sound and the conversation that ensues is forever enriched by the diverse inclusions. Instead of being afraid of the interruptions, the Catholic educator engages them. The narrative is kept open and engaging for members of the school community and ‘spacious’ enough for them to have room to move in their identity creating projects. Those who lead Catholic schools effectively in our time know how to create a ‘middle space’ where all involved are free to bring their questions, hopes, ideas and worldviews fully into the educational process and where the Catholic tradition is equally freely and confidently opened out in a school whose Catholic identity is explicit, engaging, particular, authentic and dialogical. Something of the freedom and indeterminancy of this middle space is now considered.

2.2.2. a playful dialogue

Hans‐George Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory as published in 1960 demonstrates little appreciation of plurality and detraditionalisation in the cultural context. Gadamer’s hermeutics has also been criticised as lacking the critical consciousness that is a hallmark of the Leuven‐CECV project. Two Gadamerian analogies do however help Catholic educators to recognise the freedom and creativity that is associated with the hermeneutic approach to the construction of the identity of the Catholic school. Gadamer argued that genuine understanding could be likened to what happens in a good conversation or in a game that is played properly.

conversation

We say that we ‘conduct’ a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus a genuine conversation is never the one we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation, or even that we become involved in it. The way one word follows another, with the conversation taking its own twists and reaching its own conclusion, may well be conducted in some way, but the partners conversing are far less the leaders of it than the


led. No one knows in advance what will ‘come out’ of a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like an event that happens to us (Gadamer, 1989, p. 383).

When religious education is working well, religious educators do not try to convince the students of their beliefs (Pollefeyt, De Vlieger & Smit, 2003, 5), rather they try to create a space which allows a conversation to occur in which the truth of the matter being discussed is able to be disclosed. The religious educator in a Catholic needs to be someone whose life and professional practice is enlivened by Catholic faith but this faith can never be imposed on another – only appreciated as a gift by the person to whom it is offered. Conversations are thwarted when one of the dialogue partners refuses to be led by the conversation’s subject matter and seeks instead to ‘railroad’ the conversation by imposing his or her own point of view as a set of rails for the conversation to run along. The prerequisite for genuine conversation is that the dialogue partners surrender to the ebb and flow of the conversation as its subject matter unfolds.

This does not mean that the religious educator has nothing to say in the religious education ‘conversation’; in fact, quite the reverse. A good conversation only occurs when the dialogue partners have something to say. This some‘thing’ is not imposed on the other but offered freely and responsively and the space becomes dialogical when the conversation takes over its dialogue partners. They are no longer leading the conversation, they are also being led by it and they are being led into the truth of what the conversation is about. When the focus is on the disclosive truth of the conversation’s subject matter, the conversation never leads into relativism, it always becomes an earnest search for the truth. Leaders of Catholic schools create the conditions for elements of the Catholic faith to be an integral ‘voice’ in the formative conversations which unfold in their school. The outcome of a good conversation is never known in advance; it is always indeterminate. Gadamer argues that what is true for conversation is also true for human understanding more generally. We discover the truth, not by having it imposed on us but by entering into spaces which are disclosive of truth.

play

The indeterminate middle space of an authentic conversation is also present in a game that is played properly. In Gadamer’s reflections on what it is like to be lost in the playing of a game, he argued that the game draws the players into its power and fills them with its spirit (Gadamer, 1989, p. 109). The player who refuses to ‘get into’ the spirit of the game is described as a ‘spoilsport’. Part of the spirit of a game is that the players do not have control of the game’s outcome (Gadamer, 1989, p. 106). The whole point of the game is that the outcome is undecided ‐ it is unclear just what will happen. In a game of chess, for example, the spirit of the game would be destroyed if the players changed the rules about how to move the pieces whenever they felt the game was not going their way (Weinsheimer, 1985, p. 104). ‘The attraction of a game, the fascination it exerts, consists precisely in the fact that the game masters its players’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 106). For Gadamer, play is as much a ‘being‐played‐by’ the game as it is a ‘playing’ of it. ‘Ball games will be with us forever,’ Gadamer wrote, ‘because the ball is freely mobile in every direction, appearing to do surprising things of its own accord’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 106).

Analogies of conversation and play are present in the reflections of hermeneutically oriented descriptions of religious education. Boeve, for example, describes religious education as ‘a sort of refuge, a free and open space, a play or training ground’ which helps to construct a school in which identity, otherness and plurality are questioned, deepened and enriched through confrontation and dialogue (Boeve, 2004, 252). Haers describes the school as a ‘frontier space’ – ‘a laboratory for playing, for exploring and designing the society at large and for preparing people for the future of society’ (Haers, 2004, 325). Sawicki urges religious educators to ‘let the young people play – prayer is play’. ‘Don’t let the cognitive agenda of the school curriculum crow out all opportunities for


affective learning. Include art, song, ritual, architecture, fabric and embroidery, furniture, decorations and dance’ (Sawicki, 2004, 287).

As was indicated in the opening to this sub‐section of the paper, Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory has been criticised by a number of philosophers because of a perceived lack of critical consciousness in it. The quotation below from literary theorist Terry Eagleton provides an example of this critique.

History for Gadamer is not a place of struggle, discontinuity and exclusion but a ‘continuing chain’, an ever‐flowing river, almost, one might say, a club of the like‐minded ... there is no speculation that the influence [of tradition] might be anything but benevolent (Eagleton, 1996, p. 63).

Those who lead Catholic schools need to know how to create a Catholic identity for their school that is genuinely engaged with the tradition but school leaders also need to know how to incorporate a critical edge to their Catholic identity constructing endeavours. If this critical consciousness is lacking, the tradition is not tested and shaped to fit the contours of the receiving context, it is simply imposed as a template that is imported from elsewhere. Many of the members of school community will also feel alienated from a Catholic identity that does permit the space to engage critically with the tradition as disclosed in the school. If however, the critical consciousness becomes all pervasive, the community is distanced from the tradition and no longer participates in it. Our current reflections on hermeneutic space conclude with a consideration of Paul Ricoeur’s proposal for the development a Second Naïveté. Ricoeur’s proposal includes a critical dimension but also specifies a post‐critical space where the interpreter participates in the tradition in a new way.

2.2.3. a second naïveté

Those who lead Catholic schools understand that the religious identity of the School involves many critical conversations – critical in terms of their significance for life, and critical because they involve criticism of the subject matter. As has been noted above, one response to criticism coming from the cultural context is to reframe Catholic faith so that the elements likely to give rise to criticism are removed. Another is to disengage from the prevailing culture and assert a version of Catholicism that does not have a home in culture. Paul Ricouer’s notion of the second naïveté provides educators with a schema that allows them to move into a critical mode of engagement with elements from the tradition but to also have a place to go afterwards that re‐connects members of the community back to the elements in new ways. Two complementary modes of interpretation are evident in Ricoeur’s account of the hermeneutic process.

The major question is: How shall we receive – understand and evaluate – our own cultural heritage? Shall we greet it with Nietzsche’s ‘art of distrust’, what Paul Ricoeur has called the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’? If so, hermeneutics becomes unmasking, primarily the dispelling of illusions and error, as not only in Nietzsche but also in Marx and Freud. Or shall we greet it in the spirit of the ‘hermeneutics of tradition’ seeing in history the sources of our own possibilities, of insights that no contemporary enlightenment can eclipse? In his dismantlings of Western metaphysics, Derrida clearly belongs to the hermeneutics of suspicion; the theorist of chief concern here, Hans‐Georg Gadamer, belongs to the hermeneutics of tradition. As Ricoeur argues, the two hermeneutics are complementary rather than dichotomous (Crusius, 1991, p. ix).

Ricoeur offers a threefold schema for the process of interpretation: first second naïveté, critical engagement and second second naïveté. The process begins with an uncritical appreciation of the element from tradition and moves into a critical phase when the interpreter steps back from the text to question it from one or more perspectives. Points of incongruity may be identified, along with particular interests. Critical engagement distances the interpreter from the traditional element in


order to see it more clearly for what it is. Interpretation does not stop however at critical engagement. The end point is a second naïveté. Here one is prepared to move beyond reading the element critically to allow oneself to be read by it. This entails ‘a reciprocal questioning – a dialogue whereby the interpreter too becomes interpreted’ (Weinsheimer, 1991, p. 128). ‘The second naïveté is not the first naïveté; it is postcritical and not precritical; it is an informed naïveté’ (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 496).

School leaders who are still in their first naïveté find it difficult to appreciate the position of those who struggle with the tradition. Members of the school community who cannot move beyond a critical engagement with the tradition remain alienated from it. Catholic educators need to know how to enter the critical space with members of their community and also how to move beyond that critical space back into a post‐critical appreciation of what it is that the tradition has to say. Polleyfeyt has noted that the religious educator cannot choose where the students will be vis‐à‐vis the text they are studying. The ‘beginning situation’ and the points of difference that the students have among themselves and with the text are entirely dependant on the topic and the pupils themselves (Polleyfeyt, 2008b, 324). It is the teacher’s role to draw from various sources (experiences, passages from the Bible, traditions, current events, film clips, communities, theologies, magisterium) to deepen and enrich their understanding of the topic. At times the teacher will urge the students to engage critically with the text if it is obvious that they have not done so; at other times the teacher will urge the students to find a post‐critical place where the text ‘reads’ them and the process culminates in a post‐critical appropriation of what it is that the text has to say.

3. the empirical instruments

Four empirical instruments have been developed to provide school leaders with the means to map the profile of the religious identity of their school. Each of the instruments provides a different ‘window’ on the religious identity of the school and all of the instruments, taken together, provide a very detailed composite picture for school leaders to devise pastoral strategies for the short, medium and long term to develop the Catholic identity of their school in the current cultural context in all the richness of its many limitations and opportunities. The four instruments may be described as follows:

The Melbourne Scale: a questionnaire which maps the options that a school can take in response to the detraditionalised and pluralised cultural context – the scale is based on the cultural analysis of Lieven Boeve described above in Section 2.1

The Victoria Scale: a questionnaire constructed out of two dimensions developed by Ter Horst and Hermans – Catholic Identity (the degree to which the school’s culture is genuinely Catholic) and Solidarity (the degree to which different worldviews and practices of community members are actively engaged in an ongoing process of identity construction in the school)

The Post‐Critical Belief Scale: a questionnaire which maps attitudes towards religious belief – developed by Dirk Hutsebaut and constructed in two dimensions: transcendence (the degree to which a person has a sense of transcendence in their philosophy of life) and symbolic/literal (the manner in which an individual processes religious belief – symbolically or literally)

The Doyle Questionnaire: a questionnaire which maps a range of elements of a Catholic school’s religious profile concerning Catholicity, values education, and diversity.

Each of these instruments is now considered in turn.


3.1. The Melbourne Scale

The Melbourne Scale is a questionnaire which maps the options that a school could take in relation to the detraditionalisation and pluralisation of its operating environment. Four of the five options in the Scale were developed from the analysis of Lieven Boeve presented above in Section 2.1. The four options identified by Boeve that a school could take regarding its Catholic identity were named above as follows: secularise the religious identity, reconfessionalise it, harmonise it with culture or recontextualise the identity by engaging in the strategies of recontextualisation which have been described in previous sections. A fifth option was included in the Melbourne Scale to include schools that have not yet recognised that the cultural context challenges their school’s religious identity and requires a strategic response.

Two versions of the Melbourne Scale have been provided below in Figure 5 and Figure 6 respectively. The version in Figure 5 is the official version and developed by the project partners and should be used whenever the scale is being cited. The version in Figure 6 has been developed for this paper to explore the use of the scale specifically from the view of perspective of the school leader. With that in mind, the commentary below relates to the scale as represented in Figure 6. The translation to the official version is easily made.

The sloping outside lines of the cone represent the gap that has grown between culture and Christianity over recent decades. The options that a school can take to this growing gap are represented at various points around the cone. The ‘pre‐Intervention Institution’ has been placed at the bottom of the cone because the leaders of this school have not yet recognised that the cultural dynamics of pluralisation and detraditionalisation require a response from them if the Catholic identity of their school is to be preserved from secularisation. In this option the school simply continues doing what it has been doing in the religious domain because the perception is that culture and faith are already being synthesised appropriately in the life of the school. The next option is placed slightly higher in the cone where the perceived gap between culture and Christianity is still relatively small. Here the school employs the reductionist monocorrelational strategies discussed above in Section 2.1.1 in an attempt to Harmonise Christianity with the culture of the students. Two further options are presented at the upper end of the cone’s extremities. The Secularise option is presented at the top right hand side of the cone. Here the religious identity has been eroded to the point where there is no longer anything distinctly Catholic about the school. It simply reflects the prevailing culture. At the other extreme is the Return option where an attempt is made to reconfessionalise the school by returning to a Catholic identity from a previous age. Instead of embracing culture and engaging in a reductionist rendering of the religious tradition (the Harmonise option), the choice in this option is to reject culture in favour the religious tradition. The final option is to Recontexutalise the Catholic identity of the School. This option is also placed high in the cone to recognise the significance of the gap between Christianity and the prevailing culture. The Recontextualise option is placed in the middle of the cone to represent the dialogical relationship between faith and culture that lies at the heart of the hermeneutic strategies being advocated in the Project. The brown dot above the Reframe option indicates the Project’s affirmation of this option as being the most effective for focusing and strengthening Catholic identity at this time. The rationale for such a preference has been developed above in Sections 2.1.2 and 2.2.

If a school takes no action in response to the pluralisation and detraditionalisation of the operating environment, it will find that its religious identity is subsumed by the prevailing culture. If the school seeks to reassert a particular version of the religious tradition on its students – reconfessionalise them – it will find that a majority of students will reject the closed narrative that the reconfessionalising school seeks to impose on them. This rejection will occur even when the school pretends to be receptive to what the students have to say but actually has a fixed vision of what the


Catholic identity is and shall remain. The students quickly realise that ultimately the reconfessionalising school will not shift from its already‐determined vision and they withdraw from the dialogue as a consequence. If the school takes a reductionist approach in its attempts to harmonise the tradition with the prevailing culture, it will find that the distinctive features of the religious tradition are eroded over time, so that, once again, the school is secularised. The Project advocates the use of recontextualising strategies so that the school’s Catholic identity is re‐framed as a new expression within the diverse cultural contexts of its students. In the recontextualising dialogue, due respect is given both to the distinctive features of the religious tradition and also to the worldviews of each of the dialogue partners who are being invited to engage with it. The skilled hermeneutic educator creates a ‘middle’ space where the truth of the tradition is disclosed in a conversation which has no predetermined outcome but which always seeks to discover how the tradition might be expressed authentically anew in the lives, minds and hearts of those who engage with it. In this context, diversity is not only recognised but welcomed as an enrichment of the new expression (and appropriation) that will be created as the recontextualising strategy unfolds.


Figure 5: The Melbourne Scale

2010

2000

1990

1980

1970

1960

1950pre‐Intervention

institution

Harmonisereductionist strategies

Recontextualise

Hermeneutic strategies

Restore SecularisePreferential identity option on theological

grounds

Figure 6: 'Recontextualised' version of Melbourne Scale developed by Paul Sharkey for heuristic purposes

Recontextualisation

preferential school identityoption on theological grounds


The Melbourne Scale includes two levels of measurement: the current practice of the school (the factual level) and the identity type that members of the school community would like to see their school evolve in the future (the normative level). The various options described above are abstractions and represent extreme positions on a continuum. The Melbourne Scale gives rise to a school profile that is comprised of a large number of possibilities within the continuum of each option and mixed combinations between options.

3.2. the Victoria Scale

The Victoria Scale is based on a typology developed by Ter Horst and Hermans which is constructed out of two dimensions:

Catholic Identity: the degree to which the school’s culture is genuinely Catholic

Solidarity: the degree to which different worldviews and practices of community members are actively engaged in an ongoing process of identity construction in the school

Four types of school can be developed from these two dimensions:

Monologue School (Maximal Catholic Identity, Minimal Solidarity): the school works from a fixed vision of Catholic identity (closed narrative) with little openness to developing new expressions of Catholic identity in a process of hermeneutic engagement with the plurality of members of the school community

Colourless School (Minimal Catholic Identity, Minimal Solidarity): the school is open to the plurality of its members but does not engage them actively and explicitly in an ongoing process of identity construction – each community member is left individually to construct his or her own identity without the school’s challenge or support

Colourful School (Minimal Catholic Identity, Maximal Solidarity): members of the school community show great interest in the individual’s identity development but there is no commitment to engaging with the Catholic tradition as an integral and foundational element in the identity formation project

Dialogue School (Maximal Catholic Identity, Maximal Solidarity): the school’s culture and practice is animated by the Catholic tradition and it welcomes the multiplicity of voices of its members as an opportunity to re‐profile Catholic identity in the midst of present‐day plurality – a strong commitment to identity formation in the context of Catholic beliefs and values

The Victoria Scale includes two levels of measurement: the current practice of the school (the factual level) and the identity type that members of the school community would like to see their school evolve in the future (the normative level). The various options described above are abstractions and represent extreme positions on a continuum. The Victoria Scale gives rise to a school profile that is comprised of a large number of possibilities within the continuum of each option and mixed combinations between options. The preferred school identity option is the Dialogue School which is strongly committed to the identity formation of students in conversation with the Catholic tradition.


Figure 7: the Victoria Scale

Two types of dialogue have emerged in the factor analysis of results from the Victoria Scale: a kerygmatic dialogue and a recontextualising dialogue. These dialogue types can be distinguished by the degree to which the dialogue can be characterised as an Open Narrative – see Section 2.2.1 above. Kerygmatic dialogue does not seek to learn from the otherness of the dialogue partner but engages in the dialogue process primarily as a means to proclaim a static version of Catholic faith. Dialogue is embraced because it is seen as a means to engage the minds and hearts of those to whom the Catholic message is being proclaimed; it is not seen as providing a means for developing enriched understandings of Catholic faith. Kerygmatic dialogue partners understand the ‘Catholic package’ of beliefs, truth claims, rituals and moral beliefs as being relatively established and stable. They therefore see little need for it to be varied significantly to fit the circumstances of time and place. In fact non‐Catholic or anti‐Catholic views and practices need to be held at arm’s length in the dialogue because they have the dangerous potential to undermine the Catholic mission of the school.

Recontextualising dialogue is predicated on the view that the Catholic faith, whilst meaningful and valuable, cannot be simply proclaimed (however pseudo‐dialogically) in a pluralised, detraditionalised context. The truth of Catholic faith always exceeds particular formulations and needs to be continuously re‐contextualised if it is to be experienced as meaningful by the wide range of dialogue partners in the Catholic school. The goal of a recontextualising dialogue is to develop a new expression of Catholic faith that is grounded in the unique context in which the dialogue occurs. In this form of dialogue, the dialogue partners learn from each other and are mutually changed and enriched by the experience of their dialogue. We should not only be open to the new expressions of faith which will emerge from a recontextualising dialogue, we should rejoice in the richness of what unfolds when, guided by the Spirit, an active and confident dialogue occurs. A school rediscovers its Catholic identity time and time again when it is genuinely open to the otherness of its members and carefully discerns and listens to what is at work in their spirits. God is revealed in new and unexpected ways. The two types of dialogue depicted in Figure 8 exemplify the difference between the kerygmatic and recontextualising dialogue forms. In the kerygmatic form, the symbols for Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism are placed outside the dialogue circle which only has the Christian cross at its centre. The recontextualising dialogue form has these religious traditions placed inside the

preferential school identity option on theological grounds


discursive field around the Christian cross. One of the benefits of diagrams such as Figure 8 is that it can give rise to very worthwhile debates among school leaders as to what they are trying to do in the school. For example, it is very possible for a recontextualising leader to prefer the left hand depiction of the dialogue process because it more clearly conveys the foundational significance of the Christian narrative for the school. Such a leader would remain open to the contributions made by voices coming from other religious (and non‐religious) traditions but would want to ensure that the Christian narrative was engaged very actively in the dialogue. The logic of the right hand image is that the Cross is in the centre and larger than the other traditions but closely engaged with them. Obviously the visual representations have no intrinsic merit, their value is in the quality of conversation, debate, enhanced understanding and commitment to shared action that they can foster.

Figure 8: two types of dialogue identified in the Victoria Scale

Contours of the recontextualising dialogue were explored above in Section 2.2. In this type of dialogue, school leaders skilfully draw upon elements from the tradition to enliven and illuminate a dialogical space that welcomes the otherness of the dialogue partners, even as it confronts that otherness with the otherness of Catholic faith. By respecting the pluralism of the dialogue partners, by drawing skilfully and sensitively from the tradition, by exploring hermeneutic intersections as they arise in the learning process and by keeping the learning space playful and dialogical, the truth of what the tradition has to say is disclosed in terms and categories that are co‐constructed mutually by the dialogue partners. The Dialogue School is not a relativist school; it is the preferred option in this Project because it gives rise to a new expression of Catholic faith that is co‐created by the students and therefore accessible and invitational for them.

3.3. the Post‐Critical Belief Scale

The basic question that gave rise to the creation of the Post‐Critical Belief Scale is: What happens in the mind and heart of a person when confronted with a religious element (story, event, experience, ritual)? 3 The Post‐Critical Belief (PCB) Scale maps attitudes towards religious belief (as distinct from what they believe or how deeply they believe it). The PCB Scale identifies patterns of dealing with religious beliefs and the four options presented in the scale can be understood in the context of Ricouer’s theory of the second naïveté considered above in Section 2.2.3. In Ricoeur’s schema, the interpreter begins with an initial ‘naïve’ connection with the object being interpreted. In order for the interpreter to deepen his or her understanding of the element being interpreted, it is necessary to engage in a process of reflection which entails stepping back from the element to engage critically

3 Personal conversation with Dirk Hutsebaut 29 November 2010.


with it – to identify points of incongruity, dissonance, vested interests, etc. The interpretive process is not complete however until the interpreter is ready to move into a third phase of being reconnected to the element in a new way – a second naïveté. The Post‐Critical Belief (PCB) scale can be used to ascertain whether a person has a preferred place in one or other of these interpretive places. Some people have strong beliefs but are not prepared to engage critically with those beliefs. Others are critically engaged with elements of the tradition but are not able or willing to give the assent of faith to those elements. Others adopt a stance that is neither critical nor believing. Finally, others place their belief in the elements but in ways that have benefited from the fruits of critical engagement.

The PCB scale was designed by the psychologist of religion Prof. Dr. Dirk Hutsebaut and is based on a religious attitudinal typology developed by David Wulff (1991; 1997). Wulff’s typology employs Paul Ricoeur’s notion of Second Naïveté and one of its strengths is that it considers religious belief from two perspectives:

Does the person believe in God or have a sense of transcendence in their philosophy of life?

How does the person process that belief – symbolically or literally?

These two dimensions can be placed on axes as represented in Error! Reference source not found. below to create the following four cognitive belief style options:

Literal belief (High Transcendence, High Literal): belief statements are literally affirmed and the Literal belief (High Transcendence, High Literal): belief statements are literally affirmed and the tradition becomes a closed narrative.

External critique (Low Transcendence, High Literal): belief statements are rejected – they are understood literally and from an external standpoint.

Relativism (Low Transcendence, High Symbolic): belief statements are seen as being merely matters of personal opinion and taste – there is no sense of a God who is actually and really present to humanity.

Second Naïveté (High Transcendence, High Symbolic): belief statements are grasped in an ongoing process of interpretation. There is a clear sense of a God who is really and actually present, but always mediated through symbol and never grasped literally.

In this project the preferred position is one of high openness to transcendence with some level of interpretation and an openness to the literal affirmation of faith beliefs. That preferred position is represented visually by the yellow dot on the graph in Figure 9 Figure 1which has a high score on belief but is close to the literal clarity that God exists, without ever crossing the line to believe that God is grasped literally in belief statements. God is always grasped symbolically by the person in the Second Naïveté quadrant but in the preferred position for this project, there is an openness and closeness to the literal truth of what is disclosed in the belief statements.

Each of the quadrants has something to offer to the formulation of a Catholic identity and they each have the potential to harm that identity. The literal believers provide an ‘anchor’ for belief in the school; they can become the tradition bearers who seek to hand the faith to others as they have experienced it themselves. Ultimately though, this literal faith will need to be recontextualised because the evidence is that young people will eventually reject faith statements that they have not had a hand in shaping and appropriating for themselves. The positive aspect of the relativist position is that it brings into sharp relief the plurality of belief positions in the school. The Catholic project is only realised when these positions are respected and taken seriously. Ultimately though, the ‘Catholic dialogue’ does not occur unless the dialogue partners are invited to engage with elements of the Catholic tradition, even as their own particular beliefs are respected and welcomed. Those in the external critique quadrant name and denounce aspects of the tradition which require


renewal and correction. The Church recognises that it is always in need of reformation and purification (Lumen Gentium, 8) and those who attempt to hide or gloss over this reality place obstacles in the way of the faith development process. Ultimately though the faith development process requires more than critical distanciation; it requires the participation, immediacy and post‐critical belief associated with Ricoeur’s understanding of Second Naïveté. The quadrant of Post‐Critical belief is positioned here as the preferred cognitive belief style. It too however can become a counterproductive stance if the symbolic dimension is so emphasised that the link with what has been historically revealed in faith is broken. It can also be counterproductive if the faith commitment entailed in Second Naïveté leads to an insensitivity towards the particularity and difference needing to be respected in the various dialogue partners.

Post‐critical belief (or second naïveté) is valued in this project because it is an essential capability for those who would recontextualise Catholic school identity in a context that is pluralised and detraditionalised. If there is no belief, there can be no invitation into faith. If there is no capacity for moving beyond literal re‐tellings of the tradition as received, there can be no capacity to accompany learners as they receive the faith tradition in their very diversified and often detraditionalised contexts. Second naïveté faith accepts truth claims about the transcendent but always with the awareness that such claims are mediated, and therefore accessible only through interpretation. Second naïveté faith is committed, rather than relativist, but is also aware of the need for ongoing searching – ‘a nomadic journey in the footsteps of Abraham and Sarah, whereby every arrival at an oasis shows a new beckoning horizon which will be a new point of reference’ (Pollefeyt, 2008b, 322).

One of the points marked in Figure 9 is a position adopted by many young people in our time – ‘somethingism’. Those who hold this position have an extremely low sense of the transcendent but feel – vaguely – that there is ‘something’ transcendent beyond the here‐and‐now. Those in this position are unwilling or unable to say what this something is with any level of specificity or commitment. The External Critique and Literal Belief positions are very different in their responses to the transcendent but can be seen as similar in their desire for certainty. Pushed past a certain point this desire can be seen as a defence against the anxiety that comes from living in the middle space where there is a preparedness to believe that something else might be the case from what I presently hold to be true. As has been noted above (Section 2.2), a preparedness to enter the indeterminate middle space is a precondition for being prepared to incorporate new understandings and perspectives during the process of interpretation. The open narrative and the category of interruption described above in Section 2.2.1 require the same preparedness to enter the middle space that welcomes the ‘intrusion’ of the other as an opportunity to enrich and deepen one’s current understanding. The more symbolic one’s way of thinking is, the greater the perceived distance between the symbol and its referent. Whilst such distance has the advantage of making it possible to accept a variety of viewpoints as being true, the danger is that truth itself is relativised out of existence. With this in mind, the normative point advocated within the Project for this scale is placed higher on the transcendent axis and lower on the symbolic.


Figure 9: Post‐Critical Belief Scale

The preferred position advocated within the Leuven CECV project is represented by the brown dot above. This position is in the Second Naïveté quadrant but with a lower level of symbolic thinking and a higher level of openness to transcendence. Higher levels of symbolism are not promoted in the Project because the interpreter becomes too removed from the referent of the element being interpreted. The interpreter never crosses the line though into literal belief because there is always the recognition that the transcendent cannot be absolutely grasped and that any element from the tradition always needs to be interpreted in order for its truth to be disclosed.

4. implications for practice

4.1. recontextualising the Religious Education classroom – the hermeneutic‐communicative model

A hermeneutical‐communicative model of religious pedagogics begins with an invitation to students to test the assumptions and presuppositions of their opinions and view of the world (Polleyfeyt, 2008b, 320). An important strategy in this regard is work with the ‘hermeneutical intersections’ which emerge in the teaching and learning process. The starting place is not Christian tradition as such but the tensions and conflicts of interpretation which emerge between students or between the teacher and students. These tensions and conflicts arise out of a ‘plurality of presuppositions underlying the class discussion of a certain subject’ (Pollefeyt, 2008a, 14).

BELIEF DISBELIEF

SYMBOLIC

LITERAL

Symbolic way

of thinking

Literal w

ay

ofthinking

exclusion of transcendence

inclusion of transcendence

something‐ism

Literal Belief literal affirmation

Second Naïveté Post‐critical Belief symbolic affirmation

External Critique

literal disaffirmation

Relativism Awareness of Contingency

preferential belief position on theological grounds


This interpretive way of teaching and learning is the result of a confrontation with influxes from various sources, namely the prevailing culture, one's own life story, and the existing narrative religious/ideological Traditions (Pollefeyt, 2008a, 14).

These conflicting interpretations function as a ‘driving force’ in an ongoing process of clarification with students (Pollefeyt, 2008b, 321). The religious education classroom becomes a playful or dialogical space where students can engage in ideological searching and reflection in dialogue with the Christian tradition and, in so doing, practice their identity construction (Polleyfeyt, 2008b, 325). The classroom narrative is kept open and the hermeneutic intersections are actively explored as a means to interrupt any closed narratives that are encountered during the learning process.

The teacher’s role in the Belgian Catholic religion curriculum is to be a witness, specialist and moderator (WSM) during the learning process. As a witness, the teacher ‘dares to lead Christian conversations’ by offering his or her ‘constructed, particular, Christian synthesis of faith’ to the students (Pollefeyt, 2008b, 312 & 323). The teacher’s synthesis remains open by being offered to the students as a work‐in‐progress. The teacher’s specialist knowledge draws artfully upon resources from culture and Catholic faith to inform and enliven the work that students undertake at the hermeneutic intersections. Teachers act as moderators when they guide their students in the construction of their identities (Pollefeyt, 2008b, 312). This requires significant sensitivity on the part of the teacher regarding what lives in youth culture and it demands a capacity ‘to join young people in their searching, their amazement, even in their doubting and mocking. … there is no other place where God comes to pupils than their own world’ (Pollefeyt, 2008b, 323). In the WSM hermeneutical communicative model, the teacher is grounded in his or her own tradition but is open to other traditions and to accompanying young people as they search and construct their own identity. The teacher does not see him or herself as the ‘one path, truth and life, but as a guide, or rather as the person who shows pupils cliffs and beacons, traps and points of reference in their search for meaning’ (Pollefeyt, 2008b, 323). This accompaniment takes the students on a ‘communal search for truth, goodness and beauty’, the ultimate end of which always lies in the future (Pollefeyt, 2008a, 15).

This journey can be seen as a nomadic journey in the footsteps of Abraham and Sarah, whereby every arrival at an oasis shows a new beckoning horizon which will be a new point of reference (Pollefeyt, 2008b, 322).

The model is not a relativist one as any viewpoint encountered in the learning process is subject to rigorous critical evaluation by a teacher who witnesses to the Christian tradition and draws upon specialist knowledge to ensure that the positions are properly grounded and morally solid (Pollefeyt, 2008a, 15). As students become familiar with the method, they too grow in their capacity to critique the positions that are advanced by their peers. Religious educators are not afraid of the different traditions and perspectives that emerge in the pluralist learning context because they understand that suppressing these perspectives leads to the creation of a closed narrative and a withdrawal from the conversation. Students then construct their identities in a space apart from Catholic formation where their voices are included and welcomed. More than this though, the Catholic educator understands that the Christian tradition is animated and enriched by pluralism when the teacher is skilled in the WSM model. By exploring the hermeneutic intersections and keeping the learning space playful and dialogical, the teacher avoids stereotyping the subject matter for students and thereby avoids the ‘shutter phenomenon’ as students learn to expect the unexpected with surprises being able to emerge at any time (Pollefeyt, 2008b, 317).


4.2. recontextualising the Catholic school

Leaders of Catholic schools know that whilst the Religious Education classroom is a critical expression of the school’s Catholic identity, there are many other places and ways in which students might encounter Catholic faith and its implications for life. The Spirit of Generation Y research clearly indicates that students are very receptive and open to retreat experiences (Hughes, 2007, 87), immersion experiences with people in need (Mason et al, 2007, 342) and eco‐religious sensibilities (Hughes, 2007, 115). These are but a few ‘sites’ where educators skilled in the hermeneutic approach advocated in this project might work with young people to engage them with the richness of Catholic faith.

4.3. recontextualising the system

The skills and dispositions advocated in this paper are not easily acquired. They will be familiar to our higher performing leaders and teachers. We need to do more together to foster them in our educators more generally. The Leuven‐CECV project is already modelling cooperation between a Catholic University in Belgium and four dioceses in Victoria. The fruits of this project can be made more generally available if the resources of other dioceses are joined to those that are already contributing. There are obvious implications for the training and accreditation of teachers to teach in a Catholic school, as well as their ongoing professional formation over a career lifetime.

4.4. recontextualising our ecclesial forms

It will no doubt be obvious to anyone who understands formative processes that the goals of the Leuven‐ CECV project cannot be realised in isolation from the broader Church. Our current ecclesial structures and relationships need to be recontextualised if families, schools and parishes are to find ways to work together more holistically to proclaim the gospel to the young people enrolled in Catholic schools. The ecclesial form presented in Appendix B provides an example of the kind of creativity that needs to be exercised and the ‘middle space’ that needs to be created if our young people and their families are to experience the life of the Church beyond the Catholic school.

5. Conclusion

The context for pastoral ministry in Australia has never been more exciting. Whilst there is much cause for despondency when one considers the statistics presented in Section 1.1 of this paper, there is much cause for hope and energetic action when one considers the possibilities opened up by this project. Leadership, Catholic faith and committed action is as crucial now as it ever has been in the history of the Church in our nation. If those who proceeded in faith before us were able to build a system of parishes and schools from the ground up, we most certainly can rise to the challenge of ensuring that those families, parishes and schools can continue to be places where the Gospel is disclosed dialogically in our time.


Appendix A 50 years of Religious Education

A. 50 years of Religious Education Religious educators in Australia have demonstrated time and again over the past six decades that they have the imagination and commitment necessary to keep innovating as the cultural context for their educational endeavours shifts. In the early 1960s, in response to the kerygmatic renewal associated with theologians such as Josef Jungmann, educators broke with the rote learning pedagogy and the dogmatic emphasis of the catechism that had held sway for the best part of 400 years since the invention of the printing press. The My Way to God series developed by Father John F Kelly and his team in Melbourne was prescribed for use in all Australian schools in 1962 by the Australian Catholic Bishops Committee for Education. This series was described in the following terms by Maurice Ryan in his succinct and clear overview of Religious Education in Australia over the course of the second half of the twentieth century.

The kerygmatic texts encouraged teachers to use a variety of teaching strategies in line with approaches adopted in other curriculum areas: singing, gestures and creative movement, mining, puppetry, storytelling and dramatisation, modelling and construction activities, creation of class and individual books, nature collection and excursions were ways suggested to teachers to engage students’ imagination (Ryan, 1997, 41).

The kerygmatic renewal made an important contribution to Religious Education because it encouraged educators to return to the early Christian sources such as Scripture and the liturgy of the early Church. At the heart of the kerygmatic theologians was a ‘joyful proclamation of the message of Jesus Christ for the Church and the world’ (Ryan, 1997, 41). It helped educators to move on from a pedagogy of propositions where teachers ‘taught the faith’ in a string of systematised questions and answers that were rote learned by their students. Notwithstanding this important contribution, the kerygmatic approach to Religious Education was short‐lived in Australia because it was seen as taking too little account of the life experience and interests of the students. On a theological level, ‘new insights on the theology of revelation forced the realisation that catechesis was a far broader concern than could be encapsulated in the proclamation of the Church’s salvation story’ (Ryan, 1997, 47). A way needed to be found to integrate the gospel message with the life experience of the students. Religious educators experimented with a range of approaches to open the classroom out into the wider world of the students. Many classrooms became less formal and schools created specialist R.E. areas where the classroom furniture reflected a commitment to a more interactive pedagogy. In some schools, Religious Education no longer appeared as an academic subject on the report sent home to parents. Students came to the R.E. classroom with a different set of expectations about the dynamics and processes they would encounter in the life‐centered space they were entering.

A life‐experience approach to catechesis was developed in Melbourne in the 1970s around a four‐point plan: Experienced Shared, Reflection Deepened, Faith Expressed and Insights Reinforced. This 4 point plan was to become extremely influential for religious educators in many dioceses as it gave them compass bearings for navigating their way through the sometimes challenging terrain at the interface between the Church’s tradition and the life experience of their students. The Shared Christian Praxis approach developed by Thomas Groome was also influential in a number of dioceses from the 1980s onwards. This approach drew from emancipatory sources such as Latin American liberation theologians, feminist theologians, critical theorists and Paolo Freire’s notion of conscientização. Commentators have noted however that many religious educators have blunted the sharper edges of Groome’s critical pedagogy and the praxis approach has resembled previous catechetical approaches, especially the four‐point plan in the Melbourne guidelines (Ryan, 1997, 77).


Even as early as the mid 1970s a number of religious educators had begun to ask questions about the appropriateness of catechetical approaches which relied upon faith sharing in the classroom and therefore a critical mass of students who were being formed by ongoing catechesis in the home and the parish. The increasing diversity of student background meant that in most classrooms the requisite prior catechesis could not be presumed upon. There were also criticisms that teaching which relied upon four or five steps all too easily became contrived or predictable for the students who became ‘allergic’ to the overuse of the methodology (Pollefeyt, 2008a, 13). In a light‐hearted way teachers would recognise this by admitting that their students did not always know what the question was but they always knew that the answer was Jesus. In many schools, the status of Religious Education as an authentic learning area in the curriculum suffered through the perceived (and actual) lack of rigour in what was being taught and assessed. Students could be reluctant to bring a pen into class because the presumption was that it would be all talk and no action. The R.E. class was seen in some quarters as a place for achieving pastoral objectives with students. In secondary schools the time allowed for Religious Education in the timetable began to reduce and teachers could be allocated an R.E. class to ‘top up’ their teaching load. The status of the R.E. faculty in terms of teaching competence and academic rigour began to suffer. Whilst primary schools do not typically have timetables or faculties, the same decline in terms of time, expertise or rigour was observable.

Proponents of Groome’s Shared Christian Praxis approach or other approaches to religious education which draw upon the experience of the students could legitimately argue that their methodologies do not necessarily need to lead to a loss of rigour or inappropriate assumptions regarding the faith background of students. It is conceivable that the life experience of students can be drawn into the learning process, even as rigorous educational outcomes are achieved.

Because of the difficulties which had emerged in the life‐centred approaches, from the early 1980s attempts were made in Australia to ‘recast Religious Education … in educational terms’ (Ryan, 1997, 89). For example, it became popular to develop courses which studied the world religions and it was possible for these courses to be accredited by State curriculum authorities because they were ‘dispassionate, descriptive and comparative’ rather than confessional in nature (Ryan, 1997, 107). Many students and teachers found it refreshing and fruitful to break free of the closed narrative of study of their own tradition but questions began to emerge about the congruence of such approaches with the mission of the Catholic school. For example the external and objective study of the world religions hinders the ‘empathic understanding’ and the ‘engaged perspective’ necessary for genuine understanding of a religious tradition (Pollefeyt, De Vlieger & Smit, 2003, 2). The religious studies approach was also criticised in some quarters because it lacked personal relevance for the students and had the potential to turn religion into a museum collection with exotic exhibits but with ‘no compelling links with what students themselves experience as important issues of life’ (Rossiter, 1996, xxv – cited in Ryan, 1997, 112). A turn back to meaning and identity as focal points for Religious Education is evident in research currently being coordinated by Rossiter – for example The Search for Meaning and Identity Research Project (Rossiter, 2003).

As the use of outcomes and competency standards have become commonplace in the state curriculum frameworks, many dioceses have developed frameworks for Religious Education that have matched the frameworks used in the other learning areas. In South Australia the Crossways framework for Religious Education employs the curriculum elements from the SACSA Framework used for the other learning areas in the curriculum and thus the framework employs such elements as strands, standards, outcomes, Key Ideas, examples of evidence and reference to the skills, attitudes and dispositions associated with the outcome. Those who developed the framework were also keen, where appropriate, to integrate into the framework elements from past approaches such as those that have been described above.


With the advent of the Australian Curriculum, the SACSA Framework will be replaced and religious educators will be on the move again as they position Religious Education as an integral element in the curriculum of the Catholic school which has implemented the newly introduced national . As the next chapter of the Religious Education story opens in Australia, it will be fascinating to witness the options that are made around the nation in response to the introduction of the Australian curriculum. In the midst of the curriculum debates and flurry, it will be important to remember the expressivist, pluralised and detraditionalised context in which our students live their lives. The contours of an approach that has been developed with that context in mind is considered in the next section.


Appendix B an integrated ecclesial community

Paul Sharkey

July 2010

Integrated Faith Communitiesa schools’ perspective

Appendix B an integrated ecclesial community

Integrated Faith Communities: A Schools’ Perspective [Paul Sharkey VG July 2010] 37 | Page

1. background

This Reflection paper was prepared at the request of the Moderator of the Curia to reflect on the pastoral strategy of the Integrated Community from a schools’ perspective. For the purposes of this paper, the term ‘Integrated Community’ is used with the meaning below.

An integrated community within our Family Centred Church is a single ecclesial community that builds Church out of the school and parish community by creating strong and multi‐layered bonds to other parts of the local Church. It is recognisably much more than a school and a parish sitting side by side with occasional intersection. It is an organic integration of all constituent elements. 4

The pastoral strategy of building a Church out of a school site is currently being explored as a means for the Church to reconnect with Catholics, particularly those Catholic families who are not currently active in the life of the Sunday gathered communities. It makes sense to situate a pastoral strategy of engagement in a Catholic school because approximately half of the Catholic families in the Archdiocese have their children enrolled in Catholic schools and the school community provides a potentially rich point of engagement for the Church with its families.

The following reflections are the personal views of the author. They need to be refined through testing and debate within the community of Catholic Education and the broader Church.

2. 3 models of relationship between the Catholic School and the broader Catholic Church

Three models of relationship between the Catholic School and the broader Catholic Church are depicted below in Figure 10. An outmoded understanding of the mission of the Catholic school is that exists to ‘deliver’ young people to Church on Sundays (Model 1). Most leaders have moved on from this model because they understand that schools have little control over what families decide to do on Sundays so they seek to do the very best they can with students during the week in terms of the liturgical, pastoral and other facets of school life that could be considered as being ecclesial (Model 2). Whilst these efforts are admirable, and even heroic in some instances, they fall well short of what is required because no matter how powerful the ecclesial experiences of students whilst at school, they all too easily terminate upon graduation unless they are joined up during the school experience with the broader community of the Church (Model 3). Even in those parishes where the school enjoys a very positive relationship with the broader parish, it is unlikely that families of graduating students will ‘join up’ with the parish‐beyond‐school unless they have been ‘joined up’ in significant ways during the school experience.

Model 3 in this schema corresponds to the Integrated Community that has been advanced within the Leap Ahead project. It is a relatively easy model to comprehend but deceptively difficult to enact. Subtle but significant paradigm shifts are required on many levels within both the school and the broader parish if the Integrated Community is to be formed. Professional educators are oriented towards the skills required to run schools and, in a similar vein, Parish staff are oriented towards the catechetical skills necessary to deliver the services that are associated with the traditional parish. The development of a ‘third discipline’ beyond education and prior to catechesis is identified within these reflections as being essential if the movement from a Model 2 relationship between school and the broader parish into the Integrated Community model is to occur.

4 This definition was taken from thinking undertaken in the context of the Leap Ahead Project Team.

Model 1 Relationship

The School is NOT Church This model is common with committed Catholics who see the Sunday gathered community in the parish as the only authentic expression of Church. The ecclesial dimension of the Catholic school is rejected.

The mission in this model is to shift weekday school families into the Sunday gathered community.

The model FAILS because:

the choices that families make about what to do on Sunday lie outside the control of the school

weekday school families are disinclined to transplant themselves out of the school into a different Sunday community

many Sunday communities have a low capacity to welcome school families – especially when most of the Sunday community is elderly

Parish Church

Catholicity of Catholic School is measured by the movement of people from the School community which is understood not to be Church into the Parish Church that gathers on Sunday.

School isNOT Church

Schoolnot Church


Church EQUALS School This model is common with school leaders who recognise the ecclesial dimension of their school and who understand the difficulties associated with Model 1 relationships.

The mission in this model is to make school as positive an experience of Church as possible (with little connection being made to the broader parish).

The model FAILS because:

to be Catholic is to be in communion with the broader Church and to celebrate the Day of the Lord

once students graduate from school, in this model they graduate from Church

SchoolIS Church

Parish Church

School is THE Church for families in the school because more than 85% of these families do not experience the broader parish – e.g. at Mass on Sunday

Church= School


Growing Church out of School The defining feature of this model is that the school and the broader parish form a single identity, rather than being two separated identities in relationship.

Even when a Model 2 school enjoys a very positive relationship with the broader parish, the ecclesial experience concludes at graduation unless school families are joined to the broader parish during the years of schooling.

The mission in this model is to grow the Church out of a school site by making many multi-layered connections with the broader parish in such modes as liturgy, service and social. This model is deceptively difficult to implement as institutions like ‘parishes’ and ‘schools’ do not change easily.

The model demands:

the creativity to develop ‘ecclesial’ experiences that are authentically Catholic, genuinely integrated with the life of the school but opened out into the broader community

community development skills so that families are enabled to develop experiences that are attractive and life-giving to them as well as being ‘owned’ by them

a sufficient number of experiences that genuinely include those who are not students or families of current students

Figure 10: Models of Relationship between the Catholic School and the Wider Parish

Integrated Community

A single ecclesial community that builds Church out of an integration of the school community and the wider parish by creating strong and multi‐layered bonds between the school and the wider Church.

1. Recognisably much more than a school

2. Organic integration of all constituent elements

So are a range of other integrated services

So isschool

So isParish

Kerygma (Proclaiming)

Leiturgia (Liturgy)

Didache (Teaching)

Koinonia (Community)

Diakonia(Service)

Family is asite of Church


3. facing the adaptive challenge

Somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of Catholic families in Catholic schools are not actively engaged with the life of the Church beyond the school. If these families are to be evangelised, new pastoral strategies need to be developed. The ones we have been using no longer connect with the majority of our families. Einstein is reputed to have said that a form of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. With this in mind, there seems little point in ‘trying harder’ with the pastoral strategies we have used in the past. We are faced with what Heifetz & Linsky (2002) have called an ‘adaptive challenge’ which they contrast with ‘technical challenges’. Whilst technical challenges are able to be solved using current knowledge, adaptive challenges are more complex and go beyond what we know. Adaptive challenges have the following features:

they take time to resolve

the people with the problem are both problem and solution

they require difficult learning

they generate disequilibrium and avoidance If Heifetz & Linsky’s analysis is correct, the way forward for us will involve pastoral strategies which invite the community into solving its own problems. This will entail difficult learning, disequilibrium and avoidance as well as time. A ‘community development’ approach is proposed here as providing a framework for dealing with this adaptive challenge.

4. ‘community development’

Community development seeks to empower individuals and groups of people by providing these groups with the skills they need to affect change in their own communities. … It starts from the principle that within any community there is a wealth of knowledge and experience which, if used in creative ways, can be channelled into collective action to achieve the communities' desired goals. Community development practitioners work alongside people in communities to help build relationships with key people and organisations and to identify common concerns. They create opportunities for the community to learn new skills and, by enabling people to act together, community development practitioners help to foster social inclusion and equality. 5

One response to the adapative challenge presented in our current pastoral context is for leaders in the school and the broader parish to ensure that ministries within their community are informed by a community development skill set. This skill set needs to be integrated into the skills required to work in a school or in the broader parish. Those working in schools will still need to be educationally proficient and those working in ministries within the broader parish will still need to be adept in various catechetical ministries. The following list provides a synthesis of the types of skills that are required if we are to face up to the adaptive challenge presented in our current pastoral context. Those who would engage in a ministry of outreach need to develop the following capabilities:

1. spirituality: a living faith that provides a compelling witness

2. a capacity to reflect theologically from a Catholic place

3. an ability to understand and appreciate the contemporary outlook and mindset of families – especially those families not currently engaged in the life of the Church beyond school

4. able to network and offer effective invitations to families, especially those families who are in special need or those who are not engaged with the life of the Church

5 Community development. (2010, June 30). In Wikipedia. Retrieved 11:01, July 11, 2010, from

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Community_development&oldid=371042666

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[draft 1.00] a consideration of the Leuven → CECV Enhancing Catholic School Identity Project from the perspective of Catholic Education in South Australia (September, 2010)

5. is creative and able to devise pastoral strategies and structures that connect with those families in new ways

6. appreciates the Church’s understanding of the unfolding stages or ‘moments’ of conversion which begins with the desire of the human heart for love and beauty, then moves into discipleship, then abandonment of self in Christ and finally, moved by the Spirit and nourished by the sacraments, prayer and charity, journeys towards perfection

7. builds the capacity of community members so that the community develops initiatives that matter to them – as distinct from ‘delivering services’ to community members that professionals feel they need

5. Conclusion

Developing the ‘Integrated Community’ will require people with the appropriate time release and skill set to be appointed to a community development role. These people will need to be located in the middle of the life of the school but will need to have an orientation and mandate that transcends it so that the community development which occurs is not simply with families enrolled in the school but is joined up in some way with the broader community of the parish. Unless families in the school are joined up with the broader parish during the school experience, they are unlikely to do so afterwards. Given the disengaged target group for this pastoral strategy, it may well be that the parish experience that school families are joined up to is centred on activities and experiences which are at the earlier stages of conversion outlined above, rather than the later.

The pastoral strategy of developing the Integrated Community presents difficult challenges for parish and school leaders alike. Where will the resources come from? Who will have the courage, commitment and creativity necessary for enacting the strategy? What will the new forms of engagement look like?

Notwithstanding the difficulties, there are seeds of hope in our current practice. These seeds need to be named and nurtured.



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