LETTERS

ARTICLES

NEWS

FOLLOW ME

ROAMIN' CATHOLIC






Contents © 1998
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

LETTERS
MARCH 1998

---

ST. MARY'S REDUX

Your article in the January 1998 issue of San Francisco Faith represents the worst in modern journalism for such an important topic as religious education at local Catholic colleges and universities (unrelieved by the comical error in the first sentence: Ex Corde Ecclesiae is not an encyclical, but an Apostolic Constitution) see "Everything Accepted but Orthodoxy", January]. I am the only respondent you identified, while all other quotations were from unnamed students and professors.

Your article said nothing about the explicitly Christian and Catholic courses taught at Saint Mary's College. If you were really interested in the whole picture, you would have read the college's catalog and learned for yourself.

Needless to say, I continue to defend the pluralistic approach provided by our Religious Studies program here at Saint Mary's College. Many of our students are not Catholics and many who are Catholic are not functionally religious. Catholic Christianity, as you know, has several dimensions besides the explicitly "Catholic," namely, the human, the religious, and the Christian. We teach on any and all of these dimensions depending on the needs of our students. Many are not ready for a discussion of transubstantiation because they have an insufficient understanding of human dignity, destiny, values, good and evil, ends and means, justice and peace, the common good, etc.

Finally, I was intrigued by the "experiment" performed by one of my colleagues who was disturbed that only two of his or her twenty-one nominally Catholic students could explain the Real Presence. But how many non-Philosophy majors can explain why Plato taught that we are born with the eternal forms already in our minds, or why Aristotle said that our active intellect abstracts forms from the material world? Similar questions arise out of every academic discipline.

Bro. Michael F. Meister, FSC
Chairman,
Department of Religious Studies

TOP