Growing up in Christ

Extract

Although religious instruction occupies a separate place in the curriculum of a Catholic school, and although we pay special attention to this class no one believes that religious instruction, and still less training, is finished when the religious knowledge period is over. Every practising Catholic in England must have heard, perhaps oftener than he cares to remember, the argument for staffing Catholic schools with Catholic teachers, that religion must penetrate all departments. It is a truth which, rightly, Catholics take for granted, and equally surely it is a principle which experienced Catholic teachers put into practice with little or no reflection and with a skill that sometimes seems infallible. As children reach the age of thirteen or fourteen this becomes a more important matter, for they are arriving at the critical years of change from childhood to manhood, and the Sacrament of Confirmation which they may have received recently or some years previously acquires considerable importance.