We are pleased to have Leonard Franchi on our blog to discuss his book Shared Mission: Religious Education in the Catholic Tradition. Leonardo Franchi is lecturer in Religious Education at Glasgow University and Professor of Catholic Education at Notre Dame University Australia. Leonardo Franchi is also the author of Thomas Shields and the Renewal of Catholic Education (Catholic Education Press).
Q: The obvious question is what ideally would you want a reader to get out of your book? What’s the big takeaway?
A: The big takeaway: a great question! I would like readers to come to an understanding that that religious education in schools and wider catechesis are distinctive but complementary processes. A Catholic school’s RE curriculum, while rooted in a Catholic vision of the human person, is not designed explicitly to catechize but to foster knowledge and understanding of the Catholic intellectual tradition, taught, of course, in an age-appropriate way. This can have catechetical implications for young people who are already aware of and committed to the “faith”; for others it could be a way of pre-evangelization or simply an engagement with a body of knowledge.
Q: The book is clearly a must-read for educators, are there other audiences that you envision as potential readers for this book?
A: I would hope that all who have an interest in formation would find something of value in the volume: catechists, priests, seminary directors and bishops. The Church, in many ways, is an “educational movement” so all its activities and initiatives have pedagogical-formational implications.
Q: You offer a historical look back as well as a path forward. How important was it to have both of those perspectives in this volume?
A: A sense of Tradition (as well of traditions) is a sine qua non of the Catholic intellectual tradition. There is a danger in the Church of today either of a) rejecting the past as irrelevant and out of touch with contemporary sensibilities or b) putting the Church of the past on such a pedestal that anything contemporary is seen as the removal of another brick in the wall of faith. Of course things are never quite as simple as I have outlined in the previous sentence but it is not unfair to say that neither perspective offers much hope for a Church that wishes to encounter the other. We need, therefore, to immerse ourselves in the story of how the people of the Church have lived and moved through history. Bear in mind that it will not be long before historians of the future see us as “people of the past!”
Q: Was there anything that surprised you in putting this book together, either in the research or in the writing?
A: I was surprised at how little is said in the Church’s magisterial teaching on education about the nature, framework and curriculum of school-based religious education. There is a short Circular Letter from 2009. Apart from that there are various related paragraphs dotted around other documents. What does strike the reader of these documents is the sense that religious education must have some form of cultural impact but there is little to direct or shape how this could be done. This might reflect the complexities of any debate on how religion and culture interact on a curricular level. It might also reflect a desire to let such matters be worked out at a local level.
Q: What would you like to happen now?
A: It would good for educators to develop materials that focus on how the Church’s cultural heritage can be developed and integrated into the life of the Catholic school. The National Schools Singing Programme (Britain) and the Jubilate Deo program (Archdiocese of Sydney (Australia) are two specific examples of commendable initiatives to embed knowledge of liturgical music in the wider curriculum. We need much more of this.