Courtney McGrailDear Editor, While it is good for us to seek to defend faith-based schools in a pluralist society, I see little benefit resulting from such effort while the Church in Ireland continues to devise and use catechetical programmes which have so diluted the Catholic Faith as to make it virtually impotent.
As the letters of The Irish Catholic testify, grave concerns regarding the ‘new catechetics’ have been expressed by Catholics down the years, especially since the introduction of the ‘Children of God’ Alive-O Series in the 1990s.
A comprehensive review of this series was undertaken by Dr Éanna Johnson clearly showing its defective nature, in which he said: “Errors, omissions and confusions concerning the fundamentals of Catholic Christian faith are such that the ‘Alive-O’ programme cannot validly claim to be authentically Christian. In spite of an outward Catholic Christian appearance, it is actually following a different spirituality.”
Donegal’s Fr Joseph Briody said: “ ‘Alive-O’ raises serious questions about our willingness to transmit the Catholic faith to future generations. Its strength may be the enjoyable experiential, but in its present form, it is unlikely to foster a faith rooted in the firm acceptance of God’s revealed truth.”
Yet while our bishops promised a new programme, they continued to allow this series to be used in Catholic schools throughout the country right up until 2015. It has now been replaced by a new series, ‘Grow in Love’, which is no improvement on its predecessor.
The most serious overall defect in these programmes, I believe, is a strong tendency towards pantheism. When God is viewed as one with creation then the relationship of God to man is completely altered and doctrines such as those on the supernatural life of Grace and Original Sin are the first to suffer. In the end all doctrine is affected and the final outcome is scepticism.
Yours etc.,
Julie Connolly.
Finglas, Dublin 11.