Mags Gargan
Mags Gargan speaks to the National Director for Catechetics about her first year in the role
There is a lot happening in the area of religious education in Ireland at the moment, so when Kate Liffey took the role of National Director for Catechetics early last year, in some ways she didn’t realise the challenge she was taking on. However, despite juggling a busy job and being a wife and mother to three small children, Kate sounds like she is very much enjoying being part of a time of change and development in Catholic education.
“A lot of the stuff is so exciting and there is a lot of innovation happening, some of it internally inspired and some of it coming from outside organisations,” she explains.
One of the outside factors is the current consultation on the National Council for Curriculum & Assessment’s (NCCA) proposal on Education about Religions and Beliefs (ERB) and Ethics. “That whole process has been really interesting,” Kate says. “This has been an opportunity to really ask the question what is Catholic education, and more particularly, Catholic religious education. The conversations have been very rich. I suppose it is us saying that Catholic religious education is something we should be proud of.”
Since the native of Swords, Co. Dublin came to the role in January 2015 there has also been the release of the new Catholic Preschool and Primary Religious Education Curriculum for Ireland, the first ever RE curriculum for the island of Ireland, and the new religious education programme Grow in Love which replaced the 20-year-old Alive-O series.
Exciting
“Both are being really well received,” she says. “People love the new programme. They see that the children are enjoying it and parents are benefitting from it. It is a really exciting moment in Catholic religious education.”
At post primary level there is also the new junior cycle reform and the questions of where religious education is likely to sit. And then the whole question of adult faith development and young adult faith development and the promotion of the National Directory for Catechesis, Share the Good News.
“I am also the Co-ordinator of the National Faith Development Team and that team has been a really exciting space where key people are getting around the table to plan ways of maximising our engagement to ensure better, richer and more co-ordinated faith development takes place across all the various different ages and stages in people’s lives,” she says. “Share the Good News is a rich document and we have a lot of work still to do, but I have a really strong hope that the work of the National Faith Development Team is bearing fruit and will bear fruit into the future.”
Kate comes from a background of catechesis and religious education, and faith has always played a role in her life from her early childhood. She taught religious education and history in St Leo’s College, Carlow and in Coláiste Iognáid SJ (The Jes), Galway for 10 years. She then spent three years supporting primary and secondary teachers with the Edmund Rice Schools’ Trust in their exploration of their mission as Catholic schools in the Edmund Rice tradition.
Kate sees ethos becoming more and more a question for Catholic schools, who are exploring what that really means and how it can be expressed in school life.
“The Jes for me was a really good example of a school that attempted to live its ethos in a radical way and provide ways for parents and teachers to come to grips with the spirituality that underpinned that ethos,” Kate says.
Ethos
“Some schools are doing it really well and you get a strong sense of ethos as soon as you walk in the door.
“For other schools there is a taken-for-granted quality about ethos and maybe for the first time schools are beginning to realise it can’t be taken for granted anymore and in exploring it together the richness that is Catholic education comes to the fore and people start to recognise its giftedness and celebrate it.”
When Kate got married and moved to Maynooth, she took up a newly created position in Trócaire as a Church Outreach Officer. “I went overseas as a lay missionary for a short time while working in Galway and that inspired me to try to look at my spirituality in terms of service to the poor,” she explains. “Then when the job in Trócaire came up it really spoke to me. It was a new role and a very interesting one, looking at how Trócaire’s Catholic social teaching might be explored at parish and diocesan level.
“For me it was faith formation for adults by a different name. Trócaire was living it in such rich ways in terms of the wonderful work I would have seen visiting Trócaire projects overseas and it was easy for me to be able to communicate that work as an expression of Catholic social teaching and the Gospel values of love, solidarity and care for the poor and those on the margins.”
Catechist
However Kate is a catechist and religion teacher at heart, and when the role of National Director for Catechetics came up six years later she felt drawn to it. “I felt I was being called back more explicitly into religious education and there was a sense of it being a natural progression.”
While it is challenging, she says it is an exciting time to be working at the forefront of so much change and she wants to capitalise on it as much as possible.
“Some of the work is technical but I have had a lot of support. In terms of the new primary curriculum it has been a really steep learning curve for me, but the writer of the curriculum and the writers of the programme, and the diocesan advisors and the CPSMA have all been massively supportive. There is a great sense of collegiality and support,” she says.
“This is a time of great hope in the Irish Church. There is great energy. The spirit is moving among us and we want to do our best to ensure that we are as helpful to the spirt as we possibly can be.”