{"id":6142,"date":"2005-06-27T08:58:55","date_gmt":"2005-06-27T08:58:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/hardball.html"},"modified":"2005-06-27T08:58:55","modified_gmt":"2005-06-27T08:58:55","slug":"hardball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/06\/hardball.html","title":{"rendered":"Hardball"},"content":{"rendered":"

Staten Island pastor cleaning house<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

The pastor of a Staten Island Catholic church is playing holy hardball – kicking hundreds of kids out of religious ed classes because their families aren’t showing up at Mass. <\/span><\/p>\n

The Rev. Michael Cichon, pastor of St. Joseph\/St. Thomas in Pleasant Plains, used each family’s bar-coded donation envelope to track attendance. <\/p>\n

He’s tossed about 300 kids from classes and told them not to reapply until next April. <\/p>\n

Without the classes, children cannot receive the sacraments, meaning some youngsters who thought they’d be making their First Communion next year will have to wait.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Several points:<\/p>\n

1)This was not, as you can see from the rest of the article, tied to donations. The pastor says empty envelopes can be turned in – I’m guessing it’s how he tracks attendance of registered members.<\/p>\n

2) I’m a former DRE, and believe me, this is one of the most nagging and serious issues for all involved in religious ed, and it has a very practical dimension, not to speak of a theological one. Practically, when you have children in class maybe 20 times a year, and that’s the time you have to teach them about, say, the Mass, and they’re not going<\/em> to Mass…your impact is, to put it mildly, limited. <\/p>\n

3) However, this is the wrong tactic. (Although who knows, perhaps the pastor has tried other things and this is just the last straw) Instead of finding a better way to serve, the population won’t be served, period.<\/p>\n

4) 150 religious ed fee<\/strong>?<\/p>\n

To me, this is symbolic of so much that is wrong with Catholic religious education. When I was DRE, I think I charged a 20 dollar fee to cover texts, and I would have dispensed with that if the pastor had let me. This business of Catholic churches charging for religious ed programs (of all kinds – charging to go to an adult ed session is not unheard of either) is one of the more counter-evangelizing practices out there. There are, of course, costs involved in running a program, but to charge parents, rather than say to the parish as a whole, saying, "This is your responsibility….pay up – (as in, increase your contributions)" – is just wrong and in the end, counterproductive. <\/p>\n

I understand the pastor’s frustration. The environment in Catholic parishes regarding children has become totally consumer-oriented, just as education in general has – provide this for my kid, give him the paper, so we can move on<\/em> – and who knows what he’s tried up to this point.<\/p>\n

But it seems there could be a better way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Staten Island pastor cleaning house The pastor of a Staten Island Catholic church is playing holy hardball – kicking hundreds of kids out of religious ed classes because their families aren’t showing up at Mass. The Rev. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}