european churches: Religious education " "
“Religious education facing new challenges” is the title of a document published by the German Bishops’ Conference, and presented with a press release on 24 June. The document “is mainly aimed at teachers of religion, and those responsible for the formulation and specialization of religious education in schools”, says Cardinal Karl Lehmann, president of the German Bishops’ Conference, in his preface to the document. Lehmann also promises the support of the bishops for the work of these teachers with the objective of “giving impulses to the further development of religious education”. “Today, many children and adolescents no longer have much, if any, socialized contact at the religious level. For them, religious education at school thus becomes the most important, and often the only, place in which they can get to know the Christian faith”, say the bishops, who emphasise that teachers of religion “are often no longer able to depend on children having had any religious experiences in the family or in the parish”. It thus becomes indispensable that “students learn the rudiments of the Christian faith in religious education”, in full harmony with “the requirements expressed by the current school reform that aims to reinforce fundamental knowledge in all subjects”. Apart from “faith learnt” at school, the bishops praise the role of “living faith”, transmitted by teachers by “more intense collaboration with the ecclesiastical places of living faith, whether in the parish, neighbouring convent, Caritas centre or youth movement”. In recalling the “capacity for dialogue” and “tolerance” as essential prerequisites for community life and for understanding persons of other religious or secular convictions and different lifestyles”, the Bishops’ Conference hopes that, thanks to religious education at school, students may “learn to assume their own point of view and express it at the argumentative level”, because “real willingness to enter into dialogue is a cardinal virtue of the pluralist society”.
