This is really sad, but I see it everyday both at school and in the Confirmation program. Via Curt Jester:

My daughter came tumbling out of her religious education class recently, shouting, "Mom, I want to go to Washington; they're killing babies!"

Next to her my 5-year-old chimed in, jumping up and down: "I want to go, I want to go!"

Dread flooded my stomach and chest; the abortion debate had reached my doorstop.

I knew it was coming. Years before when it came time to enroll our oldest daughter in CCD - Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, religious education for Catholics -- I thought of the conflicts that lay ahead.

In CCD she'd be taught things my husband and I didn't believe and, quite frankly, things we didn't want her to believe.

We don't believe that homosexuality is a disorder, we don't believe the use of contraception is wrong and we don't believe that having an abortion is a sin, or evil.

But the Catholic Church is home for me, and it is more than the sum of the doctrine I ignore, more than the sum of its scandals and newspaper headlines.

It has something important to teach its members - and my children -- about right and wrong, about love and commitment, about social justice and compassion.

And I pledged at my wedding and their baptism that any children would be raised Catholic.
" Have faith," I said to myself when I signed our oldest daughter up for CCD four years ago.

"You'll hear a lot more about it in the coming years, and you'll have to make your own decision about what you believe," I said, "but what's important is that you know people have different opinions. The Church believes one thing; Mom and Dad believe another."

...A few days after that CCD lesson my husband and I sat down with our daughter and her science book and turned to the chapter on cells and cell division. We talked about when life begins according to science, and according to the church and talked some more about what this means in terms of an abortion.

She got bored after a while and squirmed away.

But she'll be back and we'll continue the discussion adding more of the missing pieces as she grows old enough to hear them.

And then, it's her choice.

There's more at the source, including a miscarriage that the author experienced. What a way to confuse a fourth grader though.

Comments: Post a Comment



<< Home