Amy Welborn has a Substack site on the experience of being Catholic in the years after Vatican II.
Here is a post on religious education:
3rd-7th grade This would have been 1968-1973. We were living in Lawrence, Kansas during that time, I attended public schools, and I recall exactly two years of religious education. I don’t know if there were more, but two, I remember. I’m thinking they were 5th and 6th grade. And in a way, they are a snapshot of the dynamics of those years. Both catechists were male.
The first fellow decided to teach us according to the signs of the times. The focus of every week was newspaper articles. We were to bring in newspaper articles and then we’d rap about them. Even at the age of ten, it struck me as very stupid and frustrating. I had not signed up (well, I probably hadn’t signed up at all…but…) for Sunday mornings of listening to other ten year-olds give their opinions on the news.
The next year was different. Just a bit. I don’t know if this guy knew what had happened the previous year, or he just took stock of our abysmal ignorance the first day or if this had been his plan all along, but I kid you not, our text for that year was….the Baltimore Catechism. And I loved it. He didn’t have us memorize answers, but I think I tried to anyway, you might not be surprised to hear. I think what struck me the most was the systematic aspect of it all, clear from both the text and the illustrations.
