Scotland celebrates Catholic Education Week

Catholic Education Week takes place in Scotland from 3 - 9 February. The Scottish Catholic Church encourages schools, parishes and other agencies to work closely together in order to celebrate the distinctive purpose of Catholic education during one particular week each year. The purpose of Catholic Education Week is to highlight the significance of education, not only for young people but for everyone. Students, parents, teachers and others are asked to reflect on their own roles in the education process - at home, in school, in the local parish and in other educational settings.

The organisers say in a statement:

This year's theme is taken from 'Porta Fidei', the document with which the Holy Father introduced the Year of Faith. It provides an opportunity to reflect on the positive impact of faith as an emotional, intellectual and spiritual force. It counters any notion of education in faith being about ‘closed’ minds. It calls for us to be open to God’s gift of faith and to help others to be open to God’s invitation to faith. It also calls for parents, teachers, catechists and clergy to be “credible witnesses” to faith in their words and actions so that others can be helped to believe.

"Opening Hearts and Minds to God" is the raison d’être of Catholic education. Our purpose is to develop the whole person – in mind, heart, body and spirit – and so help each young person to achieve his or her full potential for life.

At home, in the parish and in school, adults share the responsibility of nurturing young people in faith. We can prepare the ‘soil’ which will allow the seed of faith to grow and take root in the hearts and minds of children and we can nurture that growing faith until young people are mature enough to sustain their own personal faith commitment.

In this way we are opening minds, not closing them, as some critics like to argue. We are offering them a vision of God’s transforming love. We are opening the door of faith for them but they have to freely choose to walk through that door. Thereafter we can only pray that they do so.

We have developed resources for school, parishes and parents which will help adults to open hearts and minds to God. We hope that, through the Year of Faith, young people will be helped to focus on what our faith is and on how it can be professed, celebrated,
prayed and lived. The starting point for this learning and reflection is the Nicene Creed, the prayer of the Church which we profess each Sunday.

All the materials we have provided to schools, including 60,000 laminated cards, relate to learning and teaching about the Nicene Creed, enabling young people to come to know and understand what these words mean, so that they may proclaim them not only in Church but in the whole of their lives.

Our intention is that, throughout this Year of Faith, teachers and chaplains can use these learning resources to help children and young people to examine the Creed in depth over a period of some time. Indeed, we hope that they will find creative ways of explaining to their parents and other adults what they have learned and what they believe.

In such ways they will show that they are becoming credible witnesses who are “capable of opening the hearts and minds of many to the desire for God and for true life, life without end."