In 1964 I was a freshman at Covington Latin. That year our religion textbook was the Baltimore Catechism. Now to many of you who are younger than me, and many of you who are my age, that title may not ring a bell, or, if you do recognize it, you may only know what others have told you about it – that it was a cut and dried approach to religion, that is was dull, and that it relied only on rote memorization and not thought.

I can tell you from personal experience that my freshman year religion class was anything but dull, and we had some of the most interesting, thought provoking discussions that year that I have ever had. The priest who taught the course would begin by reading the question in the text book. Then he would ask us why the question itself – apart from the answer – was an important one to be asked. Then we would move to the answer in the text – almost always very brief, and the priest would explain it, using examples that 12 and 13 year old boys would understand, and then he would engage us in discussion about the topic. Now this discussion was never along the theme of "how does this make you feel", or "how do you feel about this", but more along the lines of "why is this true" or "how do we apply this to our lives here and now". Sometimes the teacher would play devil's advocate – pretending to disagree with the catechism answer and leading us to be the ones to come to its defense.

I found the classes always informative, and often fascinating. By the end of the year I knew much more about my faith than I had at the beginning.

In 1965, when I returned to Covington Latin as a sophomore, the entire approach to religion had changed. The priest who was teaching that year began by telling us what a waste of time it had been studying all that "stuff" in the dusty, dry, boring old Baltimore Catechism, and then proceeded to bore us to tears. For the next three years religion class involved listening to Beatle songs and finding deep meaning in them, sitting on the floor and gluing pictures cut out of magazines to poster board, and talking about how Christ was our buddy and how religion made us feel. In those three years I found out that nothing the Church had taught prior to 1965 was important, and a lot of it was just wrong, that the official Catholic Church was so out of touch with the modern world that nobody could take its moral teachings seriously, that it was silly to go to Mass if you felt you were not getting anything out of it (funny they never said that about religion class!) and that if our parents did not approve of the "new Church", we should not get angry at them because they had been warped by the old one. We should just ignore them. I found out – to my utter surprise – that most of the stories in the Bible were not true, and that all that was really important in life was to be a nice guy.

Unfortunately, many, if not most of you adults sitting in front of me today, whether you went to Catholic schools, or CCD programs, were put through the same indoctrination. And in the process the foundations of faith were undermined, love for the church was soured, and zeal for virtue was dampened. Because they were fed on such poor food, the souls of many Catholics shriveled – so much so that today most Catholics don't even realize that they are starving!

At the same time the Church was in this hard to understand self-destruct mode, the world was going through the social revolution of the 60's and 70's. Attitudes towards sex, marriage, family, authority – almost any important matter you can think of – underwent profound changes, changes that were enshrined in law. Divorce, far from being seen as a tragedy, became considered to be a right. Sexual intercourse, which had been seen by all moral people as being something that was to be engaged in only by men and women who had made the commitment of marriage to one another, was to be considered after the mid 1960's to be just another form of recreation by most, and by the more conservative as just another way of expressing strong feelings for somebody – and not just somebody of the opposite gender. In the early 1970's we were treated to the spectacle of the highest court in our land declaring that our constitution guaranties every woman the right to kill her unborn and even partially born and that any law to the contrary was therefore null and void. And having sown the wind, society has reaped the whirlwind. Most marriages end in divorce, there are more illegitimate births than legitimate ones, in some countries as much as one third of the entire population is infected with sexually transmitted diseases, in our nation alone there are more than 4,000 unborn children killed every day, and we are very close to giving the relationship of two people engaging in habitual sodomy the same legal status as marriage.

My friends, it is not business as usual! You can no longer presume that Christian teaching on the meaning of life, the way to happiness, and the nature of man are going to be supported by the society around you. In fact, you will find that your government and your media are – with a few notable exceptions – promoting a view of life that is in direct opposition to that which has been transmitted through 2,000 years of Catholic tradition.

Make no mistake – if you are a family that is trying to be Catholic, you are under siege. And unless you realize that, and come to terms with that, you are never going to be able to make the hard choices that you will need to make in order to save your families from misery and eventual enslavement.

I began this tirade by telling you about my experiences in high school. I did that not just to take another slap at my old teachers, but to help you see how that kind of education left so many of us defenseless against the onslaught of the secular humanist agenda that was being implemented in the 60's and 70's, and which is now enshrined as the only religion that can be taught in our government schools. Many of us Catholics feel uncomfortable with some of the things in society, but we are not always sure why – and we have had it so drilled into us that one religion is as good as another, that we find it next to impossible to get excited about our Catholic Faith.

Well, all that can change. We Catholics are one fourth the population of this nation. We are the largest Church in the world. Just think what we could accomplish if we began studying and living out even just the basic teachings of our faith! Just imagine what we could accomplish if we could become convinced ourselves – really convinced in our heart of hearts, that the message of love and light and freedom that is the true Gospel of Christ, and the life of health, and happiness that flows from the living out of the virtues, are not things for which excuses need to be made, but are the fantastic treasures that Church has to share with the world!

In the next several weeks, I will be talking to you on this theme. In September, Dr. Scott and Mrs. Kimberley Hahn will be here to add their voices to mine, and Fr. Wade of the Fathers of Mercy will be with us for an entire week to lead our parish in what I hope will be a true Catholic revival, and in October the internationally known author and dynamic speaker, Christopher West will be in our diocese to tell us about the teachings of our Holy Father on how our very make-up, the very way our bodies are shaped and how they function is an expression of God's plan for our ultimate happiness – what he and others call the Theology of The Body, and then we will have a series of presentations on that topic here at the parish, given by our own dynamic speakers – Steve and Corrine Hooper - on the last two Wednesdays of October and the first two of November. It is my fondest hope that by the time we celebrate Thanksgiving, all of us adults here will have a better understanding, and a much deeper love for our faith than we do now.

I said I will be talking on this theme for the next several weeks. I would like to begin this week with something I think is basic – education.

As I said, in the past you could presume that the education your children were getting in government schools was certainly compatible with, and often times supportive of the truths of your faith. You can no longer presume that. You need to make sure that your children know, understand, and appreciate their Catholic Faith. Unfortunately, because of how so many of us were taught the faith in the 60's, 70's, and 80's we are not all that well equipped to teach the faith to our children. But I have good news for you. We have right here on our parish property a school where the Catholic religion, in all its fullness and beauty is taught. We have a school that has learned from the mistakes made in the past and has a religion course that has real content, and which is faithful to the Church. The Sisters of St. Joseph the Worker are dedicated first and foremost to helping you as parents pass on to your children a love of the Faith! Not only do the children have the opportunity to worship God, hear his word, and receive the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of God's Son as their food every day, not only are the doctrines of the church taught in an orderly fashion and the children prepared for the reception of the sacraments, but even the subjects usually considered secular are taught in a Catholic atmosphere.

It is true that St. Joseph's simply does not have the financial means to compete with the government schools when it comes to certain kinds of equipment, or in its sports programs, but ask yourself what is more important – sports or faith? If you send your child to a government school, which by law has to teach the lifestyle endorsed by the government and which has to exclude God from its curriculum because you want him or her to have the chance to play better basketball, baseball, or soccer, will you be able to teach him the truths of the Catholic Faith, and give him as many opportunities to receive the Sacraments as he would have at St. Joseph's? Can 45 minutes of CCD on Sunday morning really substitute for five full school days at St. Joseph's? At his installation, our bishop, Bishop Foys, said "there are alternatives to Catholic Schools, but no substitute." I stand behind that statement 100%.

As your pastor, I beg you to consider sending your children to St. Joseph's. If you have already considered it and chosen not to, then I ask you to reconsider. If you have taken your children out of the school because of problems, then let's see if we can address those problems, find solutions, and make an already good school better. If you do not support the academy, it will close. What a tragedy it will be for this parish if we lose the school! I cannot think of anything that would be sadder for me as your pastor.