Reproducing whiteness? A critical race analysis of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ process for drafting the framework for secondary religious education

Abstract

This article draws on critical race theory and social reproduction theory to analyze the process resulting in the curriculum framework for secondary, Catholic, religious education in the US. This document, promulgated by Church leaders, has impacted millions of US Catholic high school students. Recent calls for racial justice, within and outside of the Catholic Church, invite inquiry into whether this framework is impacting all students equally. This article explores two key questions: Whose knowledge mattered in the creation of the Framework? Was the Framework constructed so as to support the creation of a culturally-sustaining religion curriculum for all students? This analysis demonstrates why the Framework may be problematic for Students of Color and suggests Catholic leaders and educators must learn more from critical race scholars and education researchers if they are to enhance the quality of this and future pedagogical resources for religious instruction. Recommendations are made for addressing the issues raised.

Keywords

Catholic schools religious education critical race theory social reproduction theory secondary education

“Racism is an evil which endures in our society and in our Church. Despite apparent advances and even significant changes.... the reality of racism remains. In large part it is only external appearances which have changed.” (USCCB 1979, 1)

“Racism can also be institutional, when practices or traditions are upheld that treat certain groups of people unjustly. The cumulative effects of personal sins of racism have led to social structures of injustice and violence that makes us all accomplices in racism.” (USCCB 2018, 5)

Introduction

A fundamental responsibility of the Catholic Church is to pass on the faith (Vatican n.d.). Catholic schools in the United States take this responsibility very seriously. Indeed, Thomas Groome (2021) has recently explained that schools “serve a critical social function toward the personal and common good of all” and that the “defining characteristic [of Catholic education] is to be faith-based education” (par. 6). Catholic schools pursue these ends by incorporating religious instruction into school life through cultural expressions (e.g., prayer, religious artwork, and collective worship), structured curriculum, and pastoral action—a practice with deep roots in Catholic social teaching.

Within the religion classroom, curriculum and pastoral action overlap. “Effective pastoral action—the linking of faith and justice—requires adequate social knowledge” (Holland and Henriot 1980, 89), which may come from a wide variety of sources, including social scientific inquiry. “[The] link between faith and justice requires that theological reflection grow out of the analysis” (Holland and Henriot 1980, 93). Pastoral action has roots in the “pastoral circle” created by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn nearly a century ago and employed by Catholic leaders, lay and ordained, including Pope Francis, and according to which one must first “see” the world as it is before one can “judge” the world in light of faith, or “act” on that judgment in a socially just way (Brigham 2019). Accordingly, “social analysis is not the answer to social problems, but a tool for dealing with them” (Holland and Henriot 1980, 89, emphasis original).

This article employs social analysis to understand the creation of a document, which has guided religious instruction in US Catholic secondary schools for the past fifteen years, in order to open space for pastoral action that may “grapple with the systemic white racism that permeates our nation, our church, our parishes, our colleges and universities and seminaries” (Copeland 2021, 31). In doing so, it aims to improve the pedagogy of religious instruction in Catholic schools. I write this as an education researcher, shaped by years of training in Catholic moral theology and experience teaching religion to predominantly Black and Latinx students in an urban Catholic secondary school. While teaching in this setting, I was encouraged to use the document, “Doctrinal Elements of a Curriculum Framework for the Development of Catechetical Materials for Young People of High School Age” (hereafter, Framework), published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), to guide my practice. However, rather than aiding my efforts to develop quality equitable curriculum, I often found the Framework to limit my ability to provide culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings 1995), particularly to my racially minoritized students. This problem of practice struck me as inconsistent with the social teachings of the Church, particularly the universality of Catholic teachings and the equality of human dignity (Massingale 2000, Mich 1998). While Black Catholic theologians and Church leaders, have long asserted the need to address racism in both sacred and secular institutions (see Copeland 2016, 2021; Massingale, 2000, 2010; USCCB 1979, 2018), education researchers have less frequently applied a critical race lens to explore Catholic schools, particularly religious curriculum or curricular resources at Catholic schools. Indeed, in his review of curriculum studies in Catholic schools, Juan Cristobal Garcia-Huidobro (2017) found that beyond two studies touching on the hidden curriculum of Catholic schools,

no work dug deeper in the unintended social and religious reproductive dynamics in Catholic schools. It is shocking that since 1993 there has not been research and discussion among Catholic educational scholars about “how Catholic schooling … plays a fundamental role in the socialization of students and the reproduction of the dominant culture” (McLaren, 1986, p. 72). In a time of claims for cultural, social, and racial inclusion, this silence in the Catholic curricular conversations indicates insufficient critical reflection in the field. (87)

This article aims to address this silence, by applying both critical race theory and social reproduction theory to make sense of the Framework, a document which has informed religious instruction in US Catholic Schools, including through textbook and curriculum design, since its promulgation in 2007.

Context

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) is the leadership body responsible for providing guidance about faith-based instructional content in Catholic schools throughout the United States. In 2007, it published the Framework to guide secondary religious education in all Catholic high schools in the country (USCCB 2007). Its recommendations have been widely adopted and impact the daily instruction and community formation of more than half a million students currently enrolled in US Catholic secondary schools, and more than two million students since 2007 (National Catholic Educational Association 2019).

While the stated intention of the document was not to guide individual teachers or departments—indeed, its stated purpose is to guide “catechetical publishers in the creation of instructional material” (USCCB 2007, 1)—my experience as a former religion teacher in urban, Catholic, secondary education contradicts this claim. Working to develop curriculum and assessments within my school and with religion teachers across the country, I regularly felt, and heard expressed by colleagues, concerns about being held accountable to this document, either by Church leadership, conservative school funders, or both. We teachers experienced this document as prescriptive at the classroom level. Though such evidence is anecdotal, this contradiction between the written aims of a document and the way in which that document functions is consistent with Sara Ahmed’s (2012) research on inclusion work in educational institutions. Often, institutionally produced documents function differently than is explicitly stated within the documents themselves. Indeed, Ahmed demonstrated how the production of documents about institutional diversity functioned as “non-performatives”—ways for educational institutions to avoid the critical work of changing institutional behaviors by investing labor in the production of documents about those behaviors. This institutional slight-of-hand demanded labor of diversity workers, while allowing educational leaders to maintain the racial status quo.

For decades, traditional forms of social capital have been declining in the United States (Putnam 2000). Approximately 40 percent of Americans participate regularly in a faith-based or spiritual organization, significantly higher than any other type of voluntary association (Purcell et al. 2011). This makes church a primary location for Americans to build social capital. For those who identify as Catholic, participation in Catholic secondary schools directly correlates to one’s likelihood to participate in church communities throughout life (Perl and Mark, 2007). Further, Catholic secondary education inheres a social justice component (Muth 2018), which includes recommendations in the Framework for multiple semesters of coursework in moral and social justice education (USCCB 2007). This instruction not only contributes to one’s religious knowledge, but evidence suggests it has a positive impact on secular civic participation in adulthood (Dee 2005). Accordingly, if one wishes to understand community building for social justice in American life, they are wise to examine how this functions in explicitly religious educational contexts, such as Catholic secondary schools.

This article draws on social reproduction theory and critical race theory (CRT) to explore the nature and implications of the Framework. I will begin with a brief review of neoconservative ideology within social reproduction theory. I will then summarize the key tenets of CRT. These two theories will set up the constructive tension necessary to more deeply analyze the Framework, which I will detail in section two, both in terms of what the document is and how it came to be. In section three, I will analyze the questions which these theories raise about the Framework. Namely, whose knowledge mattered in the creation of the Framework? Was the Framework constructed so as to support the creation of culturally-sustaining religion curriculum for all students? In section four, I will discuss how these theories illuminate the need for change, in light of education research on best practice. In the final section, I will offer recommendations for ways forward, in light of our historical moment in the American Catholic Church.

Theoretical framing

Social reproduction of neoconservative ideology

In his essay Whose Markets, Whose Knowledge? Michael Apple (2016) outlines four influential factions that use education systems to reproduce American society in their own conservative image. He notes with concern the “pressure in the United States to reinstall a (selective) vision of a common culture, to place more emphasis on the ‘Western tradition,’ on religion, on the English language, and similar emphases are deeply connected to cultural fears about Latin America, Africa, and Asia” (Apple 2016, 258). One of these factions is neoconservatives, whose ideology is based largely “in a romantic appraisal of the past, a past in which ‘real knowledge’ and morality reigned supreme, in which people ‘knew their place,’ and where stable communities guided by a natural order protected us from the ravages of society” (263). Many scholars argue that beginning in the 1980s and escalating during the 1990s onward, the Catholic Church in America, pushed by neoconservative commentators, has adopted a neoconservative ideology (Borghesi 2021; Scribner 2015). One key facet of this ideology is a so-called “return” to “‘Western tradition’…and conservative variants of character education” (263). Apple (2016) points out that there is a not-so-hidden curriculum in neoconservative ideology, in which “fear of the ‘Other,’” has political and cultural repercussions.

Behind much of the neoconservative position is a clear sense of loss—a loss of faith, of imagined communities, of a nearly pastoral vision of like-minded people who shared norms and values in which the “Western tradition” reigned supreme. It is more than a little similar to Mary Douglas’s discussion of purity and danger, in which what was imagined to exist is sacred and ‘pollution’ is feared above all else. We/they binary oppositions dominate this discourse and the culture of the “Other” is to be feared. (263)

Apple (2016) uses the example of The Bell Curve to show how such “othering” may take the form of “ethnocentric, and even racialized, understanding of the world” (265). Accordingly, one may recognize this fear of cultural dilution in narratives that attack multiculturalism and/or promote reorientations of textbooks or curricula “toward a particular construction of the Western tradition….and…official knowledge” (264). Policing of teachers and students — vis-à-vis scrutiny of instructional content, methods, and outcomes—becomes necessary in this neoconservative regime. Teachers, particularly, are not trusted with professional discretion, but become the targets of suspicion, both for their competence and intentions. Such scrutiny contributes to a culture of fear—not just of cultural others but for teachers, of cultural powerbrokers, who have the authority to censure practices at the diocese, school, or even classroom level. This culture of fear undermines teacher organizing and contributes to “the ‘deskilling’ of teachers, the ‘intensification’ of their work, and the loss of autonomy and respect” (265). The teacher is made to choose between resistance of those feared with power over them, or cooperation with the reproduction of the culture those powerbrokers promote, a culture which may manipulate identity, and with it race, for political ends.

Social theorists have long applied social reproduction theory to explain how schools operate to reproduce social class (Anyon 1981; Bowles and Gintis 2016), forms of capital (Bourdieu 2016), and racio-cultural inequality (Yosso 2005). Numerous researchers have also explored how religious organizations in the US contribute to social reproduction of religious aims through schools and school policy (Anyon 1981; Apple 2006). However, as indicated above, there is a shocking lack of research applying social reproduction theory to US Catholic schools (Garcia-Huidobro 2017).

Critical race theory

Critical race theory emerged in the late 1970’s with the legal scholarship of Derrick A. Bell, Jr. (Delgado and Stefancic 2017). Bell used the term “interest-convergence” to explain the phenomenon wherein, “the interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interest of whites” (Bell 1980, 523). Bell dispelled the illusion that the legally mandated desegregation of America’s schools was a product of a moral conversion. On the contrary, this case “cannot be understood without some consideration of the decision’s value to whites….in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation” (524). From this starting point the field of CRT proliferated.

While CRT theorists don’t always agree, Delgado and Stefancic (2017) summarize the field into six tenets, held in common by its theorists. Three are particularly relevant to the discussion here. These are: (1) racism is common, not rare; (2) everyone has various identities that intersect and impact their social realities; and (3) non-dominant groups have a particular competence, by virtue of their experience, to speak about race and racism (8-11).¹ Delgado (2013) further elaborates on the role of narrative in CRT, as “a powerful means for destroying mind-set—the bundle of ….shared understandings against a background of which legal and political discourse takes place” (71). Since its inception, counterstorytelling has been the modus operandi of critical race theorists (Taliaferro Baszile 2015). Denise Taliaferro Baszile (2015) explains that CRT

embraces the realization that knowledge comes from thinking and feeling bodies, from bodies that are raced, gendered, and sexualized among other subjectivities, from bodies that are located in hierarchical relations and places of difference. Critical race counterstorytelling is an acknowledgment that all of this matters in our efforts to imagine and work toward justice in a diverse democracy and in a diverse world. (239)

Counterstorytelling is the means by which critical race scholars engage in “talking back” (hooks 1989) to white racism, thereby subverting dominant narratives and building the collective power of oppressed race(s) (Taliaferro Baszile 2015).

CRT is helpful to critique educational practices for at least two reasons. First, by acknowledging the competence of non-dominant groups, by virtue of their experience, it offers a way to respond to dominant narratives and ideologies, such as those espoused by neoconservatives. Second, it provides a new and specific racial positionality through which to understand more completely the way in which white power functions to maintain and reproduce social order.² In other words, when examining the pedagogical work of neoconservative institutions, like the American Catholic Church, CRT helps us see and understand more completely what is happening, by providing counterstories from racially minoritized perspectives. Accordingly, I suggest critical race counterstorytelling is necessary for pastoral action related to educational improvement, insomuch as counterstories help us understand the true complexity of reality, which is a precondition for moral intervention in that reality (Holland and Henriot 1980). There are many examples of applying CRT and counterstorytelling to shape educational inquiry into curriculum studies (Taliaferro Baszile 2015), teacher and student experience (Ladson-Billings 1999; Solórzano et al. 2000), educational policy (Burke and Gilbert 2016), and school leadership (López 2003), among others. We can even see the use of counternarratives, regarding racial discrimination in access to seminary education in the US and the experience of native peoples in boarding schools and orphanages, in the recent pastoral letter, Open Wide Our Hearts (USCCB 2018). Indeed, the USCCB goes so far in this letter as to call for the creation of new curriculum to address racism. However, it does not turn its attention explicitly to the Framework. Neither has research on Catholic education yet applied a critical race lens to the Framework.

The framework

The USCCB, as part of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, acknowledges a responsibility to teach on matters of faith and morals. As a spiritual body, the bishops claim divine authority to execute this essential function, an authority termed magisterium (Vatican n.d.). It was while pursuing this teaching function that the USCCB promulgated their Framework. The sections which follow explore the Framework in terms of its sociohistorical context, drafting process, and pedagogical product.

Context

Membership in the American Catholic Church is falling, particularly white membership. By contrast, People of Color, especially from the Latinx community, comprise an increasing portion of the Church’s membership (Masci and Smith 2018). Since 1965, the percentage of the American population that considers itself Catholic has decreased by more than eight percent (Rocca, Hong and Ulick 2015), and presently, the majority of Catholics under fifty years old, 52 percent, consider themselves a race other than white. These demographic changes have been accompanied by attitudinal changes, as reflected by a sociological study from the late 1980s (D'Antonio et al. 1989), which indicated 39 percent of Catholics “challenged the teaching authority of the leaders by saying you could disobey the Church and still be a good Catholic,” (Ostasiewski 2010, 59). This marked a steep change from previous decades, in which the laity (non-ordained Catholics) assumed a more subservient posture toward the clergy. Indeed, Ostasiewski points out that this study was “the first time in US Catholic history that two thirds of Catholics felt…the ultimate source of moral authority did not rest with the Church authority alone,” but with their own consciences as well. In the late 1980s, two recommendations were made by Church leaders, based on this trend. First, “reexamine the process of formulating moral teachings” with an aim toward inclusivity, and second, “clarify the relationship between the authority of Church teachings and the informed individual’s conscience” (Ostasiewski 2010, 60).

As a religious institution, the Catholic Church understands that a key part of its mission is to evangelize, or, in lay terms teach. Magisterium, then, is not just authority to teach but mission to do so. For the Church to endure, there must be people in the pews, and these people must have knowledge of the faith. The shifting demographics in the late 1980s and early 1990s posed two problems for the US bishops: (1) declining people in the pews, with concomitant decline in tithes, and (2) changes in the beliefs of those who remain in the pews, including greater confidence in democratic leadership and personal authority, as opposed to exclusive authority of bishops (Ostasiewski 2010). Many American bishops framed this concern in terms of lack of general knowledge of the faith’s tenets (Schroeder 2015). Soon after the publication of the aforementioned sociological study, the USCCB began work toward the Framework in earnest.

The process of creating the framework

The first step the USCCB took toward creating the Framework was to form a group to study these shifts in views and catechetical knowledge. This group took the form of an Ad Hoc Committee to Oversee the Use of the Catechism. This committee was first chaired by the Archbishop of Indianapolis, Daniel Buechlein, who led a charge to investigate the conformity of secondary religious education textbooks to the Catechism.³ Carrie J. Schroeder (2015, 11) quotes Buechlein to explain the impetus of this investigation: “recall that the original inspiration for the Catechism of the Catholic Church was the perceived need for a common language in service to the unity of the faith and in the global context of cultural diversity and religious illiteracy.” This inquiry found most textbooks insufficiently conformed to the Catechism. Schroeder (2015) explains that Buechlein

characterized these deficiencies as symptoms of a postmodern world unduly influenced by… the principle of plausibility. According to Buechlein (1998), this principle causes teachers to depict the Catholic faith in a manner inclusive of and sensitive to diverse groups of people…. Buechlein (1998) expressed fear that this desire to portray Catholicism in an inoffensive manner may lead teachers to dilute their presentation of Catholic truths. (12-13, emphasis added)

After conferring with textbook publishers about the feasibility of the bishops drafting their own instructional series, a member of the Committee, Archbishop Cardinal Law, recommended in 1998 the creation, instead, of curricular supports, for grades 9-12, to assist publishers.

Toward this end, a small steering committee—consisting of seven members, six of which were USCCB staff, two laymen and two women—was created in 1999 by the Ad Hoc Committee. No data is available as to the steering committee’s racial or ethnic make-up. The task of the steering committee was to draft a “scope and sequence” (Schroeder 2015, 15) document, and they produced a draft within a month, a very limited amount of time to create guidelines of such breadth and detail as the Framework.⁴ In the following few years, the committee continued conformity reviews, and more than two-thirds of textbooks were found deficient, so much so they were not adequate for publication even if revised. New leadership of the committee, Archbishop Hughes of New Orleans, recommended that all textbooks used in American Catholic diocese “carry a declaration of conformity to the Catechism” (Schroeder 2015, 18).

Under Hughes’ leadership, with the continued consultation of publishers, a draft Framework was finalized. However, concerns about pedagogy were raised, which Schroeder (2015) notes was a “relatively recent shift” (19). Hughes responded to these concerns with warnings about two unacceptable approaches to theological instruction: (1) theological parity—Catholicism viewed as one valid choice among many; and (2) human experience—which begins theological exploration from the perspective of lived experience “and as the lens through which religious faith and teachings may be understood” (20). This latter point is essential to our discussion: Archbishop Hughes, while leading the committee tasked with refining institutional approaches to religious pedagogy, asserted that human experience was an unacceptable lens through which to teach the Catholic faith. When Archbishop Hughes made this claim, no evidence from education research was presented to support this claim (Hughes 2006).

In the midst of such warnings against human experience, the first of two rounds of formal public consultation about the Framework began April 1, 2005 and concluded July 1^st that same year.⁵ It is unclear as to the number, racial/ethnic identity, or location of those teachers and ministers whose feedback was included in these public responses. Only highly structured feedback was permitted and did not allow commentary on the core themes or theological stance of the Framework. Edits were made, and the new draft was circulated for feedback, at the discretion of area bishops (Schroeder 2015). The final draft was presented at the November 2007 USCCB meeting and approved unanimously for promulgation.

The pedagogical product

The document the bishops approved reflected content for a six semester sequence of courses, along with content for five additional semester-long elective courses (USCCB 2007). Feedback resulted in the addition, to each course, of a “Challenges” section, in which the drafters respond in rote form to a series of questions which the drafters had identified. This question and answer method of instruction is known as “apologetics,” and the drafters (2007) explain in their introduction to the Framework that “publishers and teachers or catechists are to strive to provide for a catechetical instruction and formation that is imbued with an apologetical approach” (1). Apologetics originated as a mode of instruction in Greek antiquity and it mirrors Paulo Freire’s (1970/1993) notion of “banking pedagogy,” which Freire asserted perpetuated oppressive social hierarchies by denying the pedagogical value of students’ lived experience, particularly students from marginalized communities, while insisting on students’ passive reception of knowledge from sources approved by those with hegemonic power over them. Apologetics has a strong history in pre-1960s American Catholic education, and per Bishop Hughes’ recommendation, it leaves no room for personal experience in the religion classroom. Rather, the correct answer to any given question, or “challenge,” is provided as part of the Framework. Accordingly, apologetics is meant to promote a clear and fixed knowledge of the faith. Memorize the questions. Memorize the answers. Know the faith. Such emphasis on rote memorization reflects an epistimology that consciously devalues the human experience of all but those who drafted the content to be memorized.

Schroeder (2015) further illuminates the Framework by locating its inspiration in the philosophy of Louis Tarsitano (1998). She points out how the drafting committee was struck deeply by Tarsitano’s condemnation of what he identified as a post-modern problem: the “plausible person.” Such a person “is the analog of the two dimensional image on a television screen…that stirs the emotions…. He is a spectacle and an entertainment: not a communicator of ideas, but of sentiments” (Tarsitano 1998, 19). The plausible person is a danger to the Catholic faithful because, the logic goes, he relies on feelings, not on facts of the faith. Further, post-modern, media-rich American society is rife with such plausible people. In contrast to such people stands the “credible person” who will “conform the self to the received tradition of the Church,” and “endure ‘cultural martyrdom’” (23) to communicate holiness to others, through the stoic reason of the Catholic faith. It is unclear from Schroeder (2015) how much the Framework was influenced by this negative view of contemporary diverse culture. What is clear, however, is that the Framework intentionally excludes human experience and privileges very specific kinds of knowledge. So, if one were to be tempted by the “spectacle” of her own culture—say, charismatic expressions of faith, typical of the African American Church (Cone 2011) and Hispanic Church (Christian Examiner 2007)—she would be left with no choice but to martyr her home culture to the Western ways of being, inherent to the Framework. Schroeder is not the only one to observe the reverence paid, within the Framework, to traditional facets of Western Culture.

Ostasiewski (2010), in her dissertation on the Framework, observes clear parallels between the Framework and the most popular Catholic high school theology textbook series from the 1940s and 50s, Our Quest for Happiness (64). The choice to draw on a source from this era is significant, first, because the textbook series predates Vatican Council II. This watershed event in the global Catholic Church marked a fundamental change in the view of the laity’s authority. Where pre-Vatican Catholicism privileged the knowledge and experience of the clergy over that of the laity, post-Vatican II Catholicism favored collegiality and shared authority (Paul Pope 1965a), authority-with, not authority-over. Further, this textbook was written in and for an American Catholic Church of the 1940s and 50s, a Church that was highly segregated by race (Irvine and Foster 1996).

Analysis

As detailed above, neoconservative ideologies seek to reproduce themselves within and through educational institutions. Features of this ideology include: reverence for the Western tradition; ethnocentrism, traversing at times into psuedo-scientific racism; adherence to a common language; fixed social hierarchy; and promotion of “real knowledge” through policing of teachers and students, resulting in the deskilling of teachers and the loss of their autonomy and respect. This ideology pursues its aims through fear of cultural “others” (Apple 2016). When this ideology is put in conversation with the origins and content of the Framework, the parallels are hard to ignore.

First, there is a consistent reverence for an imagined Western tradition, both in features of the Framework and in its underlying philosophy of plausibility. Apologetics is validated, as an apporpriate form of Catholic religious instruction, because of its roots in Greek rhetoric and Hellenistic influences on scripture. Tarsitano, a noted inspiration of the Framework drafters (Schroeder 2015), decries the threat of multiculturalism and suggests, instead “cultural martyrdom” (Tarsitano 1998, 23). It is not enough, by this view, to conform oneself to the dominant Western culture; one must go so far as to kill one’s previous worldview. This is chillingly similar to Horace Pratt’s pithy admonition for a Catholic mission school to, “kill the Indian, and save the man,” (quoted in USCCB 2018). This reinforces neoconservatism’s second feature, ethnocentrism. While it may be nominally Universal and One,⁶ the American Catholic Church has a history of Eurocentric practices (Copeland 2019; Irvine and Foster 1996, Massingale 2000) that often leave Catholics of Color feeling excluded (Copeland 2021; Cressler 2018).

Further, the Catechism—as a document meant to clarify language (Schroeder 2015)—serves as the source of “real knowledge” (Apple 2016, 263) and reinforces norms of monolingualism. While Apple suggests English to be the language du jour of neoconservative ideologues in American public schools, it is reasonable to identify a Catholic school parallel in the Catechism, which Church leaders describe as a guide for “theological literacy” (Schroeder 2015, 11). This document, drafted by the bishops, reinforces their (moral) authority in the Church, following the sociological advice of William D’Antonio, et al. (1989), while simultaneously enforcing the lower status of the laity. In this dychotomous casting, the bishops are empowered to police any teachers of the faith, particularly lay teachers, who stand outside of the vowed institutional protections of the Church.⁷ In my own experience as a lay religion teacher, such policing took the form of faculty and school audits of curricular fidelity to the Framework, and annual testing of students for rote content knowledge consistent with the Framework. Consistent with research that indicates standardized testing and related accountability mechanisms impact teachers’ curricular choices (Natriello 2009; Winstead 2011), these accountability mechanisms may lead many religion teachers in Catholic schools to conform their instruction to the Framework. Further, given that the Framework is structured explicitly to exclude personal experience while amplifying rote content,⁸ consistent with an imagined Western tradition, the Framework is likely to impact Students of Color differently than white students.

While this possiblity may be difficult to admit, the Church needs to consider it, first, because it does not appear the US bishops have considered it before – either during or after drafting the Framework. Quality pedagogy depends on inquiry into and evaluation of the effects of changes to teaching practice (Dana and Yendol-Hoppey 2009). The Bishops’ suggestion that the Framework was a necessary pedagogical intervention for secondary religious instruction, generally, suggests that its implementation would yield significant changes in teaching practices for thousands of religion instructors across the country, resulting in modified learning outcomes for a large portion of the near half a million students currently enrolled in Catholic secondary schools. Yet, in the fifteen years since its promulgation, no comprehensive study of the effects of the Framework have measured its impact on teachers or students.⁹ Indeed, it’s not clear from available data that such changes in practice or learning outcomes were ever systematically identified, or even considered, as part of the Framework drafting process. A second reason the Church needs to ask these questions is because failure to create culturally-sustaining learning environments has significant negative repercussions for students’ learning outcomes, and this espeically impacts racially minoritized students (Delpit 2006; Ladson-Billings 1995; Love 2019; Paris 2012). Evidence suggests that isolation from their own racial identities and faith is a common experience for African American students in Catholic schools (Irvine and Foster 1996). Further, the recent National Survey of Catholic Schools Serving Hispanic Students found that only a minority of Catholic schools created welcoming environments for Latinx families and students or had staff or school leaders with sufficient skills and training to support the needs of this cultural community (Ospino and Weitzel-O'Neill 2016). If the Church cares about justice for the vulnerable, it should be concerned about whether or not the Framework contributes to culturally sustaining pedagogy for Students of Color.

Discussion

As explained above, critical race theory helps us see more clearly how neoconservatives contribute to social reproduction. Further, the Framework emerged during a time of neoconservative ascendency in the American Church and reflects neoconservative ideologies, particularly through its adherence to Western cultural norms, rote memorization, and exclusion of personal experience. Accordingly, CRT can help us locate constructive tension between the experience of the figures drafting the Framework (bishops) and those receiving it (students). Culture intersects with numerous forms of social identity, including both religion and race. Historically, the hierarchy of the American Catholic Church has promoted white supremacy (Copeland 2016; Massingale 2000), for example: prohibiting the training and ordination of Black clergy until the 1920s and cooperating with segregation in pews and parishes until at least 1958. Further, there has not been a systematic effort within the American Church to rectify this cultural norm, despite clear naming of institutional racism by Church leaders (USCCB 1979, 2018) and persistent calls by theologians to rectify it (Copeland 2016, 2021; Massingale 2000, 2010). As such, though the Church is very diverse in members, the dominant culture still skews white. Thus, the tension at hand in the Framework is between a group of bishops, who seem predisposed to Western (white) culture and have not made intentional efforts to interrogate their white cultural privilege in the drafting process, and Students of Color, who represent a diversity of racial and religious perspectives and had no say in the Framework‘s content. Further, CRT scholars and education researchers, who would be knowledgeable about best practice regarding the learning needs of Students of Color, do not appear to have been consulted in the drafting process. From this positionality, we might see more clearly whether and how it’s necessary to “talk back” to the bishops, through critical race counterstories, about the Framework’s impact on minoritized students’ lives. But, to do so authentically will require the trust and contributions of People of Color. That the bishops did not actively seek such perspectives when drafting the Framework only suggests further that, this is a topic worth talking about, and, perhaps, talking back to the bishops about.

Such “talk back” would necessarily interrogate what is “true” about so-called “traditional” ways of being Catholic in America. In America, and in the early lives of the four bishops most repsonsible for the drafting of the Framwork (Schroeder 2015), we find that their pined-after American Catholicism, was actively and deeply segregated. Jim Crow came to Church and separated the white parishes from those serving People of Color, the white pews in the front from those for People of Color in the back (USCCB 2018). While the white hieararchs who drafted the Framework may be nostalgic for such a simpler time, when their pure (white) flocks followed them without question, Black Catholic- and Catholic-educated scholars do not (Copeland 2016; Irvine and Foster 1996). Growing up in a segregated Church and segregated schools caused many Catholics of Color to fundamentally question the teachings of the Church. As some authors have pointed out (Irvine and Foster 1996), it's hard to imagine believing we are all made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1), when, for instance, the American Church propogated images of Jesus and the Holy Family that were white-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed. The Church's hypocrisy was literrally staring Catholics of Color in the face. Does the Framework’s drafters' search for simplicity and more numerous faithful make them white supremacists? No. Does their desire to fulfill their magisterial calling in a clear and unambiguous manner make them racist? Not necessarily. However, when we ask ourselves honestly whether the Gospels read similarly through all cultural and racial perspectives, we cannot say yes. As James Cone (2011) reminds us, the cross of Jesus looks very different from the vantage of a people who feared lynching verse the people who commemorated the same act with postcards, and that difference matters.

Likewise, the lived experience of racially minoritized students is objectively distinct from the experience of white students. Accordingly, these students are likely to experience differently the same change to curriculum, and that difference matters for their learning outcomes (Ladson-Billings 1999; Love 2019; Paris 2012). When we are defining the content of religious instruction, we are making a choice to reproduce truth as we know it to be. If my way of knowing intersects with my racial and cultural identity, as CRT posits it does (Delgado and Stefancic 2017), then we must explore the possibility that the drafters of the Framework would, consciously or otherwise, be choosing to reproduce not only the religio-cultural norms of the Catholic Church, but the racial norms of the white-privileged culture of pre-Vatican II America, toward which they demonstrate a cultural inclination. This same culture, I have explained, was actively and deeply segregated. We know the bishops' knowledge mattered more than others in the drafting of the Framework because they did not equally privilege the knowledge outside the USCCB in the drafting or consultation process (Schroeder 2015), a reality that coheres with neoconservative ideology (Apple 2016). Further, we know from CRT that the views of the non-dominant race have a privileged perspective in understanding racial inequality (Delgado and Stefancic 2017). Accordingly, the predominantly white institution of the USCCB, which unanimously approved this document, may not be capable of recognizing if or how the Framework content could be impacting Students of Color differently than white students. Further, it has not asked. As Bryan Massingale (2000) explains

Until Catholic ethicists and bishops explicity name this reality and engage the social sciences in a serious analysis of “whiteness” as a social location of structured advantage and dominance, their understanding of racism will continue to be superficial and result in ineffective pastoral practice.(727)

Constructing curricular guidance is one such pastoral practice, critical race theory simply posits that in a world where racism is common, our experiences will be different, and that difference is likely to privilege a white worldview over that of People of Color. So, if it cares about equity and creating deep and effective pastoral practices, the Catholic Church should be concerned by how easy it is to reproduce white cultural power, and consider intentionally how it may already be doing so in its schools.

Conclusion

This article has set out to question the nature of the USCCB Framework, using the bifocal lens of social reproduction and critical race theory. I explored the social context, drafting process, and philosophical influences on this pedagogical product. In doing so, I tried to demonstrate how the positionality of the bishops, especially those who were most responsible for the creation and promulgation of the Framework, is problematic. Whiteness is a normative part of the institution’s identity (Copeland 2016; Massingale 2000), and it may be reproducing this cultural superiority consciously or otherwise by not taking into account the views and experience of people from non-dominant races. Indeed, the bishops’ warning against the inclusion of human experience in secondary religious education, through the Framework, creates a fundamental impediment to the application of CRT to interpret and refine the way “Truth” is communicated in this document, and by extension, potentially limits the cultural relevancy of religious instruction in secondary classrooms across the country. By contrast, it would be an expression of solidarity and universality for the Church to welcome human experience in the interpretation of the Framework and the development of curriculum from it. Moreover, and this is especially important, encouraging teachers to link religion content with students’ experience would allow Catholic educators to align their pedagogy with “some of the best research and practice” (Paris 2012, 93) available today about what makes for excellent teaching (Ladson-Billings 1995; Love 2019). Put plainly, linking students’ culture and lived experiences with curriculum is essential for effective teaching (Ladson-Billings 1995; Paris 2012). By contrast, designing curricular resources that seek to prevent this from happening and then mandating that such resources guide instruction sets teachers up to fail as instructors, especially as instructors of students from racially minoritized communities. Accordingly, by designing the Framework to amplify Western cultural normativity while mitigating the incorporation of personal experience, the Framework may function to undermine teachers’ ability to teach well, especially their non-white students.

Though teachers may be afraid to raise their voice about this pedagogical reality, the time to do so is now. In 2018, the USCCB published a pastoral letter against racism. This letter is the first of its kind in over forty years (USCCB 1979), since before the emergence of CRT (Bell 1980), and this letter seems to have learned from the wisdom of critical race scholars. It offers repeated counternarratives of human struggle, in the face of systemic Church-driven racial oppression. It critiques its own social and personal sin, in perpetuating racism, and calls on more voices to create “curricula relating to racism and reconciliation” (USCCB 2018, 26). Indeed, in their report on the state of Catholic school outreach to Latinx students and families, Hosffman Ospino and Patricia Weitzel-O’Neill (2016) advise, “more than imagining a return to a past that cannot be replicated or stretching resources to meet unrealistic expectations, it is time to imagine how to position Catholic schools to effectively serve the new Catholic populations in the United States” (7). CRT can help provide the social analysis needed to make possible such timely moral imagining. Toward such truth-seeking ends, I offer the following eight suggestions:

(1) Place the Framework, and any future curricular resources, in conversation with more prophetic voices in the American Catholic Church, “especially from Black, Womanist, Feminist, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian thinkers” (Copeland 2021, 30) and the recent pastoral, Open Wide Our Hearts. Allow participants in this conversation the authority to revise and reform language and content within the Framework;

(2) Incorporate into the Framework, and any future curricular resources, guidelines for intercultural encounter—including but not limited to encounter across racial, religious, gender, and economic identity groups;

(3) Retract the warning of Bishop Hughes against human experience in theological instruction (Schroeder 2015);

(4) Re-affirm the necessity of human experience in the practice and teaching of the faith, in accord with Catholic social teaching’s practice of being responsive to the “signs of the times” (Paul VI 1965b) and the prophetic call to “shift from unconscious racial supremacy to intentional racial solidarity” (Massingale 2000, 729) in the American Catholic Church;

(5) Conduct a comprehensive study of race, identity, and practice within the American Catholic Church, giving attention to all racial affinity groups that comprise the Church¹⁰;

(6) Regarding the above study, make special inquiry into the students and young adults who do currently or have previously studied at schools using the Framework, in order to understand how the Framework has impacted and continues to impact students differently across racial groups;

(7) Commit to multi-racial collaboration as a constitutive norm for USCCB committee work and other Church functions, especially for but not limited to the construction of pedagogical tools, like the Framework; and

(8) Incorporate more deliberately into the Framework, and/or future curricular guidance about Catholic Social Teaching, the reality that racism is common and systemic (Delgado and Stefancic 2017), and with it, so too, the social and personal sin of racism (USCCB 2018).

Examining and revising the Framework, in light of the insights of social reproduction theory and critical race theory, can illuminate a new path toward more inclusive and just religion curriculum resources. And if done well, it may help the Church teach the faith more responsibly and effectively in US Catholic secondary schools.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Shayla Cothran, Dr. Brittany Aronson, Dr. Warren Goldstein, and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and detailed feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This work is stronger for your insights.

ORCID iD

Kathleen M. Sellers

Notes

Author biography

Kathleen M. Sellers is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Religion and Social Change Lab at Duke University, where she contributes to the Seminary to Early Ministry Study. She received her doctorate in educational leadership from Miami University. Her scholarship applies a critical lens to the policy impacts, pedagogy, and philosophy of religious schools and school systems in the U.S. and globally. She has worked in Catholic urban secondary education and immigration law.

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