CONTENTS
ARE WE Really TEACHING
RELIGION?
ON TEACHING THE KEY DOCTRINES
A Preliminary Note on Spirit
God
Man
Christ Our Lord
Union
A General Note on Mystery
NOTE
A couple of summers ago I spoke to the Teaching Nuns of Ireland,
gathered in annual conference in Dublin, upon the topic "Are We
Really Teaching Religion?" Rough copies of the talk were made and
widely circulated. Teachers wrote asking for the elucidation of certain
points. It seemed simplest, in the end, to make this formal publication
of what I originally said, together with a Note containing most of the
elucidations asked for. I hope that this pamphlet may be of use not only
to teachers, but to parents: unless there is cooperation between them,
religious instruction will go limpingly.
F.J.S.
The subject of this lecture is not of my choosing. It was not I who
decided that I should speak to you on the teaching of Religion. The
topic came from yourselves. I take it that what you wanted was an
outside look at the question. After all, you spend your lives teaching
Religion. It might be interesting, or at the very worst amusing, to hear
what an amateur has to say on the same subject, and it is really from
that point of view that I am going to speak. If anything I say should
seem to you to be critical of the teaching of Religion in Catholic
schools, at least I am not criticizing you, because I don't know you. I
have never heard you teach, I have never been in a school in Ireland.
All I know of Ireland in this particular matter is that my ancestors
learnt the Faith there, and I still have it. Any criticisms I make are
based upon my experience of the countries I frequent. So that from your
point of view the question should be altered to read "Are they
really teaching religion?" You can compare anything I may have to
say in criticism of the situation in these other countries with your own
knowledge of what happens here, and see how far any of it applies to
you. At the end you will perhaps be giving thanks to God that you are
not as one of these.
But criticism will be incidental, not my main business. I shall,
indeed, not attempt to answer the question you have set me, but only to
state the principles in the light of which it must be answered. I am
aware that much that I am going to say will seem to you elementary, you
will wonder why I should bother to say things so obvious. But much may
strike you as fantastic, unrelated to the prosaic realities of teachers,
pupils and classrooms. After all you are teachers, I am not. You know
the story I heard it first as a boy and have
heard it scores of times since of the young priest, newly ordained,
preaching a sermon in a great parish church on Marriage, and the two old
ladies leaving the church after, one saying to the other: "I wish I
knew as little about it as he does." And I imagine as I go on
talking about the teaching of Religion in schools, you will think back
over the years of agony you have devoted to precisely that, and smile
wryly at my happy innocence. I am aware of all that and yet I am quite
shameless in accepting your invitation. As it happens, I have taught in
schools I did so as a young man in Australia,
with my elders and betters telling me I would never make a teacher; and
since then I have taught Religion in a surprising number of schools, at
evening classes, in college courses, in study clubs, and on street
corners. All the same it is not from such teaching experience that I
shall draw what I am going to say. The real value of any education
begins to show ten years after. This paper is based upon discussions of
religion I have had with thousands of men and women who went to Catholic
schools when young. What they know now is the test of what they were
taught then. That is the experience on which I shall be drawing for the
next hour or so.
I
I take it, as regards the aim of the teaching of Religion in Catholic
schools, that we are agreed on something like this: that the
indispensable minimum is that the Catholics coming out of our schools
should emerge with a tremendous devotion to Christ, Our Lord, with an
awareness of Him, a considerable knowledge of His Life and Personality,
and a desire to increase that knowledge; if they have got that, they are
all right; even if they have got nothing else, they are still all right,
they will come to very little harm. But if they have not, all other
excellences don't do them a great deal of good. None the less, the other
excellences are excellences and to be striven for. It should surely be
the aim of religious teaching that, by the time the pupils leave, they
should have learned the great doctrines of the Church, up to the level
of their capacity to absorb them at that age and with the somewhat
scanty experience of life they have so far had; and that they should
have acquired such a liking for the doctrines that they will want to go
on studying them, roughly pari passu with their experience of life.
Let me take three or four questions that might test how far these
aims had been achieved not necessarily the most important
that could be asked, but easy to answer with a yes or no, and in their
own way pretty decisive:
(i) Are Catholics, by and large, so equipped with knowledge of the
doctrines of the Church, that if some outsider came along and wanted
enlightenment, the first educated Catholic he came to would give it to
him, would really expound the Church's main doctrines in such a way that
the enquirer would think the matter worth pursuing with a priest? Would
he, by the time he reached the priest, already have learnt a great deal?
(ii) Do Catholics really want to go to Heaven? I don't mean, do they
want to go at once. I mean have they, with all their love of life, the
life of here and now, a real desire to go to Heaven not simply a desire to avoid hell, but
an actual desire, knowing what Heaven is, to embrace it? Would that be a
normal state of the Catholics who have been to our schools?
(iii) Take a third quite different sort of test. Supposing one of our
Catholics were to find upon the table in his bedroom a religious book,
say by Dr. Leen or Monsignor Ronald Knox, and a novel which would he pick up? I realize that
there are moods in which every one of us, even you, would rather have
the novel. All I mean is: are those the only moods that Catholics have?
If so, it means they have no very vivid interest in God, in Christ, our
Lord, in our Lady, in all the major facts of reality.
(iv) One further test: A Catholic receives the gifts of truth and
life that the Church has to give him, through Christ our Lord. Is he in
a kind of anguish at the thought that there are others who know nothing
of these gifts and are not receiving them? Can he take it quietly, can
he go about his business and only occasionally say: "Poor fellows,
they are unlucky"? Or is it a matter of anguish that fellow human
beings should be starved of the gifts of truth and life that Christ
wanted them to have? Is he as much concerned at that fact and conscious
that he ought to be doing something about it, as he would be if he heard
that fellow creatures lacked bread? If he is not, then it means that
bread has a more real value for him than the truth and the Sacraments.
This may be so, even if, as a practising Catholic, he frequents the
Sacraments. There may still be a good deal of routine in his own regular
Catholic life though of course, by the mercy of God,
that routine is a life-giving routine and will lead him to salvation.
My own feeling is that we do not measure up very well to those four
tests. We, as a body, with all our practice of the Catholic religion,
are not alive to the Faith in that sort of way. I travel a great deal,
more than most, and as a result I meet a far greater variety of people
than most; and because I am known to be a Catholic publisher, I hear a
great many more religious views. In the Catholic Evidence Guild, I have
had thirty years of meeting the incoming members, the people who would
like to be speakers. On this mass of evidence, I can only state my own
conclusion that even with those who are really devoted Catholics,
religion has not for the most part taken in that kind of way the Sacraments, yes, thank God; the
Mass, yes, thank God; but you don't feel the whole Catholic outlook on
life profoundly comprehended or really very much adverted to: and of
course sadly large numbers have dropped Mass and Sacraments altogether.
From meeting so many of my fellow Catholics, I have formed a mental
picture of the Religion classes from which they have emerged. That is
the basis of my talk this afternoon.
II
One begins with the attitude of the Religion teacher. I have masses
of evidence about that. There are Catholic schools in which Religion is
a poor relation on the syllabus. If there is a teacher who would startle
the Government Inspector if he caught her teaching Mathematics or
English or Latin or French, she is relegated to the teaching of
Christian Doctrine; the principle apparently being that the Diocesan
Inspector is made of sterner stuff than the Government Inspector and
does not startle so easily. You may not believe it, but I have seen such
schools.
I will say no more of these base institutions. We are talking about
schools that really take Religion teaching as the primary work, the
thing for which more than anything else they exist. Now the primary rule
of all teaching that is supposed to affect the way in which human beings
live is that the teacher is not simply handing out information like a
postoffice girl handing out stamps. The teacher gives herself, with the
truth adhering. There is no way of giving the truth with out giving
oneself. There must be actual self-donation of the teacher, and the
truth somehow goes with that self-donation. Everything I have to say
assumes that that is taken for granted by every teacher of Religion in a
Catholic school.
But let us say two further things.
First if the teacher regards the Religion
class as a kind of sacramental, a kind of sub- sacrament, then it would
be quite impossible for her either to have any slackness in preparing to
give it, or any dishonesty in giving it. It would be quite unthinkable,
it would be, in its own sort of way, not exactly a sacrilege it certainly is not but something moving in that
direction. When I mention dishonesty in giving the lesson, there flash
through my mind incidents people have told me of, occasions in class
where the Religion teacher tried to bluff when she did not know, or,
being caught out in ignorance, lost her temper. Now I know that these
things have been exaggerated, time does exaggerate them. But after all,
you as teachers know that you live permanently in the appalling
certainty that all your lapses are going to be exaggerated. So you have
to be terribly careful not to have lapses.
Second as the Catholic looks back over his
Religion classes, there should be no memory of harshness to stain his
devotion to religion; whatever may be true in the other classes, there
should be no harshness in this class. The amount of resentment one finds
over things that took place thirty years ago, a resentment which is
sometimes profoundly serious, which sometimes means even the dropping of
the practice of the faith, is amazing. I have been in school myself, and
I know that there are teachers who are positive lions their slightest whisper is a roar. I
remember a particular teacher who roared so effectively that I will
never open a book in his subject again, willingly. Be a lion, if you
must, in the other classes, but be a lamb in the Religion class. If
children learn nothing else, or retain nothing else, from their Religion
classes, let them learn and retain that religion is love. If all the
rest goes, let that stay. And it does seem to me that a teacher should
examine his conscience to see if there be any incident that might have
dimmed the realization in anybody that religion is love. I know that, as
a street corner speaker for the Catholic Evidence Guild, I examine mine
on that point. There have been occasions when I was sarcastic to a
questioner. I have not flogged myself for it, though I should have,
because my sarcasm stands between that questioner and the love of God,
and I put it there. The love of God cannot be taught with a snarl or a
sneer; and if the love of God is not taught religion is not. It would be
wonderful if everybody coming from a Catholic school could look back on
the Religion classes and say: "They were different. Even Sister
So-and-So was a Christian in the Religion class!"
Now I know I speak of something that is your affair and not mine, but
I think I would not punish children in the Religion classes if they did
not do their homework. I think I would, as far as is humanly possible,
leave compulsion out of the Religion class. It is not the same as the
other classes. I would not do anything that would give them a resentment
toward me, which they would proceed to attach to religion. Try to
persuade them, yes; get them so interested that they want to learn, yes.
But not compulsion. In the matter of behaviour, you cannot of course
have the place turned into a bear garden. But my tendency would be not
to punish them in the Religion class for any sort of misbehaviour that
did not tend to disrupt the class. If they are merely day- dreaming, try
to be more interesting than their dreams. And, for most faults, use the
Religion class to illustrate the value of forgiveness up to seventy
times seven. Religion class would be a wonderful place for that.
I do not think the Religion class should be a class at all. It is not
simply part of school work. It happens to be in the same building; it
happens to be run by the same people; but it is not part of school life,
it is something much more profound than that. The teacher in the
Religion class is not exactly there as a school mistress, she is there
as a maturer member of the Catholic Church, trying to convey, to less
mature members, just what treasures the Church has. Compulsion is a
thing that rankles. You would be amazed at the number of grownup
Catholics who resent having had to go to Holy Communion with all the
others. And this for two reasons. Number one: in many cases, it meant
sacrilege. They had not the nerve to stand out, they had not the nerve
to go to Confession over some sin or other, they had a bad conscience.
Not only that, it caused them to associate Communion with a great
mass-movement, without any personal choice at all. Consequently, once
they left school, they lacked the mass-movement and they gave up
Communion. It is the same with this question of religion when it is
thought of as part of school life. I have seen it to the point where it
is almost heartbreaking. Children, so devoted, so devout, at school. And
the moment they leave school they drop religion, because religion was
simply one more part of school life. Anything we can do to make children
feel that their Religion class is not just part of going to school would
be wonderful.
III
It is a commonplace that the teacher in the class room teaches in two
ways. She teaches by what she is, and she teaches by what she says. And
everybody knows that the first sort of teaching teaching by what you are lasts longer, is the more permanent.
But not for that reason would you neglect the teaching by what you say.
Any teacher who says to herself: "What I am is what matters to the
class, not what I say, so I will improvise as I go along," is a
charlatan. Surely any Catholic would feel rather that what she is is
such a shoddy thing that she had better make up for it by a greater
excellence in what she says. Would any of us have the nerve to sit there
and say: "I am so excellent a being that what I say hardly matters,
all they need do is absorb me"? On the contrary, the teacher really
trembles at the thought that so much throughout the rest of the child's
life is going to hinge upon the child's reaction to her. It cannot be
helped, but it means that you have to be better than yourselves in the
Religion class room.
What I am going to say next, I say with the fullest sense of
responsibility. Far too many of the Religion teachers I have met have
seemed to me not really competent. You will say that my experience could
be of only a small proportion of all Religion teaching. That is quite
true. But it is larger than most people have had. I am going to analyze
my impressions so that you may judge how far the standard I am
suggesting is a right standard.
It seems to me that there are two elements of intellectual competence
which should be a minimum for the teaching of Religion.
(i) The teacher of Religion should be absolutely soaked in the New
Testament, so that she knows what every key chapter in it is about;
knows the line of thought of every book of it, could find her way about
it blindfold. That seems to me an indispensable minimum and if a teacher
just lets the New Testament go by, does not take too much account of it,
merely looks it up when questions arise or uses it for texts to prove
doctrines, then what she is really doing, by ignoring the Book, is
snubbing the Author of the Book. The Author of the Book is the Holy
Ghost. And if you snub the Holy Ghost, it is hard to see how you can
count upon His cooperation in your class; and without His co-operation,
it is hard to see how you will accomplish anything. The teaching of
Religion is a kind of dialogue I was almost going to say between the
Holy Ghost and the Holy Ghost the Holy Ghost in you helping you to
say the truth, and the Holy Ghost in the child helping it to understand
what you are saying. It really is your work, you are not passive, you
are not nothing but the Holy Ghost is acting in you if
you let Him. The same is true of the child the child is not passive, not nothing,
but the Holy Ghost is helping it to understand what you say. Ideally,
one should know the whole of the New Testament; the Gospels must be
known thoroughly. In addition to reading the four Gospels, one should
have a good Harmony of the Gospels, and live with it. That is number one
of the qualifications which seem to me to be an indispensable minimum.
(ii) The teacher should be soaked also in the Church's dogmas, soaked
in them in this sense that she knows them in so far as the Church has
expounded them; and further, that she is possessed by them. This
experience of having the dogmas of the faith come alive in the mind is a
most fascinating psychological thing. It is not my business to appraise
the value of teaching the words of the Catechism, but I would like to
give a word of warning. The Catechism makes it possible for people to
teach doctrine without knowing doctrine. But the teacher who is soaked
in dogma, really afire with it, is not in the least likely to confine
herself merely to a repetition of Catechism words. The very essence of
being possessed by any truth at all is a desire to tell it. To be
possessed by a truth and not to long to communicate it would be
impossible. The mark of the teacher who is possessed by truth is an
almost anguished desire to convey to others what is so rich a treasure
to her.
Most of the Religious teachers I have met do not seem to be in that
sense soaked in the dogmas; still fewer, one feels, are soaked in the
New Testament. For the last thirty years I have been teaching the Faith
at street corners. Throughout that time I have been receiving the people
who join the Catholic Evidence Guild, who want to be trained as
speakers, and finding out what they know. Those who come are not the
worst Catholics, obviously. They would not want to speak at street
corners to their fellow citizens if they were thoroughly bad Catholics.
We have probably a good average lot of Catholics; some of them have just
left school, some left school thirty or forty years ago, some are
converts. Except for the recent converts, the effort to find what they
know is very depressing. The best of them know the Catechism answers,
but the moment one questions them as to the meaning of an answer, there
is trouble. They can nearly always get the first answer right, but if,
instead of going on to the next question, you question their answer, you
find that the foundation is chaos. Among them, over the years, have been
a great number of school teachers and they are just the same as the
rest.
Many of those who come to us, the ones most recently at school, have
been taught Apologetics and have been taught very well, though too often
they have been trained to answer yesterday's questions and not today's,
so that when they meet a living objector, the sword of their apologetic
breaks in their hand, proves in fact to be no true sword, but only a
good imitation. However that may be, there is invariably one most
extraordinary thing about their Apologetics. They have learnt the proofs
of all sorts of Catholic doctrines, but they do not know, and seem to
have no desire to know, what the doctrines themselves mean: they are at
once uninformed and incurious about the realities which they are so
pleased to prove that the Church has.
Thus they can prove, by evidence internal and external, that the
Gospels are authentic. I have hardly ever met one of them who has read
the Gospels.
They can prove that the soul of man is spiritual, that man therefore
is a union of spirit and matter: but what the union means, how things so
disparate are in fact united, they do not know. Over and over again, one
has had some such dialogue as this: "Is the soul in every part of
your body? Yes Is it in your thumb? Yes Then, if your thumb were cut off, what
would happen to the soul that had been in it?" A fool of a
question, perhaps. But the answers reveal that the vast majority have
not a notion of what the phrase "union of spirit and matter"
means, so do not know what a man is, and apparently have never even
wondered.
They can prove that the Pope is infallible, but they do not know the
meaning of infallibility. You can discover this by asking "Why, if
the Pope is infallible, does he summon a General Council? If he cannot
teach error, why have a council to prevent his teaching error?" To
be unable to answer this question (which most of them are) is not to
know the difference between being prevented from teaching error and
being able to teach truth, and therefore not to know what Infallibility
means. But they can prove it all right.
One last example: they can prove from the Gospels that Christ Our
Lord is God, but they do not know the meaning of the doctrine whose
truth they have so convincingly established, what it means that this man
was God. They have not gone into it and have not any curiosity in the
matter. You ask, for instance, "Did God die on the Cross?" The
answer, happily, is Yes as I have said the first answer is
usually right. But if you go on and ask "What happened to the
universe while God was dead?" nearly all abandon the great truth to
which they have just assented, and explain that it was not God who died
on the Cross but the human nature God the Son had assumed: which roughly
is the Nestorian heresy, condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431, one
year before St. Patrick landed for the conversion of your ancestors and
mine. The true answer, you may say, sounds not so very different from
the heresy: need we bother the young with technical distinctions of this
sort? But upon this distinction our redemption depends and the young are
quite capable of seeing the distinction, and of rejoicing in it.
Students thus drilled in the arguments but unconcerned about the
realities have not been taught by teachers soaked in the New Testament
or soaked in the dogmas. They come to the Evidence Guild classes and
start to learn; and you can see beginning to grow in them the excitement
that is born of a sense of being initiated into divine mysteries an excitement they were quite capable
of having at any stage in their career. As the realization comes to life
we see this invariably there begins also to grow the desire
to communicate, to go out and tell these truths to people who have not
got them: the feeling that it is intolerable that there should be
anybody who has not had at least an opportunity of having them, of
knowing these marvellous things. Please do not misunderstand me. I know
that one can be a good Catholic, one can be saved, one can be a Saint,
with very little notion of the content of Catholic doctrine. But it
still remains true that, to one who loves God, every new truth learned
about God is a new reason for loving Him, and it still remains true that
every doctrine contains light for the mind, and nourishment for the
soul, and that that light and nourishment remain locked up in it for
anyone who has never been taken inside it, to see what is there.
IV
The products of our Catholic schools ten years or more after, you
understand, when I meet them lack two things overwhelmingly. They
lack the shape of reality as expressed in the dogmas, and they lack any
inside knowledge of what the individual dogmas mean. A great devotion,
willingness to do God's will, devotion to the Church's laws, devotion to
the Sacraments, devotion to the Mass these things are there, but side by
side with a chaotic picture of what it all means.
I have already glanced at the lack of grip on individual dogmas. Take
now the question of the shape of reality. Catholicism means the union of
men with God in Christ. That is Catholicism, that is all of Catholicism.
That is the fact they should have standing up clear and clean from all
the mass of things they know. As they come through school, they have
learnt a great number of things, but there is no order, no hierarchy, in
the things they have learnt about the faith. They have all sorts of
pious practices, good salutary practices, rubbing shoulders, so to
speak, with essentials. They hardly know which is which, they are all
there together in a kind of I was going to say rag-bag, but that
would be rude they are all there in a kind of heap.
The absolutely essential activities of Catholicism and the quite
desirable but non-essential pious practices all there together the Trinity hardly larger than our
Lady of Fatima! They need some framework on which they can arrange their
knowledge, to which all the rest can be related, and I suggest the
simple definition of Catholicism I have just quoted: the union of men
with God in Christ. We are incorporated with Christ and thereby united
with the Father and with one another.
The union of men with God in Christ is Catholicism; and, that being
so, whatever else they are clear or vague about, whatever else they
remember or do not remember, they should be absolutely clear on what God
is, what man is, what Christ is, what union is. Those four should stand
out like a great plateau you can arrange all the other things
around these. Those four they really should know. Do they know them? One
small piece of evidence could obviously be collected in our churches:
the sermons preached are not preached as to a congregation that knows
those four things. The priests must know their people. An occasional
priest might under-rate his congregation: but if the clergy as a whole
preach only the simplest elements, they are surely uttering their
verdict on what their people already know. They say that a dogmatic
sermon would be above the heads of the congregation the majority of whom have had anything
from eight to twelve years in Catholic schools: you would think it must
be very hard to be above such heads. There is indeed an astounding
contrast between what the religious curriculum says is to be taught in
school, and what the sermons say has been learnt.
Come back to these things what God is, what man is, what Christ
our Lord is, what union is union with God in Christ.
V
I have been suggesting that there are two indispensable elements in
Religion Really Taught (to revert to the question you set me):
(1) that individual truths should be known in their inwardness, the
children should be shown how to get under the skin of the doctrine to
find what is there: the words of the Catechism should be broken up into
their component sentences;
(2) that the truths should be seen as parts of an organic whole, like
features in a face, and that face should be known intimately and seen
everywhere: the "shape" of reality must become a permanent
mental possession, not in the sense of truths known so that one can
recall them at need, but (to change the simile slightly) in the sense of
major features of the landscape in which the mind is consciously living:
if this is achieved, then the student will never be able to see anything
without at the same time seeing God and man and Christ and the union of
men with God in Christ, will never be able to judge of any problem that
arises in his life without seeing it in relation to God's will and the
supernatural life and the Beatific Vision. In other words he is living
mentally in the real universe, which helps him morally, too: for the
Laws of morality are the Laws of this real universe, and if one is
living mentally in it, one sees that they are, so that intellect helps
will in its struggle: whereas to be trying to obey the laws of the real
universe, while not living mentally in it, casts the whole burden of
virtue on the will.
That the pupils should learn to see Religion so, the teacher must
already be seeing it so, and must have given endless thought to the way
of sharing her vision with her pupils.
Consider the seeing it first. Any teacher of any subject must know
far more than he has to impart: with knowledge it is as with the voice,
you get your effects with what you are not using: the speaker at the
limit of his voice, the teacher at the limit of his knowledge, each in
his own way sounds thin and tinny: what is being held in reserve gives
resonance to what is being used. The Religion teacher, then, will be
always thrusting deeper into the inwardness of the doctrines. And she
will be living ever more consciously and intensely in the seen reality:
a teacher will be able to introduce the children into the world of
reality in which she herself is wholly living and rejoicing to live,
just as she will teach more vividly the geography of a country she has
lived in and loved.
Consider now, but all too briefly, the effort of the mind to grow in
the art of sharing the vision. There is, of course, the solid groundwork
of teaching method. Of that I need not speak. I suggest two further
points:
(i) There should be a continuous thrust of the mind, to discover
less-obvious but still fascinating implications of the dogmas.
When teaching the Incarnation, for instance, of course you teach them
that Christ is God, and that Christ is Man, and as they grow into the
doctrine, they begin to see how marvellous a thing it is that God should
have taken a human nature, made it wholly His own. But you can go
further, and should invite your students to go further, especially your
older students. Just think what it must have been to the Man, Christ, to
know that He was God because He had to embrace the
knowledge of His own Godhead with a human intellect, a human intellect
like ours. And He had to respond to it with human emotions, human
emotions like ours. Try to make them see the thing as a kind of
psychological challenge to them that they should see Our Lord not as a
doctrine but as a Person.
Take again as a sort of combination of being
soaked in dogma and soaked in New Testament the famous objection of the street
corner heckler to the infallibility of the Pope, that "Christ
called Peter Satan." In our early years on the platform, we gave a
thoroughly unsatisfactory answer to the question, an answer we had got
out of the books. Our answer was this: Christ did say to St. Peter:
"Get thee behind me, Satan"; but, we said, the context
explains it. Our Lord had told the Apostles that He must go to Jerusalem
to suffer and die. Peter, out of his love for our Lord, begged Him not
to do so, and our Lord then said to Peter: "Get thee behind me,
Satan"; and we explained that the word Satan means tempter and that
Peter, out of love of our Lord, was tempting Him not to go through His
suffering. And all this was very much to Peter's credit. That was our
explanation and it never satisfied the crowd. Why? Because we had
explained the words, but we had not explained the violence of the words.
Satan does mean a tempter, but Satan means Satan: our Lord knew it, and
Peter knew it, and it was a scarifying thing for our Lord to have said
to Peter. Why the vehemence, if that was all? Go forward to the Agony in
the Garden and you see more profoundly. Our Lord asks His Father the
very thing that Peter had suggested to Him. "Don't make Me go
through with this suffering." And our Lord feels the anguish of it,
so that the sweat runs off like blood. Now, that sweat as of blood is
the measure of the temptation that Peter is exposing our Lord to, when
he begged Him not to suffer and die. And once you see the sweat as of
blood, then you understand the vehemence of "Get thee behind me,
Satan."
Take one other example. You can remind your students how every life
is fed by its own kind, and cannot otherwise be fed. If you want to feed
your bodies, you must persuade some animal to part with a little of its
body some cow to sacrifice a steak, a lamb
to sacrifice a chop. The body has to be fed upon matter. If you want to
feed your minds, it is no good offering them chops: they must be fed on
minds, you must find someone with a richer mind and either by getting
him to talk to you, or by reading the book he has written, you feed your
mind on his mind, and your mind grows in richness. But there is another
life the supernatural life and our Lord said that this life is
Himself: "I am the Life." If there is a life that is Christ, and
if every life must be fed upon its like, the only food for a life which
is Christ is the Food which is Christ. And so you get the Blessed
Sacrament.
(ii) A most useful way with the class, when you have done your
uttermost to help them see what the doctrine is in itself, is to get
them to show, both to you and themselves in one act, what it would mean
if the dogma were not there. Get them to search their minds with
absolute honesty to see what it would mean to themselves if this thing
were not so, then to generalize and see what it would mean to mankind.
Get them thinking about it, and talking about it. Of course, in almost
every dogma class, the major part of the talking should be done by the
pupils, guided by the teacher. It is a great thing to get them
accustomed to talking easily, freely, and as the most natural thing in
the world, upon Religion. It will stand them in good stead, when they go
out into the world, if they have acquired this habit. And it will do an
immense amount for a world which is perishing for the want of the very
truths we could bring, if only we would learn to utter them, if only we
would learn to say even a little of what we see. As part of this,
children should be encouraged to raise the difficulties that occur to
their minds. They have not always been much encouraged in this matter.
Take the child who suddenly asks "Who made God?" Boys have
told me what happened. Either they were punished for irreverence or they
were wept over. They should, of course, have been rewarded, because they
were using their minds on one of the great truths.
One way and another, what all this comes to is this: you are trying
to give them a mental framework for reality, in which they can live
healthily and grow in knowledge and love. They are going out into the
world, and they are going to have all sorts of vital experiences which
will test the framework not simply intellectual objections
against the Faith, but the sufferings and temptations which no one can
avoid.
We must do all that lies in us to see that the framework is so strong
and so true that none of life's experiences will ever succeed in
smashing through it. The mark of a true framework is that it is stronger
for the testing.
ON TEACHING THE KEY DOCTRINES
I am adding this Note, which was not in the original talk, partly to
answer questions asked by teachers, but also for parents who may want to
co-operate in the religious education of their young. To teach the
doctrines one must know them. Teachers, of course, will have the
necessary doctrinal formation, but parents may not. I have treated all
the points I am about to list in two books A MAP OF LIFE and (in much more
detail) THEOLOGY AND SANITY. For the parents of younger children,
I mention Marigold Hunt's ST. PATRICK'S SUMMER (see page 26,
below).
Let us look more closely at our four-point master plan what God is, what man is, what Christ
is, what union is. And may I say once more that it is not for me, but
for the teacher, to say at what age this or that truth can be taught? My
plea is that the Catholic out in the world, and under pressure from the
world and the flesh and the devil, should know all these truths and see
them as central, relating to them all else that he knows. He needs them
in the world: he should not leave school without them.
A Preliminary Note on Spirit
Involved in all four doctrines is the concept of spirit: it is the
key to their understanding, as to the understanding of all religion. The
mind which has not mastered its use cannot make much of what the Church
has to tell. I must confess that, though I have been teaching Catholic
doctrine these thirty years, it is only in the last few years that I
have come to see this quite obvious fact as a first principle. If we are
serious about teaching religion, we must concentrate upon spirit, always
thinking of ways to make the idea clearer to the pupils, never satisfied
that we have found the unimprovable method. Spirit is not just one more
topic in the long list of topics to be taught in religion class, it is
basic to every topic; it is not simply something to be known, but
something without which nothing else can be known at once an object of study in its own
right, and a tool without which the mind cannot make progress they must see it, and see by it. Thus
it is not simply a matter of their learning and memorizing a definition,
or even solely of mastering the meaning, but of acquiring a skill.
Spirit should be as familiar a concept to them as their breakfast, and
any amount of labour must be put into making it so. They will not
understand God, or man, or Christ, or union, if they do not know what
spirit is. If we are to grasp our own faith, and help others to do the
same, we must be clear about spirit; no one should emerge from a
Catholic school at any age, even if he emerges at fourteen, who has not
been helped, to the limit of his and his teacher's capacity, to know
what spirit is, so that he can handle it as an idea of which he sees the
meaning and knows the importance.
It is, of course, difficult for the pupil; but the difficulty must
not be exaggerated. The teacher has to work hard at preparing the
lesson, and patiently at giving it, indeed it is a special test of the
teacher's skill. The first step, anyhow, is no great problem. A child is
very early aware that his body does not know or love, finds no
difficulty in thinking of these as operations of his soul, and accepting
the notion that knowing and loving go with being a spirit. Very early
too he can realize that spirit has power, it can master matter and make
matter serve it.
The next step is to introduce him to the idea of spirit as permanent.
He can see that material things are changing, always liable to become
something else, of any material thing other things can be made. He need
not find it hard to grasp the idea that spirit is the very reverse of
all this it cannot become something else,
nothing else can be made of it, it can only be itself; and, in my own
experience, quite young children can be interested in the underlying
reason for this difference between matter and spirit: material things
can suffer change because they are composed of parts, and what has parts
can be taken apart. Spirit has no parts, and therefore cannot be changed
into anything else. Even a few minutes meditation on this by a class can
work a profound change in their understanding.
A spirit has no parts, there is no element in it that is not the
whole of it. They will not possess this idea at first meeting, but it
will grow. As it does, they are ready for one further step: they can be
helped to see how the possession of parts goes with occupying space, how
therefore a spirit, having no parts, is superior to the need for space.
(Neither upon this matter, nor the others I mention as I go along, am I
bothering you with detail of teaching method; your own experience will
tell you how, and at what age, to convey these truths.)
Just as their first awareness of spirit as permanent can be developed
through the years, so can their first awareness of spirit as knowing and
loving. These ideas must be further analyzed, to distinguish them as
human and spiritual from animal imitations. Certainly by sixteen or
seventeen they can have been taught the whole concept of spirit as the
being which has a permanent hold upon its own nature, simple, outside
space, the abiding reality under the endless changingness of matter, and
again as a being of power, knowledge and love.
All this may seem obvious. But the adult Catholics one meets do not,
by and large, know it or get any light from it. How can the next
generation of adults, your generation of children, be helped to? It
seems to me only by the teacher keeping the concept of spirit
continuously before her mind as one into which her pupils must be
continuously growing. It must be returned to constantly. In every year
the ideas involved in it, as stateable, will be growing clearer and
richer. Not only that: spirit itself will have been lived with, leading
to an intimacy with the idea deeper than words or concepts can express.
Spirit can become an essential element in the world they are mentally
living in, so that world and thinking alike would seem miserably thin
and impoverished without it, materialism however persuasively presented
would at once be seen as repulsive and find all their mental habits
ranged solidly against it: just as, if a man has learnt to walk, the
most persuasive arguments could not get him to resort to crawling he would find the idea repulsive, all
his bodily habits would be ranged against it. The analogy is close the mind that is aware of spirit is
walking upright, the matter-bound mind crawls.
GOD
To the idea of spirit and its independence of space they can, even
quite young, be shown how to join the ideas of eternity and infinity,
and see God as the Infinite Eternal Spirit.
Infinite first, seen as greatness without limit. Every spirit has
power, knowledge and love. The pupil can be reminded of his own
limitations in all three and it is no bad spiritual exercise
that he be forced to concentrate on them, list the more obvious of them,
see where he can extend the limits by developing his ability and his
knowledge and his love, and where he will come to limits beyond which he
cannot in any event pass. He is now able to attach some sort of meaning
to the limitless power (so great, for example, that He can make things,
using no material at all), the limitless knowledge and the limitless
love of God.
Just as one approaches infinity by way of a concentration upon the
limitations of the finite, so one approaches eternity by way of a
concentration upon the "successiveness" of time. Provided we
choose our vocabulary and our illustrations carefully, they can see that
no one of us creatures here below is all he is, all at once: that if we
consider ourselves, there is not only what we are now, but also what we
used to be, and what we are not yet but one day will be; no one of us is
at any moment all there. They can be familiarized with the fleetingness
of our present, the word "now" applying to a different moment
every time we use it, indeed not remaining present even while we are
saying it (for while we are saying the n-, the -ow is still in the
future, while we are saying the -ow, the n- has already vanished in the
past). One way or another, by having considered the various ways in
which no one of us is all he is, all at once, they can grow into easy
familiarity with the phrase. Once they are thus familiar with it, they
can be told that it is true of God, God is all He is, all at once (that
indeed being Boethius' classic definition of eternity). God then knows
infinitely and loves infinitely, none of His knowing or loving vanishes
away into a past, there is no future from which any more knowing and
loving can come to Him, because He already does both limitlessly.
As the years go by, this refining process in the ideas of spirit,
infinite, eternal can continue. It will be for the teacher to decide at
what age the various steps can be taken: but as a general principle it
may be agreed that the earlier the pupil is helped to take the first
steps, the sooner he will be ready for the later developments. Certainly
it is an enlargement and a liberation for the minds of the young to see
time, as they have already seen space, as not of the essence of all
conceivable being, however much it be bound up with the kind of being we
are. So early it can be only a seed, the glimpse of a possibility, but
nurtured it will grow.
To have brought them to a better than verbal acquaintance with God as
Infinite Eternal Spirit is a great thing, great in itself and the
necessary preparation for a better than verbal acquaintance with the
Blessed Trinity. They have seen God, infinite and eternal, knowing
infinitely. They can now be told how in that infinite knowing He
produces the infinitely perfect thought of Himself, a thought which is
not only something (as our thoughts are) but Someone, equal to Himself
in all perfections, the Son, the Second Person, and how Father and Son,
loving infinitely, produce a total lovingness within the Godhead, a
lovingness which is not only something (as ours is) but Someone,
possessing all the perfections of Father and Son, for they have poured
their all into it. In my own experience, it is better thus to begin with
the processions of Son and Holy Ghost and when these truths are really
living in the mind, go on to show what we mean by person and what by
nature, and why what they have just learned is summarized as Three
Persons in One God.
But how early can the effort to lead them into the mystery of the
Trinity be made? Earlier, perhaps, than is always realized. The small
child finds the doctrine in some ways easier than the adult: his power
to accept reality has not been hardened and stiffened by routine and the
customary as ours has: it does not bother him to be told of a thought
that is not only Something but Someone. Yet that is not the only, or the
main, consideration. Return, for a moment, to the view of teaching as a
dialogue between the Holy Ghost in the teacher and the Holy Ghost in the
child. You are not teaching merely natural intellects. These children
have been baptized. The Blessed Trinity indwells them. If ever the Holy
Ghost can be relied on to help, it must surely be upon this truth. The
child can hinder Him by any of the countless ways of cussedness open to
the young. The teacher can hinder Him by not giving the whole power of
her mind to the seeing and the saying of the truth. A slackly prepared
lesson on God is one way of taking God's name in vain. This matter of
teaching the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity is the classic example of
the maxim "Work as if everything depended on you, pray as if
everything depended on God." After all, you are the people who KNOW
HOW TO TEACH; and I am convinced that if you bring all your wealth of
teaching experience to bear upon ways of introducing the child to the
Trinity, advances will be made by which the whole Church will be the
gainer. Meanwhile a pioneering work of extraordinary value has been done
by Marigold Hunt in St. Patrick's Summer. This book is an
exposition of Catholic dogma directed at ten-year-olds. In the story,
St. Patrick instructs them upon the Blessed Trinity expounding it stage by stage, at each
stage getting them to tell it back to him, correcting them, drawing them
on to the next stage. It is really brilliant pedagogy.
MAN
Once again, it is for the practised teacher to decide what can be
taught when; but, by the time the pupil leaves school, he should have
the following truths about man so mastered that, in all his thinking of
himself and others, they operate automatically, so to speak.
(i) He will of course have been taught that Man is made by God of
nothing. It is essential that he be shown slowly and patiently and
unforgettably (a large word, I know, when the young are in question) how
it follows from this that he could not continue in existence, unless God
continued to hold him, that he is held in existence from moment to
moment only because God wills to hold him there. This is one of those
realities, like spirit, which cannot simply be taught and left. It is as
basic to the understanding of man, as spirit to the understanding of
everything. If it becomes part of the pupil's very consciousness, he
will see everything differently more as it truly is than merely as it
looks. For one example, it will take a lot of the bounce out of him to
know that he is made of nothing, that God is holding him there and that
if God dropped him, so to speak, he would be back in his native
nothingness in no time at all: it is good for him to know that he
himself, like everything else in creation, is expressed in that formula.
For another example, he will see sin as folly for sin means trying to gain something
against the will of God: but only the will of God holds us in existence
at all: what could be more idiotic? The realization may not stop anyone
from sinning, but, if we must sin, it is better that we feel fools while
doing it.
(ii) But if it is vital that the pupil should know his nothingness
compared with God, he should also know his, and every man's, splendour
simply as man. He should be aware of the greater splendour of the soul,
as spiritual and immortal, made by God in His own image, and of the
lesser splendour of the body as God's handiwork. He should be shown what
it means for the splendour of both that God became man and took to
Himself a human soul and a human body; and what it adds to the value of
all men that Christ our Lord died to redeem them. This picture of man as a union of matter and spirit, by
his spirit immortal and in God's image, redeemed by Christ should become so much part of his
thinking that he can never see himself or any other man without seeing
him so, can never make a decision about himself or another without
taking it into account.
(iii) He must also have some notion of what is meant by the union of
matter and spirit of its strangeness first of all, given
that matter is in space and spirit not, and then of the mode of it. By
the time he is old enough, he can be given the notion of spirit pouring
out its forming and animating energies upon the body, so that no part of
the body lacks them (that being the sense in which the soul is in every
part of the body). Younger, he may be helped by some such comparison as
water boiling over a flame the flame not in the same space as the
water, yet by its heating energies in every part of the water all the
same: the water so obvious, hissing and steaming and spilling over, the
flame so still, that a chance spectator might think the water was
everything and overlook the flame altogether (as there are people who
think the body is everything and deny that there is a soul).
(iv) He should have been helped to meditate on the concept of man as
a rational animal: especially on the truth of which he, like all of us, has
continuing experience that rational does not mean reasonable
but only endowed with reason, a reason he may use or misuse, that man is
not only the one animal that can act reasonably but the one animal that
can act unreasonably. There are all sorts of ways in which the teacher
can profitably set the class musing on themselves as rational animals.
CHRIST OUR LORD
What Christ is means the dogma of Incarnation, but in addition to
that, it means a personal intimacy with Christ our Lord. I am not sure
that that would not be the starting point of learning everything;
everything has to be built up from that. Now I need not tell you that a
personal intimacy is something one has to acquire for oneself. You
cannot hand on your personal intimacy with someone to someone else. He
has to get it for himself. Intimacy is not the same for any two people.
You and I might each know a third person most intimately. The third
person himself might be unable to say which of us is the closer friend.
Yet each of us would have a really different picture of the person not different in every way, of course,
but different in a great many things. No one is able to respond to all
the qualities of any other person; some respond to some, and some to
others. I might respond to his love for Shakespeare. You might respond
to his love for Bach, which would not mean a thing to me. But if there
is no human being to every quality of whom one human person can respond,
immeasurably more so is that true of Christ our Lord, and of course of
our Lady in a lesser degree. We all respond to different elements in
Christ, but we have to find them for ourselves. The student, like the
teacher, should be soaked in the Gospels. He cannot meet our Lord
anywhere else, not as He lived and moved and talked: that is where He
is. St. Jerome said, in the fifth century, and Pope Benedict XV in the
twentieth made the phrase his own, that "ignorance of the
Scriptures is ignorance of Christ." And as a kind of corollary of
that, the ignoring of the Scriptures really looks like a lack of
interest in Christ our Lord. It seems unthinkable that we should love
Him and not want to know more about Him, know all that we possibly could
about him.
This knowing about Him means, as we have just seen, meeting Him as He
lived and acted among men and knowing the detail of His earthly life.
But it also means knowing who and what He was, the dogma of the
Incarnation in short. Where the Trinity has been carefully studied it is
all much easier. The pupils will already be familiar with the concepts
of person and nature, by attaching a meaning to three persons in one
nature, will have seen that one person to one nature is not the only
possible proportion, so to speak, and will be prepared therefore for the
dogma of one person with two natures. It is vital here to make them
realize that while the nature decides what actions are possible, it is
the person who does them; thus that, because Christ had a human nature,
He could perform genuinely human actions, yet the He who performed them
was God the Son. This is not simply a theological technicality; as we
have already noted, our redemption depends upon it. It was God the Son
who was born of the Virgin Mary, it was God the Son who died on the
cross, in each case, of course, in His human nature, not in His divine
nature.
UNION
We have glanced at the three God, men, Christ whose union defines the Church. It
remains to see what their union means.
(i) Just as the key to the understanding of religion as a whole is
spirit, and to the understanding of all creatures, man included, is
God's conserving action, so the key to the understanding of the union of
men with God in Christ is Sanctifying Grace. And in the same way as
spirit and God's continuing maintenance of man in being, grace must be
taught continuously, the teacher must concentrate intensely on ways of
making the doctrine known, realized, part of the very structure of the
mind. I speak with some feeling: until well into my twenties, all I knew
of Grace was that it was something to die in a state of. The Church
simply cannot be understood without it, everything she does is done that
we may have Grace and increase it. Experience seems to show that the
young grasp it best as Supernatural Life in the gradation life, natural,
supernatural. Thus they can be helped to see it as a new set of powers,
in the soul, enabling man to do things that by his natural powers alone
he could not do, things that he must be able to do if he is
(a) to attain heaven
(b) to live there. They can see Grace operating here as faith, hope
and charity, and finding its full flowering in the Beatific Vision:
this, too, with careful, patient teaching can must be made a reality to the pupils,
otherwise they will not know what that heaven is towards which their
whole life must be directed: one always moves more languidly to a cloudy
goal. Grace is union with God here below, heaven is union achieved,
total, final: just as sin is refusal of union, and hell is refusal
definitive, chosen eternally.
(ii) The breach made by sin between the human race and God was closed
by Christ's redemptive passion and death; it is in union with Him that
we are to be united to God. The truth that the Church is Christ's
mystical Body has three consequences for union
(a) Life, supernatural life, flows from Christ to us, making us one
body with Him, incorporating us with Him (roughly on the analogy of the
cells in any living body) so that He lives in us and we in Him; we are
more closely related to Him in the order of grace than even His Mother
was in the order of nature though she, of course, is immeasurably
closer to Him in grace than we shall ever be;
(b) united with Him, we are necessarily united with His heavenly
Father "I in my father and you in
me";
(c) in the shared life of one body men are related not only to Christ
the Head (though this is primary) but also to one another, and more
closely than by any natural relationship: we are closer than brothers,
we are members one of another. Even an attempt to live up to this truth
would revolutionize social life.
Christ's life flows to us in the Body by way of the Sacraments: the
Blessed Sacrament, above all. In the Body Christ continues to offer
Himself once slain upon Calvary to His heavenly Father for the
application to men individually of the rich treasure He merited for the
whole race of man on Calvary. In the Body, we receive His truth
infallibly "we have the mind of
Christ."
(iii) The Church then is Christ our Lord continuing to do through a
body of men the same truth-giving, life-giving work that He did in His
own natural Body while He was on earth. But the Church has a human side
too, and the young should be shown the implications of this long before
they leave school; otherwise their faith is going to be tried very
bitterly. What Christ has guaranteed in the Church truth without any alloy of error, life
by way of the sacraments is perfect. What the human members of
the Church, from Popes to laymen, do on their own judgment varies from
the highest sanctity to the lowest depths of sin. It is a wicked thing
to leave children to find this out from the Church's enemies when they
have left school. Indeed it is a black mark against a school if the
pupils meet, in the world outside, objections for which they were not
prepared in school: obviously they cannot be told of every objection and
its answer, but there are certain main categories into which objections
fall and they can be introduced to these. They should, one feels, be
prepared as for a mixed marriage which would certainly reduce the
number of mixed marriages. It is plain common-sense that they should
hear of the objections in school, where they can be given the answers as
well, rather than left to hear the objections, without the answers, in
the outer world. On this matter of what is called Scandals varying from great crimes down to
ordinary human failings it is especially urgent that they
should learn in school. Otherwise, when they hear them outside, they may
begin by denying them and suffer the humiliation of defeat in a needless
battle; and their faith may be shaken by a feeling that their teachers
never mentioned these things because the Church is afraid of them. They
will on this matter, at least, be unshakable if
(a) they have been taught that the Church depends on Christ's holiness,
not on men's; and
(b) they realize that they are in the Church for the sake of the gifts
of Truth and Life which Christ gives in it, not for the sake of the men
through whom Christ gives them: the essential thing they get from the
Church is union with our Lord to the level of their willingness to be
united.
A General Note on Mystery
Before embarking on this rapid tour of the four elements in the
definition of the Church, I talked of spirit as the foundation concept.
Now at the end of it, something must be said of Mystery as the
atmosphere in which all must be seen. Seeing reality is an exhilarating
experience; but part of seeing it consists in seeing why we cannot see
more of it. There is a first stage of sheer ignorance in which nothing
is seen: the darkness is simply darkness. Then the light of revelation
is given and a new universe comes into view. But our minds are limited,
there are realities beyond man's vision, even his grace-aided vision;
and once more there is darkness. But it need not be simply darkness: if
we know why we can see no further, the darkness IS a sort of light, and
we shall not be irked at not being omniscient. The young should be
constantly aware that Mystery is inescapable mystery in the form of truths we
cannot see how to reconcile with each other, mystery in the even more
testing form of happenings we cannot see how to reconcile with God's
goodness. None of these things need be dangerous, they may indeed be
enriching, to the mind which is livingly aware of its own limitations
and God's limitless knowledge and love knowledge which means that God sees
where men cannot, love which means that men can trust God
unquestioningly.
As I think back over this outline, I know that every element in it is
already being taught. I cannot imagine any Syllabus anywhere that would
omit any of it (except, perhaps, the scandals). It is all being taught.
But it is not being learnt learnt, that is, in the sense of still
being vivid and operative in the mind of Catholics ten years out of
school. Let me remind you once more that I am basing all I have to say
in this paper, not on what happens in school but on what remains in the
mind afterwards, not on the process of religious education but on the
product. I think it may be a matter of proportion, of light and shade.
Teaching the faith does not mean simply teaching one thing after another
till the list of things teachable is exhausted. The young must be given
the shape of reality, with the elements emphasized that matter most either in themselves, as Trinity,
Incarnation and Beatific Vision, or as keys to the understanding of
these great matters. Reality, seen thus in its true shape, should be
ever growing in clarity and so in grip on the mind. Other truths must,
of course, be taught, for I am not here drawing up a Syllabus of
Religious Instruction; but they will be best learnt in their place in
the master-plan, enriching it but never allowed to obscure its main
lines. The difficulty of all learning is the difficulty of seeing the
wood for the trees: in this subject it is almost a tragedy.
Where, in all this, comes piety? It may seem that I am suggesting a
purely intellectual instruction, with will and emotions left on one
side. Partly this arises from my own position as a layman: I am not
equipped to give you guidance upon the development of your students'
spiritual lives: nor, upon that, do you lack guides. Yet, as I have
said, that is only part of the story. The truth is that the will and the
emotions will re-act best to truths seen truly. A teacher can set about
exciting devotion to our Lord, the Mass and the Blessed Eucharist, Our
Lady: but unless the young know to the limit of their power of
grasping what the Church has to teach them what those realities are in
themselves, how can their reaction to them be genuine? All too easily
the reaction of the impressionable young is not to the doctrines at all,
but to the teacher's reaction to the doctrines: their emotional response
is rooted in hers, not in the realities; and all too often today the
reaction goes the other way, they dislike an enthusiasm which seems to
them meaningless, and doctrine and teacher are involved in one single
rejection. They must, then, as we all must, study the doctrines not for
the sake of the emotional vibrations they may stir but to find out what
they mean. The vibrations will come of themselves. Between stimulated
reactions and simulated the gap is not wide.
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