Brief Overview of the ECSI Survey

Our current context is no longer marked by a dominant Christian world view; instead, a plurality of religious and non-religious world views present themselves. In this context, the Christian person has to choose to be Christian rather than to be Christian ‘by default’. Fr Frank O’Loughlin, in his book This Time of the Church, identifies this change as a transition from Christendom to pluralism (O’Loughlin 2012, Chapter 1). In so many of our school communities there is increasing diversity of culture and religion alongside a decreasing familiarity with the Catholic tradition.

How might Catholic schools respond to this changed and still changing context?

The ECSI research findings indicate three necessary responses to this context – or three shifts: 1. 2.

3. a move away from secularising tendencies and towards a strengthened Catholic identity. the move from a literal faith position to a faith position that opens itself to interpretation, difference and otherness (post critical belief). a move away from a harmonising approach in pedagogical practices where Christian values are emptied of their Christian particularity (Christian Values Education). This third shift attends faithfully to the Christian narrative, situating the Christian tradition right in the middle of the plural cultural context and there making new meaning through the process of recontextualisation.

Together, these three critical responses constitute the theological normative.

The Theological Normative Founded in the ECSI research, the theological normative describes the essential characteristics and ambitions of a contemporary Catholic school.

Processes that support identity formation, cultural plausibility, meaning-making and relevance, alongside a theologically legitimate presentation of the Catholic heritage are enabled by the development of post-critical belief and happen through the process of recontextualised dialogue with otherness in a pluralising context. This is the theological normative and can be expressed in different ways. However, three elements or stances are always present:

1.

2.

3. The attitude towards belief is post-critical: that is, belief continues, not in fixed ways but in ways that are responsive to the contemporary context. The school opts to recontextualise as its way of being in the world: it creates a bridge between absolute closed-ness and openness, choosing to maintain both cultural plausibility and theological legitimacy. The school chooses a dialogical approach: this affirms an openness to all others through solidarity with them. Like post-critical belief and recontextualisation, dialogue is deeply and necessarily theological.

Ideally, the data collected from the respondents to the survey (the empirical normative) will coincide with the theological normative of the Catholic identity project

Post-Critical Belief

The movement to second naiveté or Post-Critical Belief involves the deconstruction of naive Literal Belief and the development of a reconstructed believing stance. This is marked by an awareness that God (the Other, the Transcendent) is a mysterious, unseen reality mediated through stories, rituals and communities of faith (a person’s relationship with God can only grow within a community, whether that be expressed in family, school, parish or more broadly). The person of faith in this position can acknowledge that non-belief or rejection of belief is a real option, one taken by many people today. The post-critical believer lives a vulnerable faith journey, remaining steadfast in the face of doubt and critical reasons not to believe.