DEAR EDITOR: The archbishop has extended a call for the Church to reclaim her schools, but as with all rallying cries, the cry itself does not really provide the means or answers.

My hope is that it does not merely mean saying more prayers or putting up more crucifixes. Not that I have anything against prayers or crosses. In fact I love them!
There are some worrying issues the Church has to deal with in administering her schools.

One is the noticeable lack of direction or policy from above. It is only when a hijab or dreadlocks appear in our haloed halls that there is a sudden flurry of excitement and some official announcement is made to deal with that particular issue.

No one is quite sure of what the shape of Catholic education should be, what a Catholic school should look like today or what our focus should be?

Catholic teachers in their training, the little they receive, are told to be holy, good people, to teach the faith and to be dedicated and hardworking.

Sounds great but I suspect our government school counterparts are told pretty much the same, probably minus the “teach the faith” bit. The basic question, what should a child be like on graduation from a Catholic institution is more or less ignored.

There is also the fact that we have all fallen prey to the scholarship temptation, from parents and students to teachers and principals. The fact remains that the public today judges a school solely on academic criteria.

It is very hard to “sell” a school on non academic criteria. The question remains though that this has been our forte over the years. Catholic schools were known to challenge youth to give service to their community, to commit to justice and peace, to develop a personal spirituality, to encourage critical thinking, to promote friendship across class and ethnic divides and to respect those who are different.

I don’t hear anyone talking about these things anymore. In my forays into the government school system they seem more concerned about these “higher” matters.

But the most burning matter, which is always ignored when raised in any public forum, is the terrible contradiction that exists today in terms of school composition. Catholics cannot get into their own schools! I am told that it is all because of mathematics, something about 20%.

Well I was never too good at mathematics and I guess I will never really understand. Logic tells me that if someone builds a house for their family they and their family should be living in it.
Catholic educator   via email

DEAR EDITOR: Are Catholics gradually drifting away from attending Holy Mass on weekends?

I remember when I lived in Port of Spain during the 1960s attending Mass at St Mary’s Church in St James regularly where, if you got there five minutes late you would have to stand at the back of the Church and sometimes even on the steps outside.

After moving to the South in early 1970 I used to attend Mass at Harris Promenade but after building my home in La Romaine, I started attending Mass at St Benedict’s in La Romaine in the hall under the old presbytery where space was quite limited.

In later years when Fr Leo built the new church with the limited resources that were available at the time, the congregation grew immensely and was always packed to capacity both on Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings.

More recently, during the administration of Fr Brennan, the entire church was completely refurbished with beautifully tiled floors, a new ceiling, panelling to cover the steel structure, all new pews with hinged kneelers and six new stained glass panels surrounding the wall at the back of the altar.

In spite of all this however, I have noticed that the congregation has been steadily dwindling both at Saturday evening and Sunday morning service and half the pews remain unoccupied, with the exception perhaps of weddings and funerals of prominent persons.

I would certainly have thought that in these perilous times with the entire world in a state of imminent disaster, all good Christians would flock to their places of worship as regularly as possible to petition the Lord’s intervention for the salvation of mankind, including the citizens of this once beautiful country who are in desperate need of help.
Martin Kavanagh, La Romaine

THE EDITOR: Mary’s fiat might strike many if not most of us as a little odd. I am not speaking about her “yes” in itself but the manner in which it was given.

She could have simply said “yes” and leave it there but chose to go further and give the reason for her yes to the angel - “I am the handmaid of the Lord.” For Mary her action of acceptance was inextricably linked to who she was.

In the story of the fall of man, action is again linked to identity. Here the first effect of sin was man’s perception of himself being naked. In contrast to Mary’s moral action though, man’s self-perception came as a result of his action and not vice versa.

Is the Holy Spirit suggesting through scripture that moral action is somehow connected to our self-understanding? I would think so, for even in the Church I have been taught that I must act in accordance with my union with Jesus.

Again like our Blessed Mother’s fiat, in accordance with an identity, that of a lover of Love and a lover of the cross.

It seems to me that unlike all other creatures on earth, man has the ability and even more, the propensity in his own nature to seek answers to two related questions – “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?”

One deals with identity while the other deals with the question of purpose or justification but both guide man’s actions. Both fashion our understanding of what we ought to do or not do.

Insofar as man seeks those answers man displays scepticism toward any intrinsic understanding he may have of himself he may have been born with and displays also a desire to be nurtured.

I was intrigued by the challenge of Fr Charles’ article “Ordinary People” in Monday’s Guardian (Oct 1) where he touched on the subject of nurture and nature.

The Lord of the Flies scenario he mentioned brought to mind the very real stories of youths being “nurtured” by youths in so many of our street gangs and the article seemed so relevant for our society today but I will suggest that nature and nurture are not diametrically opposed. In fact I think they work more through each other as separate factors.

As stated above it is in our nature to seek to be nurtured. But more than this, if we had no ability to be nurtured, then, by nature, we would have no sensitivity to others and would be incapable of moral or immoral acts.

Changing our actions because of others will be impossible. We may be neither good nor bad as the article inquired but rather like any other animal guided by an unyielding nature.

But these theoretical questions aside, for me the more relevant question then is what identity are we going to nurture in our children? Or to put it another way – how are we going to lead them to discover their true nature?
Lawrence Fortune, El Dorado