Religion

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.”

-Hebrews 11:1

It is definitely a privilege to be allowed to practice our faith so freely and attend a Catholic school. With that being said, my hope is that faith is not only a subject studied and graded at school, but also becomes a way to live life. Yes, we will be studying different aspects of our Catholic faith in the knowledge sense, but I hope that some suggestions maybe offered in using this knowledge to get to know Christ, not just about Him.

Seventh grade dives right into the New Testament, which gives us the life of Jesus. We will use Scripture very regularly, therefore at the beginning of the year we will go over exactly how to look things up in Scripture and when told a verse, how to find that. Throughout the year we will meet different characters who journeyed with Christ at different times of His life. We will see how some core teachings of the Catholic Church, such as the sacraments are pulled straight from Scripture. We will touch greatly on Christ's humanity, but also His kingdom here on earth and in heaven. We will continue on with understanding the Mass and Eucharist and realizing that we can be Eucharistic people and learn how we can live out the celebration of the Mass in our lives. After diving deeply into the life, death and resurrection of Christ we will briefly meet some other followers of Christ, such as Peter and Paul.

Eighth grade studies deeply the foundations of the Church and looks into the history. We will see the Church is “apostolic” and founded on the Apostles. We will look at what this word “universal” really means in our faith and how we can pray for unity within our Church. We will integrate the Creed into our study of the faith and find ways we can in turn live out being a part of this Church. We will see what councils and reformations have paved the way to the Church we are today. We will briefly look at the history of the St. Louis Archdiocese and see how this relates to our universality. We will end the first half of the year looking at our personal faith history as we begin the second half of the year preparing for Confirmation to continue our faith journey.

My hope is that in studying this subject, each week we will be able to spend a few minutes of class in Adoration. I will take some time to explain what Adoration is and give the students different examples and ways to pray during this encounter with Christ.