Open Hearts and Closed Minds? Talking Back to the Framework Through the Pastoral Against Racism

• In Event: Striving for the Common Good: Mission-Based Equity and Inclusion in Catholic Education

Abstract

All Catholic secondary schools in the United States provide four years of religious education to students, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) is the leadership body responsible for providing guidance about the nature of that instructional content. In 2007, it published a document, hereafter “Framework”, to guide secondary religious education in all U.S. Catholic high schools (USCCB, 2007). Its recommendations have been widely-adopted and impact the daily instruction and community formation of more than half a million currently-enrolled students, and more than two million students since 2007 (National Catholic Educational Association, 2019).
While some scholars have questioned the historical emergence and intellectual influences of the Framework’s lead authors (Ostasiewski, 2010; Schroeder, 2015), these inquires have done little to question pedagogical implications of the authors’ positionality, principally the implications of that positionality for students of color. This absence should concern those interested in equitable and inclusive curricula, because whiteness and Western Culture are two phenomena that have often operated together, within the American Catholic Church, to demarcate, explicitly and implicitly, whose voices matter, particularly around instruction in faith and morals (USCCB, 2018; Tarsitano, 1998). This takes on particular significance today, because in November 2018, the USCCB published a letter which marks a sea change in the dialogue about racism and the American Catholic church. This pastoral letter against racism is one of only three times in the past century when the leadership of the Catholic Church, as an institutional body, has spoken out publically about racism in the United States (USCCB, 2018), and this is the first time that the Church has spoken out in such a way since the emergence of Critical Race Theory (Bell, 1980). In its letter, the USCCB calls “on our religious education programs, Catholic schools, and Catholic publishing companies to develop curricula relating to racism and reconciliation,” (2018, p. 26). Curiously, despite this direct call for curricula, this pastoral letter makes no reference to the Framework.
This paper seeks to use historical studies of the Framework drafting process (Ostasiewski, 2010; Schroeder, 2015), as well as the USCCB Framework (2007) itself, to unpack the meaning and implications of this curricular document. It will especially explore patterns of whiteness and Western Cultural norms, which may be problematic for the creation of equitable and inclusive curricula. The author, then, will draw on personal experience—writing benchmarks, drafting and implementing curricula based on the Framework—to illuminate certain problems the formation and application of this document may pose for educators. This analysis will utilize sociological understandings of social reproduction and critical race theory to interpret the formation and application of the Framework (Apple, 2016; Bell, 1980; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017).

Author

• Katie Sellers, University of Miami