The falsification that characterizes Word and Worship’s portrayal of Christ in the Gospel is carried over in the presentation of Christian morality and the moral teaching of the Church. The authors consider the teaching of the Ten Commandments an outmoded legalism that has no place in a religion of love. This is in direct contradiction to what Christ taught. He said: “Keep My Commandments.” The result of the presentation of Christian morality in these catechisms is that little children are encouraged not to submit to the guidance of the Church, so that they may exercise their “freedom and responsibility.”
     It is too much to expect one to believe that those who are responsible for these textbooks really intend to convey to the children the authentic doctrine of the Church. We must rather conclude that they intend to spread a new conception of Christianity, one that radically contradicts the doctrine of the Church, the Christian revelation that has been the object of faith for almost two thousand years, from the day of Pentecost to the present. But then, why do these scribblers for false prophets dare to assume the right to teach the Christian religion to Catholic children? Should they not in all honesty cease to present themselves as representatives of the Church introducing children to the Catholic Faith, when they are in fact arbitrarily substituting their secularized Christianity for the genuine doctrine of the Church? Why, if they have lost their faith in the traditional teaching of the Church, will they not stop passing off their own heresies as orthodox doctrine? If they want to remake Christianity into a worldly religion, why don’t they at least have the honesty to leave the Church and work at their devilish purpose openly?
     They will probably answer that they are not heretics, that they merely wish to present a Christian faith that suits “modern man.” But the question remains: Whence do they derive the authority to replace the doctrine of the Church with this “modernized” Christian faith? As soon as they desire to change Christian revelation by adapting it to modern man, as soon as they believe that the mentality of an epoch is the measure of divine revelation, they are no longer Catholics–whether they want to admit this fact or not.
     Catholic parents should not be distracted by the evasive argument that all that is at stake is a question of pedagogy and that ordinary Catholics, those who are not specialists in grammar and high school education, are incompetent to criticize this technical educational matter.
     One does not have to be a pedagogue to know that the teaching of error is not the best way to lead students to truth. Further, and quite apart from the fact that the authors of these books are not teaching the doctrine of the Holy Catholic Church, the notion that one can lead people to truth by adapting it to their whims and wishes, as if truth were a product for sale or a club seeking members, is completely erroneous. In religion, such an adaptation–even for “pedagogical” purposes–can at most lead to a nominal acceptance of the Christian faith, a faith that has been so adapted, so stripped down, so reduced to a person’s peripheral worldly experience that it does not require a conversion for its reception.
     Moreover, a child not only does not have hardened convictions that the Christian teacher must overcome, but he has a strong inclination toward religion. One forgets thus that the way to attract the child’s soul to God is precisely to present to him the sacred humanity of Christ in its full glory, to confront him with the world above, which surpasses all that this world can offer. This will not be to deprecate natural values, but rather to encourage the child to lift up his heart to something infinitely more beautiful than mere natural values, to glimpse the holiness of Christ’s humanity, in Whom only is the natural perfected and sanctified.
     The secularizing authors of the new catechisms would have us believe that religion will appear more lively, more vital, to children if it is assimilated to their daily life. But there are many things for which the atmosphere of daily life is asphyxiating rather than invigorating. If we assimilate the notions of good and evil to the familiar experiences of agreeable and disagreeable, successful and unsuccessful, we necessarily falsify the unique nature of these moral categories. Such a reductive approach bars the way to any understanding of the true nature of moral good and evil. For the reality of Christian morality to come alive in the soul, there must be a concentration on the distinction between moral good and evil, moral goodness and sinfulness, and the mundane notions of success and failure, pleasure and displeasure. Only when the true glory of moral good and the unparalleled disgrace of sin are presented in radical distinction to other antitheses, can the soul of the child be vividly and permanently impressed with the meaning of Christian moral teaching.
     It is a mere superstition to believe that religion will be made more vivid when assimilated to daily life. As we have seen, assimilation means distortion. If we want to introduce a child to the message of Christ, to permit this mystery to manifest itself in all its unique intensity, then we must begin with the child’s highest experiences and ascend by analogy to the new and different message of Christ, always being careful to do justice to its unique solemnity. We should, for example, tell children of the conversions of the great religious personalities and make them acquainted as much as possible with the lives of the saints who are the great proofs of the reality of the redemption of the world through Christ.

     It is common for partisans of the new catechisms to justify themselves by insisting that they represent only necessary “experiments.” “Experimentation” will make religion more “lively” to students. For these people, the slogan of “experimentation” conjures pleasant associations of vitality, scientificness, unprejudiced and anti-dogmatic flexibility, promise for the future. For them, any insight not presented as the results of experimentation is considered abstract, unreal, irrelevant. Yet there are fields in which experimentation is not merely the wrong method and thus unscientific, but indeed totally incompatible with the nature of the subject. So it is with ethics, for example. Experimental ethics is unscientific, self-contradictory, and unethical. The very idea of letting someone commit crimes in order to study ethics is utterly immoral. And to make experiments with the souls of children is order to discover the most efficacious way of teaching religion is an irresponsible disrespect for the children and the very antithesis of a religious attitude. As long as experimentation is confined to merely technical matters–for example, to the problem of developing the memory–there can, of course, be no objections. But when the experimentation affects the content of faith, as it does in the catechisms we have been discussing when it poisons the souls of children with a distorted presentation of Christian revelation, then it becomes a diabolical game, a terrible irreverence against God and innocent children; it becomes a kind of spiritual vivisection, something far worse than medical vivisection on children would be.
     But we repeat: Catholic parents should not be distracted by pedagogical arguments. The pedagogy put forward to justify the new catechisms is false. But what we are confronted with here is not a question of pedagogy. Written all over these textbooks which are this very day poisoning the souls of little children is a hatred of the sacred and of the supernatural. This demands more from Catholic parents than arguments: it demands action. The rights of Catholic parents in these matters were reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council. Their duty in the present hour is clear. They must not tolerate their children’s being force-fed a secularized Christianity. They must insist that these texts be removed from the Catholic grammar schools, and they must withhold their children and their financial support from these schools until such vicious books as the Word and Worship series are removed.

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"The catechisms--the truth is not being given as given by the Holy Spirit to mankind. The truth is going into darkness." - Bishop Neumann, June 5, 1976

HERESY  IN  THE  CLASSROOMS
"And what are they teaching in the classrooms? Oh,  my sister, you must tell the world—all the children of earth, of the Eternal Father—that they are teaching heresy! Oh, that's untruth. Satan is deluding many and poisoning their minds. Heresy, O mournful heresy!" - St. Theresa, May 17, 1975