PARENTS MUST PREACH GOSPEL

Their influence: 'Nothing more important' TEACHER RECALLS `GREAT DISASTER'
"PARENTS are the first preachers of the Gospel . . . Woe unto them if they preach not the Gospel ! " These words in a new pastoral letter by Bishop Flynn of Lancaster coincide with a cry from the heart of a distinguished teacher, Miss Mary Cahill, in a special article in this issue of " The Catholic Herald " for an increase in the traditional parent-priest instruction in religion.
Together they cast a fresh and penetrating light upon the distressing problem of the "leakage " of thousands of young people from the Church.
Mary Cahill was, of course, unaware of the pastoral letter when she wrote her article—an article in which she recalls what a diocesan examiner called " the great disaster " that occurred in the last century when a new system of religious instruction was introduced into the Catholic schools.
For over 18 centuries, Miss Cahill recalls, the Church used no other means of transmitting the Faith than the sacramental. traditional parent-priest way.
But somewhere about the Year 1870 "a system was introduced here which changed the position completely. Instead of religious instruction being given . . under the personal direction ofthe parish priest, all was centralised."
Miss Cahill quotes the famous Archbishop Ullathorne: " They (the Diocesan Examiners) have
been allowed to prepare schemes in which they have imitated the Government inspectors, making their examinations ton scientific, cramming the children's heads to the sacrifice of piety and the training of the heart."
She quotes, too, Bishop BeIlord on the fruits of the teaching by devoted mothers.
The CATHOLIC HERALD prints Miss Cahill's historical article to underline what all the members of the Hierarchy have been saying again and again—that parents must not leave the religious instruction of their children to the schools, doing little or nothing themselves; that the parents are the first and natural religious instructors of their own children.
The point is that religious instruction given in the schools should be regarded as an addition and continuation to traditional home training, not a substitute for it.
And now Bishop Flynn, in his pastpral letter for the second Sunday of Lent, 1955, returns to the question of the duties of all Catholics—particularly parents—to spread the Faith.