Catholic bishops have expressed concerns about the Religious Education (RE) programme currently being taught in post-primary schools, a senior bishop has said.
Bishop Martin Drennan, chairman of the Irish Bishops' Catechetics Commission, confirmed this to The Irish Times last night.
He was responding to a query that Catholic bishops are becoming increasingly exercised about what they perceive as inadequacies in the programme introduced to Irish schools in 2000, with the first Junior Certificate examination in RE last year.
However, Bishop Drennan said "the matter has never been formally discussed [by the bishops] as such".
He would have liked to have seen more scripture in the programme, including a study of all the gospels.
He believed other Churches would hold similar views and that, when the RE programme came up for review, it might be best for churches to adopt an agreed approach. No review of the RE programme is planned, however.
Bishop Drennan believed it was important, not least in the Ireland of today, that pupils/people "be literate in their own faith", while also having a knowledge of other faiths and cultures.
Meanwhile, in an interview in the current edition of the Irish Catholic newspaper, the Bishop of Derry, Most Rev Séamus Hegarty, had said the Religious Education syllabi for the Junior and Leaving Certificate examinations "need to be supplemented with additional Catholic material and formation".
He believed the existing RE programmes "contain the substance of the faith but this is often buried or lost among a large volume of distracting packing material.
"The Christian doctrines which the books contain need to be made more explicit."
He was "in favour of catechetical programmes which would lead students to know Christ and opposed to programmes which would not bring them to know Him".