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Book Review

Book fills breach left by bad religious ed

By Diane Levero

Okay, let’s see a show of hands – how many of you parents or grandparents think your children and/or grandchildren received a good religious education?

That’s what I thought – very few.

Where Did I Come From?  Where Am I Going?  How Do I Get There?  Straight Answers for Young Catholics attempts to fill the gaping hole left by what has passed for Catholic religious education for at least the last two generations.

Authors Charles E. Rice and Theresa Farnan, a father-and-daughter team, come well-qualified for the job.

Professor Rice taught a highly successful and doctrinally sound religion course to high school seniors in Indiana for nine years, and has taught constitutional law and jurisprudence at Notre Dame Law School and Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for three decades.

Dr. Farnan, the mother of seven, is a Notre Dame Ph.D. in medieval studies and a lecturer in philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md.

To answer the questions posed in the title, Rice and Farnan begin by first answering two related questions:  Is there a God? and Is there a right and wrong? through the use of reason.

Yes, reason.  Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), rescued reason from the trash bin to which the Enlightenment philosophers had consigned it, say the authors.

For the past three centuries, the philosophy perpetrated by the Enlightenment has saturated our culture with three errors:

1. Secularism:  God does not exist, or if He does, we can’t know anything about Him and He doesn’t care what we do.
2. Relativism:  Nothing is certain.
3. Individualism:  Each person is his own judge of what is right and wrong for him.

Nonsense! say the authors:  there is objective truth and we can know truth through reason.

They then take the reader through St. Thomas Aquinas’ five proofs of the existence of God through reason:  motion, causation, necessity or contingency, perfection, and design.

For the high school- or college-aged reader, for whom this book is written, who has probably never heard Aquinas’ five proofs, this has to be a fascinating and revelatory trip:  yes, there is a God, and I can prove it and know it, using my own God-given reason!

But it is not enough merely to believe that God exists:  the fallen angels, the devils, know that.  We need to know what God is like.

Again Aquinas comes to the rescue:  through reason, we can know that God is one, infinite, simple, spiritual, eternal, personal, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and all-perfect.

But God did not leave us dependent on reason alone, the authors point out.  Through revelation, God has told us things about Himself that we could not know from reason.

Faith and reason, said John Paul II, are “like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”

Using the “two wings” of revelation and reason, the authors answer some very important questions:

• How did God make me in His image, and what difference does it make?  (Hint:  it makes a lot of difference.)
• How did it all go wrong?
• How did Christ fix the problem?
• Why do I need the Church?
• What is natural law?
• How does my conscience work?

They also tackle knotty issues such as contraception, abortion, the death penalty, and a “just” war.

If you learned this stuff in high school or college, Where Did I Come From? will make a refreshing recap.  If you didn’t, you will learn a lot.

Better still, keeping in mind the second Spiritual Work of Mercy (“Instruct the uninformed”), get the book for your high school or college kids or grandkids for Christmas.