14 TODAY’S CATHOLIC
Local JANUARY 14, 2011
Incorporating peace and justice into the curriculum
BY CAROL BAASS SOWA
TODAY’S CATHOLIC
SAN ANTONIO • Victor Valen-
zuela, national religion consul-
tant for bilingual resources for
William H. Sadlier, Inc. and in
ministry for 20 years, including
classroom teaching and youth
ministry, brought some help-
ful thoughts on incorporating
peace and justice into curricula
to those attending the archdio-
cese’s October Catholic Forma-
tion and Leadership Conference.
Catholic schools today are
very much into justice and
justice education, he said, and
have made that a hallmark of
our Catholic identity. While
this is good, he pointed out that
teachers need to clarify what
exactly Catholic social teach-
ing is, understand how Catholic
justice has a different meaning
than other types of justice, and
plan practical ways to introduce
this into their classes.
Baptism, he related, is one of
our most underrated sacraments
and “is really what gives us the
rights and responsibilities of
who we are as Catholics and
Christians.” Sometimes people
see the rights, but they don’t see
the responsibilities that come
with that, and he suggested
bringing one’s baptismal certifi-
cate to class, not saying anything
about it at first, and then letting
the students’ curiosity take over
and turn this into a teaching
moment.
Discipleship is also a key
point, he explained, as we are
modeling Jesus, but sometimes
our catechesis and religious edu-
cation and formation goes astray
from teaching who Christ is,
which is missing the main point.
“If you are doing religious edu-
cation, if you are doing cateche-
sis and you’re not putting Christ
at the center of every single
lesson,” he said, “then that’s
wrong.” Every opportunity we
have to talk about our faith, we
should be talking about Christ,
because that is what is central to
our church.
Children look to super heroes
and celebrities to model them-
selves after, he said, noting,
“The power of celebrity in this
country is phenomenal, and yet
Christ doesn’t get that same bill-
ing many of the times.” This, he
believes, is because we confuse
who Christ is for kids. Jesus
modeled not only discipleship,
but justice, and this can be seen
in the stories in Scripture. “Am I
my brother’s keeper?” he asked.
“Well, yes we are.”
We need knowledge of our
local, national and international
community, with one of the big-
gest concepts right now being
globalization, something that is
sometimes hard for even adults
to grasp. He named Catholic
Relief Services (CRS) as an or-
ganization that is doing much to
teach this concept, with lesson
plans being given on their site,
www.crs.org.
Justice helps in social and
emotional formation, he related,
with students’ service or justice
projects enabling them to meet
and work with others and gain
critical thinking skills in the
process that helps them see
beyond themselves.
He observed that there is a
difference between service and
justice. Service learning is what
so many schools are now doing,
with students having to go out
and put in so many hours on
various helpful projects. This
is primarily direct service.
“Justice formation,” he said,
“is having a sensibility about
justice that we need to be doing
in our world and how we are a
part of that.”
There are seven comprehen-
sive themes of Catholic social
teaching, he said, listing: Life
and Dignity of the Human Per-
son; Call to Family, Community
and Participation; Rights and
Responsibilities; Option for the
Poor and Vulnerable; Dignity of
Work and the Rights of Workers;
Solidarity; and Care for God’s
Creation. They involve conver-
sion or spiritual growth, are
done communally as the body of
Christ and are ongoing.
Justice is about conversion,
Valenzuela explained, because
it is not about our affect on the
persons being helped, but what
it is giving to us. “That is why,”
he said, “Catholic Social Justice
or doing service in a Catholic
sense involves a lot of prayer
and reflection, a very important
component of a justice pro-
gram.
He noted Blessed Mother
Teresa of Calcutta’s Sisters of
Charity spend half their day
in prayer for this reason and
that he had come to a personal
realization about the meaning
of prayer when his mother had
to have major surgery. When he
told her he would pray for her,
he realized he did not expect
God was going to miraculously
cure her, but that prayer was
rather an asking God to help
him understand what he needed
to be doing in this situation to
be the most supportive of his
mother. Prayer is important
regarding justice in that it helps
us clarify more deeply how we
need to serve those we are serv-
ing, bringing about solidarity
with them.
Justice also in-
volves a lot
of gaining
knowledge
and study-
ing, he
said, such
as educat-
ing oneself
on the is-
sues and candidates at election
time. Advocacy is another very
important concept in justice,
speaking for those who have no
voice. Here he related that a cur-
rent example is gay and lesbian
students in our schools, whom
we need to be voice for though
we may personally be uncom-
fortable with this issue.
There are two “shoes” to
Catholic justice, he said — direct
service and social action. Direct
service is immediate, such as
feeding someone who is hungry
on the street. Social action in-
volves asking ourselves why this
person is hungry and what can
be done about it.
Canned food drives at school
sometimes miss the mark, he
noted, with students thinking
that by contributing cans to help
their class win a competition
they have done something for
justice, when that is only half of
the concept. Prayer and reflec-
‘When we’re talking
about social action,
we need to talk about
issues that are uncom-
fortable to us, that we
don’t understand.’
Victor
Valenzuela
Religion consultant for
bilingual resources for
William H. Sadlier, Inc.
tion are needed to discern how
the root of the hunger problem
can be fixed.
He used the current drug vio-
lence in Mexico as an example
here, saying, “The Mexican drug
violence is all about the United
States,” as we are their biggest
drug market and are supplying
the guns they use. “This is what
social action does to us,” he said.
“It helps us ask the big ques-
tions.” One small thing we can
do is help someone here with an
addiction problem, either by per-
sonal support or volunteering
with a program such as Catholic
Charities provides. “If I’ve just
taken one person off drugs, I’ve
helped the Mexican drug war,”
he said.
The death penalty is another
significant issue that is often
misinterpreted and has taken
a back seat in the church to the
anti-abortion issue. He recalled
doing a beautiful prayer about
the death penalty at a school
assembly in his teaching days,
which enraged one of the
teachers who angrily told him
the person they were praying
for was a pedophile and child
rapist. Valenzuela pointed out
to the teacher that as Catholics
we believe in redemption and
forgiveness. “Otherwise,” he
said, “that kind of nullifies the
whole resurrection thing. When
we’re talking about
social action,
we need to
talk about
issues that
are uncom-
fortable to
us, that we
don’t under-
stand.”
Another issue of our times is
health care, with many suffer-
ing due to insufficient health
coverage. He noted the issue has
gotten politicized to the point,
however, that people are saying,
“Don’t vote for this person — he
believes in health care,” which is
the opposite of what we should
be thinking if we are practicing
Catholic justice.
He brought up the use of con-
structivism in teaching young
people — the theory behind it be-
ing that young people construct
their own knowledge through
the process of doing service,
which can have a transforming
effect on them. This happened
to a former “A” student of his
who was due to graduate but had
not completed her service hours
and told him she did not see the
point in doing so.
Valenzuela finally convinced
her to volunteer at a nearby
skilled nursing facility. She was
familiar with the Holocaust
through one of her classes
and happened to make the
acquaintance at the facility of a
90-year-old Holocaust survivor.
She later told Valenzuela how
the two of them had cried and
prayed together over the lady’s
stories, telling him it was the
most transformative experience
she had ever had. “We’ve got to
give them these experiences,”
Valenzuela told his audience.
A good paradigm to use in
setting up a class project, he
said, is “See-Judge-Act.” The
“seeing” part is educating our-
selves about an issue that needs
rectifying. In the “judging” part,
we ask what our faith tells us
regarding that issue, and “act-
ing” involves doing something
about it.
Regarding learning activities,
social networks such as Face-
book, Twitter and MySpace, he
noted, are now doing a lot in the
social justice area and he en-
couraged seeing if your school
allows having, for example, a
Facebook page for the class in
which an issue can be explored
and advocated. Activism and
community organization are
another facet. “We need to teach
about non-violent institutional
change and people power,” Va-
lenzuela said, telling of a class
of his who amassed pamphlets,
made posters and protested at
lunchtime to bring awareness
of an issue. Videos and even
YouTube can also be of help
here.
He encouraged being cross-
curricular with your plans, in-
corporating other disciplines in
your service and justice project,
as well as having students do
written reflections and presenta-
tions on their topic, which causes
them to learn more about it.
Valenzuela concluded with
a relevant prayer by César
Chávez, saying he was “a
person, to me, that’s a saint in
terms of the work he did for
justice and for the rights of
others.” The prayer’s final line
read, “Help us love even those
who hate us, so we can change
the world.”