Detroit — Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Detroit have been teaching the faith for more than 100 years.

So why do the schools need a new religion curriculum?

This year, Catholic schools have been implementing a new curriculum for kindergarten through eighth grade in an effort to make more complete Catholics — disciples who not only know the seven sacraments and the decades of the rosary, but what it means to live as a follower of Jesus Christ.

“The new curriculum is in place because if we want students to be good evangelizers, we want them to be grounded in the faith,” said Shawn Hodgins, a theology teacher for grades 6-8 at Guardian Angels School in Clawson. “The route the archdiocese is going is to get them to have an experience with the faith.”

The Archdiocese of Detroit reformed its religion curriculum for high schools in 2009, and now the grade schools are following suit in preparing young evangelists.

“This has been a two-year project; a joint venture between schools and catechists,” said Melissa Lipsmeier, interim superintendent of schools in the Archdiocese of Detroit. “There is this fire in the Office of Schools. We let our catechists know how it was going to work in our schools, but our office doesn’t have the theological background to write a religion curriculum. So we really relied on the catechists for a major portion of the content of this curriculum.”

Unlike other initiatives prescribed in Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron’s pastoral letter Unleash the Gospel, the new curriculum was already in development when Synod 16 was happening and the archbishop was penning his letter.

“It’s really like divine providence that the new curriculum came out at the same time as Unleash the Gospel,” Lipsmeier said. “When I came to the archdiocese four and a half years ago, we needed a new religion curriculum. The old one just didn’t work. It’s been a long road, but we got it to the point where we could implement the curriculum and look for feedback from teachers.”
The curriculum breaks down the faith into a set of pillars each student is expected to understand for their grade level. Released to teachers during the spring, the curriculum focuses less on textbooks and more on living the Christian message — which can be a challenge for teachers with limited time and resources to come up with lesson plans.

“It is a challenge to move away from the textbook,” Hodgins said. “The archdiocese has provided correlation guidebooks to help teachers work with different textbooks and resources. But teachers love order, knowing what resources are there to help them plan lessons.”
Another strength of the new religion curriculum is ensuring the Catholicity of all classes, such as highlighting scientific breakthroughs made by Catholics and reinforcing the Church’s role in molding civilization throughout world history.

“Listening to teachers at the grade-school level, especially in social studies, they are really excited about this,” Lipsmeier said. “In public schools, they scrape out a lot of the religion, the Catholic religion that really drove our world history. We were a powerful force, but in today’s public schools they really do try to water that down. But all of that can be breathed back into the subject.”

The emphasis on embracing a school’s Catholic identity is the most attractive part of teaching at a Catholic school over other career options, Hodgins added.



“In a Catholic school, we have so much we can offer in spirituality to children that public schools can’t,” Hodgins said. “You can see our Christianity through all aspects of the school. We’re able to come together to pray. When death comes into the community, we can come together in a way that’s stronger than at a public school. Parents are looking at our Catholic schools to embrace the faith openly.”

The new curriculum has been released, but Unleash the Gospel also calls for a complete reimagining of Catholic schools, from governance and finances to ensuring any Catholic family who wants a Catholic education, can get one.

That, for Lipsmeier and her team, is the next challenge.

“A complete reimagining of Catholic schools will take some time,” Lipsmeier said. “That’s something my office can’t do single-handedly; that is going to take the whole of our community to reimagine. We have the Catholic Schools Council forming committees to identify what we’re about, from academic excellence to our Catholic identity. We need buy-in from the whole community, from pastors with and without schools, the whole community involved in the rebrand. That’s what’ll it’ll take to reimagine schools in the Archdiocese of Detroit.”