Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Do Catholic Churches ordinarily have Sunday School or Bible Study of some sort on Sundays?

There are religious education classes. Usually for the very young children this might be on Sunday so that their parents have the option of putting young children in Sunday School while they are at mass. For the older children and teens it would usually be on a weeknight or Sunday afternoon so that they are going to both religious education as well as mass on Sunday. For adults there is Bible study or a wide variety of other faith enrichment offerings.





Personally I go to Bible study once a week, on Thursday mornings. My kids all attend religious education as well. My teenage daughter also has a small group study that she attends during the week.

Do Catholic Churches ordinarily have Sunday School or Bible Study of some sort on Sundays?
Nowadays they do. It's a new thing, in the last 2 or 3 years.
Reply:We have Catechism classes for youths on Sunday at my Parish.
Reply:some do, some don't.
Reply:Usually on Sunday, you have Mass. Mass is a worship service in which we hear three readings from the Bible - Old Testament, a reading from one of the letters, and a Gospel reading, followed by a homily (sermon) by the priest or the deacon that relates the readings to everyday life.





Most Catholic Churches have Bible Study classes during the week.
Reply:The Catholic Church I used to attend had Catechism classes for older children and teens, and sunday school for little kids - and that was quite some time ago.
Reply:The Catholic Church isn't a single Church but a federation of Churches. The largest Church in the United States is the Roman Church although the other ancient Churches founded by the apostles all have communities in the United States.





However, the Roman part of the Church reads the bible almost entirely, parallel passages and a few minor things such as lists are not included, over three years. If you attended Church every Sunday for three years, or daily for two years, you would hear the entire bible minus a handful of passages. If you were sixty years old and were Catholic your entire life, you would have read or heard the bible twenty times even if you were illiterate and most likely you wouldn't even notice it had happened.





The other branches of the Catholic Church also read the entire bible, but the time frames are different and the readings occur on different days.





In addition, depending upon the parish, there are bible studies that are organized and there is a Sunday school for children and special ones organized from time to time for adults. How it happens is parish specific.





Traditionally, if you would look at the Catholic service for the last 2000 years, the Sunday service was the bible study the Church used. Even in places where the service wasn't in the local language, the bible always was proclaimed in the local language. The oldest English bibles we have are from the 8th century.





In addition to the Sunday or daily service, the Church divides the day into prayer times with their own readings so if you want additional prayer time you can add to the primary daily service to add seven other smaller prayer services to let God interrupt your day. This has been going on for 2000 years now and the same services are still basically in use. The original services which all Catholic services come from were written by James, Mark and Peter. James' service does have an English translation. You can look it up under the "Liturgy of James." Wikipedia has an article on it, if you are interested, and there is a reasonably good translation linked to that article as well.
Reply:When I was catholic (before I gave it up), they had no such thing.
Reply:No. Most U.S. Catholic parishes have catechesis (religious education) on days other than Sunday.





"Catechesis is nothing other than the process of transmitting the Gospel, as the Christian community has received it, understands it, celebrates it, lives it and communicates it in many ways." (General Directory for Catechesis #105)





With love in Christ.
Reply:Some parishes do have bible study (depending on the availablity of properly trained people). There are also R. C. I. A. classes for those wishing to know more about Catholicism. Catholic education is not confined to Sunday and can include a number of projects, but again it depends on the parish and the availablity of quallified people.
Reply:yes
Reply:No not as part of the regular Sunday schedule. We read the Gospel through completely in the course of a three year cycle. and we have two other Sunday readings from the bible and a psalm, on a theme somewhat.





Different parishes do different things to teach additional teachings to adults. We do have formal weekly teaching for the children.
Reply:No, they have catechism on Saturday mornings, I hated missing the cartoons.


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