Catechetical Programs in the Spanish Language

 

After taking a course on faith formation, religious education and cultures, I would question those large religious educational publishing houses that simply translate the same course of catechesis into the Spanish language for Hispanic Catholic Communities. Since it is predicted that the Hispanic community will compromise 1/3 of the Catholic population in the U.S., I know that religious education programs have to do much more than merely translate what works for Euro-Americans into the Spanish language.

 

Charles Dahm (Parish Ministry in a Hispanic Community, Paulist Press) points out the various contexts of Hispanic culture and what has worked in a predominantly Hispanic parish. Taking the directives of Gaudium et Spes that each human community, with its specific history and geography, has its own inheritance of wisdom and its own way of fostering basic human values (paragraph 53). As religious education instructors, one has to take all aspects of a community’s culture and ways of fostering basic human values into the plans for catechesis.