2023-24 Grade 8 Religious Education

Greetings everyone! Because of the Resurrection of Christ, we are now bound for the glory of Heaven, which is sung of so wonderfully in the song " Glory Bound ", and this song was our opening prayer in class. I also shared treats to celebrate the anniversaries of my baptism and my First Holy Communion. As we reached the end of the Religious Education year, we considered how we grow in faith and how we put it into action. Pope St. John Paul II promoted the idea of the New Evangelization, as have the two Popes, Benedict and Francis, after him.  We have experienced the Good News that Christ, once dead, is now alive forever and ever.  We are called to be people of this Good News and proclaim it by the way we live our lives, sharing joyfully our hope with others. Living the Good News is a way that we display how the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives.  And there are 12 fruits of the Holy Spirit. We concluded class with the Easter hymn " Jesus is Risen ". Together with t...

Greetings everyone! During this class, we started with the song " God's Not Dead " as our opening prayer.  One phrase in the song says, God is "roaring like a lion".  That image connects to St. Mark, whose feast is April 25, and his symbol is a lion. Then we considered the idea of our universal call to holiness.  In our books, we looked at two important Church councils, Vatican I in the 19th Century, and Vatican II in the 1960's.  The later council made a number of significant changes in the church, including the role of laypeople. The council emphasized that holiness is not just for priests and religious.  All people who are baptized are called to exhibit God's character, and to live like saints. There is a great piece of artwork in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception that illustrates the "Universal Call to Holiness", and you can read more about it here , and see a picture of it when not being worked on, as is the ...