The Origin of Sunday Schools.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 36, 4 September 1902, Page 2

The Origin of Sunday Schools.

It is a universally accepted belief amongst Protestants that what are known as ' Sunday schools ' date their existence from a period subsequent to the Reformation, and that they are entirely due to Protestant enlightenment and activity. The evidence and influence of this belief come out very strikingly in the following entertaining paragraph qucted by our contemporary, the Sacred Heart Review, from a recent number of the Baptist Standard of Chicago. The paragraph runs thus :—: — ( ' Roman Catholic progress in New York almost takes one's breath away. And it is not all material, either. It is in the line of Sunday schools. Protestant influence is nowhere greater than here. The youth are being taught in all Catholic parishes, save a few Jesuit ones, and even Sunday school rooms, after the Protestant pattern, are being constructed. The instruction is not, as might be expected, confined to the Church, its history and its saints, but is in large measure evangelical. Conduct of many of the schools is following Protestant methods, and even laymen and laywomen are brought in as teachers of classes.' That voices quite accurately the common non-Catholic view of the Sunday school as an essentially Protestant institution. It is claimed that Robert Raikes, the English printer, who established his first Sunday school in Gloucester in 1780, was the original founder of the institution, and that before his time systematic instruction to the young on Sundays was unknown.

In his preface to Spirago's Method of Christian Doctrine the learned Bishop Messmer gives an interesting account of the origin and history of Sunday schools, and shows how utterly baseless is the idea that the institution owes its origin to Protestantism or is in any way a product or outcome of the Reformation. The honor of opening the first Sunday school, in the modern sense of the expression, belongs, it appears, to St. John La Salle, who opened his ' Ecole Dominicale ' at Paris in 1669, over a hundred years before Raikes. Bishop Messmer gives the following full account of the institution :—: — 'Seeing that so many boys engaged at work all the week received no instruction, either religious or secular, La Salle resolved to gather them on Sundays, their only free day. With his brethren he taught those boys from 12 to 3 o'clock the various secular branches, among them geography, drawing, geometry and book-keeping, and always closed the class with religious instruction or the catechism. This was really the first Sunday school of this kind in Europe. Later on the secular instruction as a feature of the Sunday school disappeared, just as it happened with the Protestant system, and we now understand by Sunday school " a school for religious instruction on Sunday, more particularly the instruction of children and youth." Taken in this sense, the first notice of a formal school class in Christian doctrine on Sunday is the programme published in May, 1557, for the Jesuit College at Cologne, which orders the pupil-, of the higher classes to attend instruction on the larger catechism of Canisus every Sunday afteronor. at four o'clock, while the lower classes hadtoleam the smaller catechism of the same author every Saturday at 4 p.m. f lf by Sunday school is simply meant the special catechetic instruction given to children on Sundays and feast days, it is surprising indeed to hear from our latest encyclopaedias that Sunday schools began only with the Protestant Reformation. It betrays a stupendous ignorance of the history of Christian doctrine in the Catholic Church, when M'Ointock's Cyclopaedia says in regard to the Middle Ages that hundreds of years then went by without any general effort on the part of the Chuich for the religious instruction of children. Several synods of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Hungary, Prance, and Italy ordain that on Sund-iys and feast days parents shall bring their children of Irom seven to fourteen years of age to church, in order to be instructed in the Catholic faith. A similar ignorance is shown by the s ime writer when he says of the times following the Reformation that, "although in numerous instances pieviou, cattchisation had been practised on the Lord's Day . . . yet nothing like a general system of teaching the young on Sundays, whether in secular or religious ieirning, was known prior to 1780." This in the face of the Council of Trent, St Charles Borromeo Popes Clement VIII. , Benedict XIII. and XIV., and the numerous sodalities of Christian docti me, and the many provinci il councils east and west, who all repeated with one voice the old Catholic rule : " [Virh the childr- n the Christian doctrine on Sundays and feast days." The Sunday school as a school of religious instruction belongs, name and all, to the Catholic Church.'