Jesus loves me, this I know, because the Bible told me so.

Chalk up another advantage that the Reformed churches have over the unreformed Church - along with < tongue in cheek > an absence of biblical hangups about divorce and a generally nonchalant attitude toward the notion of sex whenever and with whomever or whatever, so long as there is "commitment" somewhere in the mix, < /tongue in cheek > - is that handing the faith down to your children has to be loads easier.

I mean how hard is it to tell the kids to "have faith in Jesus". It should take 30 seconds and then you're done and off to watch Monday Night Football.

In contrast, check out some of these chewy sentences from the book on "Reconciliation" that I went over last night with the Widget and the Wadget, both of whom making their First Communion next year:

What was it like for you to show reverence for the Word of God

Penance is one of the sacraments. This sacrament is also called by other names. It is called the sacrament of Reconciliation.

God gives every person the gift of a conscience to help us know the commandments.

Needless to say, my seven and eight year old had a few questions. Such as, "what does 'reverence' mean? And "what does 'sacrament' mean"? And "what does 'conscience' mean"?

Answering these questions is harder than it looks. I think I settled on the idea that "reverence" means "being nice" or "showing respect". I explained that "conscience" is the "inner voice" that tells us when we are doing something wrong, which prompted my hyperliteral 8 year old to say that she didn't hear voice.

I didn't even try to deconstruct "sacrament" because the idea of explaining "an outward sign of an inward grace" threatened to open up an infinite regress of questions.

Next week, though, we launch into Aristotle's "four causes."

Obviously, we have to start somewhere and exposure is very important. And I do appreciate CCD's decision to outsource the heavy lifting of explaining doctrine to the parents, so that they have more time in class to draw pictures of rainbows and whatnot.

Clearly, the problem is one of language. Catholic terminology is, not surprisingly, so latinate that it has an inherently high level of fog. Words formed from latin roots generally lack the gritty, gutty feeling of real life. For example, while "gritty" and "gutty" are understood immediately, "visceral reaction" takes a moment for the listener to grasp. Likewise, saying that something is "retrograde" causes the attention to lapse momentarlily as the word is deciphered; say it is "backward" and we can seemlessly slide into the next concept. "Impecunious" doesn't have the same concreteness as "penniless" (which could explain why an opposing counsel in a recent opposition to our request for attornies fees argued to the court that winning shouldn't provide us with a "license to be impecunious"; presumably he meant "extravagent" or "greedy".)

Consider the term used for the educational process my kids are involved in - "Catechism of Christian Doctrine." The term makes the eyes glaze over, as one first attempts to give some content to "catechism" before getting whacked with "christian doctrine", a phrase that suggests that some future "catechism" will involve non-christian doctrine. This makes the entire process essentially incomprehensible. I know that I hadn't the slightest idea of what those words meant when I was in elementary school, and, therefore, had only a vague notion of what I was there for.

In contrast, Protestant second graders go to "Bible Classes", in which children study the Bible, or "Sunday School", which presumably meets after church on Sunday.

Clearly, I need something like a Catholic to child dictionary.