Catholic University website offers faith enrichment

    Imagine an American Catholic religious history course on a wide range of topics – from the minimum wage to immigration to race relations to U.S. bishops’ documents – available at your fingertips, with primary source materials and a teacher’s guide as a framework for teaching the lesson.
    For the last eight years, just such a resource has existed – called “The American History Classroom” (cuomeka.wrlc.org) – under the auspices of The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. The classroom materials are continuously updated, so, unlike a textbook, the course never yellows with age.
    Maria Mazzenga, education archivist for Catholic University, said the site has grown in popularity over the years as more teachers have found out it exists.
    “We have had lot of hits on our site,” Mazzenga said. “You can just look at the number of hits on Google Analytics. We’ve been doing this for awhile.”
    The American History Classroom is an invaluable online resource for Catholic educators seeking to incorporate into their lesson plans a range of materials connected to the American Catholic experience. The online site has 10 separate websites on a range of topics.
Instant Catholic curriculum
    The idea, Mazzenga said, is for teachers to integrate the material into their existing curricula. Each topic site offers 20 to 40 primary documents and photographs, background information written by educators and historians, and historical timelines.
    There’s also a “So What?” section for students that asks them to explain why something is important and reading lists by topic to delve more deeply into the subject matter.
    Some of the exhibits include Catholics and Race – The Federated Colored Catholics; American Catholics and Nazi Antisemitism; Catholics and a Living Wage; Catholic Patriotism on Trial – The Oregon School Case; Catholics and Industrialization; Catholics and Labor Unionization; Catholics and Politics; Catholics and Social Security; Catholics and Social Welfare; Catholics, Refugees and Resettlement; and The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Immigration.
    Mazzenga said university educators noticed a trend in the 1970s and 1980s of Catholic high schools dropping textbooks produced by Catholic publishers and adopting textbooks written by secular publishers.
Lost the Catholic perspective
    “They wanted to start using textbooks that were more competitive with what the public schools were using, but this meant they also were losing the twist on the information that was Catholic,” Mazzenga said. “The problem is that marginalized the amount of information about Catholic identity in the history textbooks.”
    Mazzenga said the purpose of website is to supplement the information students in Catholic high schools receive from their current textbooks by offering the Catholic documents related to each major topic.
    “We told the schools, ‘Go ahead and use the textbooks, but you can infuse that with American Catholic information,” Mazzenga said. “We’re also working on a system where teachers can contribute to the site.”
    The Google statistics show Mazzenga that the website has been viewed in all 50 states, Canada, Europe and even India. “We can’t tell exactly who’s accessing the site because of the  privacy laws, but we are getting hits from all over,” she said.
National Catholic material
    In the same way that the Archdiocese of New Orleans archives would retain records and other documents produced within or by the archdiocese, Mazzenga said Catholic University is the repository of “materials related to national Catholicism.”
    Making primary records available in one spot makes it far easier for researchers and teachers to do their jobs, she said. It also is very important to give the documents a proper context, which is why Mazzenga has included the teacher’s guides on the site.
    “What you can’t do is throw all these documents out to the public and expect them to assimilate them,” Mazzenga said. “You need to contextualize them. We want the teachers to know a little information about the documents before they take them to their students.”
    One of Mazzenga’s favorite digitized items on display is the comic book series, Treasure Chest of Fun & Facts, which began in 1946. The series was the U.S. bishops’ response to several comic book series of the 1930s and ‘40s that glamorized violence and gore.
    In 1964, writer Berry Reece and illustrator Joe Sinnott teamed up in Treasure Chest to produce a 10-issue series that “covered” the presidential election, featuring the campaign of the fictitious Tim Pettigrew. The candidate’s face was carefully hidden in every issue until the final page of the final story, when Pettigrew was revealed as the first black candidate for president in U.S. history.
    Mazzenga is a trained historian and also teaches a course on Catholicism at Catholic University. She said the website is geared to high schools, and she encourages teachers to contact her for suggestions on how to incorporate the material into their curricula.
    “I would love that,” she said.
    Mazzenga can be reached at mazzengamr@cua.edu.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at pfinney@clarionherald.org.