Religion Rocks - Windows Media Video - 16 Minutes

The Religion Department will provide students and parents with excellent resources and activities to meet the challenge of education in the years ahead. The four year Religion program is outlined in the following file. This file provides students and parents with the information needed to select the appropriate Religion course during the school’s course selection period:

What are the Religion Courses and Which Should I Take? At the end of our four year program students should have met the following expecations:

Catholic Graduate Expectations

What experience have students had in our Religion program?

In our grade 11 course on World Religions, students have visited various religious temples. They have also worn garments from many religious traditions and held many objects used in sacred rituals such as the ram’s horn and Torah scrolls in Judaism, or the prayer matt in Islam. These are part of our in-school collection of religious items. It is our goal to make religious education concrete, meaningful, creative and most importantly a source for students to foster a profound love for our Catholic faith tradition.

Many guest speakers have enriched our program. Here a just some of our past speakers: young, single moms from Rose of Sharon have spoken to the grade tens about their experiences and the value of chastity www.therose.ca and The Right to Life Association has spoken to students on Life Issues http://www.rtl-toronto.org/. Salt and Light Television has spoken to our students about Christianity in our culture today and their role in the media http://www.saltandlighttv.org/ . Other speakers have included Holocaust survivors, Free the Children (www.freethechildren.com) ,

We continue to work with our students in using technology in the most creative and innovative ways imaginable. Grade nines have used computer software to create videos of modern examples of the Beatitudes. Grade tens have gone out and surveyed social behaviour and then done statistical analyses comparing Catholic and secular values. Grade elevens are engaged in an international interfaith dialogue with students from many schools using pioneering software developed by Harvard Law School at the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society.

Our school’s social justice group, Matt. 25, has many accomplishments to date in their service to others. You can join Matt. 25 if you are interested in some of these projects: a food drive and actually preparing meals for the Good Shepherd Refuge, a Day of Anti-discrimination during Black History Month, collecting donations of teddy bears to be sent to thousands of very young girls in South Africa who have been the victims of sexual assault, key organizers in a board-wide awareness campaign on the YCDSB Fair Labor Policy (the policy is prevents school uniforms from being made under conditions contrary to Catholic principles as in the case of child slave labor).