Religious Studies & Chaplaincy Department
The Religious Studies Department at Loretto College School is a department that your child will be a part of throughout their high school career thereby fulfilling the Ontario Catholic School Graduate Expectations. As in all TCDSB Secondary Schools, your child is required to take one Religion course each academic school year, for a total of four Religion credits by graduation. An integral part of the Religion program is the class retreat—a day filled with prayer, reflection, activity, and community service. In this department, students have the opportunity to take Religion (Catholicism) and World Religions, as well as to be a part of Chaplaincy initiatives such as Church Choir, Peer Ministry (ex., Shrove Tuesday Team), Community Outreach, and the Food Drive Team.
Religious Education is designed to promote a Catholic identity that will assist students in the task of becoming life-long learners in relation to their faith within a multi-religious and ever-growing secular society. It is also designed to assist in the process of ethical and moral formation within a culture that too often fails to recognize the call of God upon all of humanity, the fundamental dignity of the human person, and the existence of absolute ethical norms. Further, it functions as the academic component within the nexus of activities that seek to evangelize and catechize students. As such, it plays an integral role in the learning experiences of students and complements the various faith-related activities that take place within Loretto College.
School Chaplaincy is a pastoral role carried out in an educational setting in a collaborative and cooperative manner in order to promote the spiritual and human development of the members of the Catholic school community. The Chaplaincy Team seeks to increase the Christian faith-life of all and is ecclesial in its nature and its goal. While the Religious Education program focuses on the intellectual understanding and appropriation of Catholic tradition, seeking to better understand the Christian message, it relies on the supplementation of activities that will allow students to make this intellectual process concrete by responding to the Gospel with who they are and how they live. In this way, Chaplaincy services provide a kind of workshop where the theory of religious education can be lived out in the reality of community life. Through liturgy and common worship at our local Church, through social justice projects, through the formation of character by growth in the virtuous life, all members of the school community learn to make their Christ-centred faith real.
