Were one to read Maria Montessori’s “The Child in The Church”¹ one would be struck by how much her pedagogical method is driven by a Christian understanding (call it a philosophy), of the human person. Montessori well understood that human development is a natural process that is God given and divinely assisted. Her study of little children convinced her that each child has interior laws contained in their very being that enabled their formation, at the natural and supernatural level.² Both St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas speak at length of this same discovery. They held that God was THE teacher who has equipped us with our human nature and all its wonderful cognitive powers that enable us to wonder and come to terms with the world around us.³ Hence she points out that we cannot respect the children we teach unless “we have respect for God in the child.”⁴

Owing to this insight Montessori realised that the perfection of an educational system would be dependent on the investigation and comprehension of “the wonderful powers of divine creation in the child’s soul.”⁵ She held that this is where educationalists needed to spend their energies; to discover under what conditions this God-given impulse to self-development finds its optimal unfolding. In this way teachers would be able to provide students with the assistance that enables them to act for themselves.⁶

Montessori did not consider religious instruction as just another subject among others, rather she saw it as a life in itself.⁷ For her supernatural education involved cooperating with God’s grace which provides the impetus to interior growth in the divine life.⁸ Montessori realised, (and she follows Aquinas here) that for such growth to occur the means which God has determined need to be used. Chiefly the scriptures, the sacraments and prayer.⁹ Such discernment was linked to her understanding that the Church is the true place of religious education for the child.¹⁰

Montessori held that the liturgy was the pedagogical method of the Church which “makes the various acts of religion real, makes them come to life, and allows the people to take part in them each day.”¹¹ Hence she saw the need to make the Church’s various liturgical rites accessible tochildren with all its ceremonies, processions, sacred objects and symbolism.¹² For this reason too she believed that the subject matter of religious education was already set, it being “the deposit of faith which has been handed down through the centuries by the Church.”¹³ The question thus becomes how to have children “live” in the Church and at what periods of their own psychic development should they experience various lived expressions of the faith.¹⁴

The work of Dr Anne Marie Irwin and her collaborators lives out this Montessorian vision in a new way today. Her method of religious education, which she terms the Scripture and Liturgy Teaching Approach (SALT) is being used in schools, parishes and Christian homes worldwide to provide children with the kind of lived experience of the faith that Montessori called for.¹⁵ SALT has biblical, sacramental and liturgical elements and explores church history and the lives of the saints, all of which are included in Montessori’s vision of religious education.¹⁶

Like the Montessorian method, SALT focuses on the calmness, obedience and attentive spirit that makes for silence and recollection, encouraging pondering and our God given gift to wonder about things.¹⁷ Montessori wisely links the ability to observe external things as making the child “capable of finding satisfaction for themselves.”¹⁸ The use of the external senses to delve into religious experience is key to the work of both Montessori and Irwin.¹⁹ Montessori held that there was a kind of activity that was essential to learning, one that combined the movement of body with mind.²⁰ Following the Mass, using models to explore the mysteries of the faith, ²¹ taking part in processions, “all these are things to be done rather than things to be read”²² where students learn “by means of objects and actions.”²³ Such an education also includes exposure to the evangelical animals and plants (those mentioned in the Bible) and the Church’s sacred music and art.²⁴ Irwin also addresses Montessori’s call to not only have the prepared environment for the child but the prepared teacher²⁵ by providing teachers with ready-made religious materials (predominately in the form of 3D models) with accompanying booklets to assist in the delivery of lessons in such a way that they too have time to ponder and feed the life of God within them.²⁶ Such an approach amply utilises the energy and initiative that Montessori saw in children.²⁷