The Catholic Certificate in Religious Studies (CCRS) is a certificate awarded by the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales.
It is designed:
- for teachers who will be in Catholic schools, so that they may have a basic understanding of the church, its teaching and way of life, to enable them to contribute to the maintenance of the ethos of the Catholic school;
- for catechists, to give them a basic understanding of the faith of the Catholic Church, as a foundation for their ministry; and
- for adult members of the church, to enable them to continue to grow in understanding and living their catholic faith.
It does not automatically carry academic credits, but some Universities offer it as a component of another academic award.
The Course is offered in all five Catholic Colleges of Higher Education and at centres in every diocese in England and Wales.
It is traditionally thought of as a pre-requisite for a job as a teacher in a Catholic School. However, schools will often employ non-CCRS teachers, or ask newly employed teachers to work towards the award.
Famous quotes containing the words catholic, certificate, religious and/or studies:
“The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in God’s coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. It is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitions. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.”
—Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)
“[B]y going to the College [William and Mary] I shall get a more universal Acquaintance, which may hereafter be serviceable to me; and I suppose I can pursue my Studies in the Greek and Latin as well there as here, and likewise learn something of the Mathematics.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)