Can Patriarch Daniil smile

The topic of religious education in schools is back on the agenda. Periodically raised over the years, rejected, then resumed again, to arrive at the comical situation of being transformed into a lesson in kindness. Naturally, without taking into account the desire or refusal of each child's parents to study, or not to burden the child with yet another subject in the already overloaded curriculum, writes the newspaper "Retro".

Sociologists claim that the percentage of parents rejecting this education is higher than those accepting it. And it is very difficult to impose something that has simply long since disappeared from the life of a Bulgarian. Today's pensioner generation remembers the sincere piety of our grandparents, who were forced to hide it in the atheistic times of godless socialism. We, the children, grew up in a time when the church and religion were something outdated, conservative, capitalist – in a word, something bad. They pushed us away from the church, from the faith, but they forced another on us. As children, they didn’t take us to church, but they didn’t miss a school year without sending us to worship the mummy in the center of the capital. Or, if we’re honest – they took away one faith to impose another on us. It ended up collapsing ingloriously.

Today, children and their parents have the opportunity to believe, to be religious, to go to prayer temples, to profess the peculiarities of Orthodoxy, Islam, Catholicism and other religious communities. But what example of religious tolerance is the recent conflict with the so-called Old-style Church, which was literally defeated and stigmatized, even reaching the point of parliamentary intervention? Isn't it a bit hypocritical to teach children about religious kindness, while mercilessly bashing their fellow Old-Style Christians, with whom they have some canonical differences?

And shouldn't the newly elected patriarch be at least a little, with one idea, more cheerful and smiling. Well, not as broadly as we see him in the company of the Russian ambassador Mitrofanova, but still?

And shouldn't the curriculum be adjusted along with the introduction of kindness classes to avoid children's overload. And is it really best to add new loads to the stress and overload of the children's psyche from the new learning environment in the first grade? Wouldn't it be better to teach religious knowledge imperceptibly in history, literature, and philosophy classes, which is what is being done so far? Just to make small adjustments to the material. Or everything is a lot of noise for a while and then it's back to normal.

Radoslav Vassilev, Plovdiv