Honest: Catholics are Christians

My rant for the day!

I am just marking papers and, even after all the lecturing and discussion in class, my students will still come up with a sentence like the following: "They also looked at mostly Christian or Catholic  families and did not go near other religions." (For that one, I even looked at the source material just to make sure)


I could have accepted Protestant or Catholic - don't need to get into the touchy subject of all those other Christians - well maybe Anglicans/Episcopalians aren't touchy - I'm not sure that they know they exist.

I swear that we need a mandatory history of Christianity course. Students may not know anything about other religions, but they certainly don't know anything about Christianity either - except maybe their own peculiar brand (but that's another post). It is not as if my Catholic students are exempt from understanding their own religion either.

Honestly, I do my best in my medieval and reformation classes, but it's just not enough.