Written in accord with the Catechism of the Catholic Church and rooted in the sound catechetical principles of the National Catechetical Directory, these texts present a well-defined curriculum model that stresses clear objectives, careful organization, and creative methods and evaluation procedures to check the attainment of goals. Very flexible, allowing teachers to select materials to highlight and stress, each text can be implemented on various grade levels for a quarter, a semester, or a full year depending on the length and frequency of class meetings. Intended to function as the primary textbook for a semester or year-long course in a Catholic high school at the eleventh and twelfth grade levels the goal of the course is to help students understand the interrelationship of the components of the Catholic Church. This course emphasizes the living Church and what it is in the present moment and is constructed around themes such as the Church as the People of God, the Church as servant, and the Church as sacrament. Each theme traces major periods of Church history and provides insights as to how the Church has come to its contemporary expression. Recognizing that to truly understand what it means to be Catholic, one must look not only at current theology, worship, and belief, but how those things were developed and accepted through history, The Church: Our Story combines a discussion of ecclesiology -- literally the "study of the nature of the Church" -- with a discussion of Church history. The purpose of the historical sections are not to recount all of the significant events over the past two thousand years, but rather to give insight into the beliefs, practices, and tensionsin Catholicism today that resulted from their historical roots.