Christina was "a gentle, beautiful little girl, " said Teresa Bier, the parish's director of religious education.
There has been a twelvefold increase in the number of students taking exams in religious education.
And Jewish parents will have to jump additional hurdles to get their children a religious education.
That is part of a trend, which has been encouraged by Labour's indulgent attitude to religious education.
Conservatives are limbering up for a battle to lift the longstanding ban on religious education in public schools.
First, individuals must complete religious education and secondly, they must receive an ecclesiastical endorsement from an approved body.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Waller testimony on terrorist infiltration
Student teachers at St Mary's could take a Catholic certificate in religious education that was not available at Stranmillis.
Church leaders, for example, are asking for further constitutional changes, notably a lifting of restrictions on religious education in public schools.
Public schools are generally larger and don't offer single-sex or religious education.
According to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, there has been a rapid increase in pupils taking GCSEs in religious education since 1997.
But the emphasis on Christianity in religious education (RE) lessons does not mean that teaching is always "challenging and vibrant" say the researchers.
This year there were 679 new religious education trainees compared with a target of 730, and 2, 058 maths trainees against a target of 2, 350.
BBC: NEWS | UK | Education | Teacher training places reduced
Religious education in schools is under threat, faith leaders have warned.
But in America, where mothers tend to be more responsible for a child's religious education, the products of Muslim interfaith couples are often raised in another religion.
WSJ: Naomi Schaefer Riley: Defining the 'All-American Muslim'
Teachers could discuss how creationism differed from scientific theory if a student brought up the subject, but any further discussion should occur in religious education lessons, she said.
BBC: NEWS | UK | Education | Teachers 'fear evolution lessons'
In the secondary sector, cuts range from 19% in the case of trainee history teachers to small increases in the number of places for religious education and mathematics.
BBC: NEWS | UK | Education | Teacher training places reduced
There have been several lobbying campaigns to add further subjects to the English Baccalaureate - including arts and religious education - with concerns that subjects outside this group could be marginalised.
The "short course" GCSE, which can be taken in subjects including religious education, physical education and art, covers fewer topics than an ordinary GCSE and is valued at half the full qualification.
Though it controls some 70% of the private education enjoyed by the young of the elite (as indeed it did, unofficially, before the reforms), religious education is still barred from public schools.
However, despite calls for subjects such as religious education and music to be included in the EBacc, the Department for Education said Education Secretary Michael Gove was "minded to leave the subjects unchanged".
The Religious Education Council of England and Wales said that excluding RE from the EBacc was already causing a drop in the number of schools offering it as a GCSE and would "gravely weaken" the subject.
As his first initiative, he proposed sweeping changes to America's schools, including the annual testing of elementary-school pupils and the use of vouchers to help parents of children in bad public schools to pay for private or religious education.
Likewise, a Catholic bishop might consider it a badge of honor to get an idea about religious education from the North American Jewish Day School Conference, or an insight into the broader culture from a novel written by an atheist.
Although valuable and quite extensive contributions to pupils' understanding of spiritual values are made in religious education, Welsh, English, history and art, the provision for collective worship does not provide a context in which pupils' own spiritual awareness can be consistently nurtured.
Still, in their Islamic scenes Britain and Pakistan do have one simple thing in common: religious education is dominated by purist teachers, who trace their roots to the Indian town of Deoband where an Islamic place of learning was founded in 1866.
"The government recognises that religious education has a distinctive and unique contribution to play in teaching children about the beliefs and values underpinning our understanding of ourselves and what is right and wrong, our sense of belonging and respect for each other, " she said.
More than a third of physics teachers (around 2, 000 teachers), half of those teaching Spanish (around 3, 400), over half of information and communications technology (ICT) teachers (around 9, 200) and more than two in five religious education teachers (around 6, 500) do not hold a relevant qualification higher than an A-level.
Appearing before the same committee, which has been set up to scrutinise the plans, Education Secretary Michael Gove was asked about the implications of legalising gay marriage for the teaching of sex and religious education in schools and was asked what protections there were for teachers who had moral and religious objections to same-sex marriage.
Nor has it heeded Alevi demands for their children to be exempted from compulsory religious-education classes that are dominated by Sunni Islam.
应用推荐