Actually, it sounds like something I'd love. Your post just pushed it higher in my priority list.
In contrast to the catholic setting, the (probably unintended) philosophy feels more like Buddhism.
This angle is also interesting to me. Do catholic schools differ from your regular (secular) schools? For example, do they also post test results for everyone to see?
Now, I haven't seen
Maria sama, but I felt the mismatch between Christian imagary and Buddhist feel with another show:
Madoka
Most of the references I got pointed towards Christiandom: the references to Faust (which I wouldn't have got if fans hadn't translated the signs); Homura transferring from a Catholic school; Kamijou playing "Ave Maria" (in ep12); but above all: Kyouko's background as expressed in church and prayer pose.
However, the way the show handled wishing seemed to me more akin to a Buddhist's concept of attachments and suffering than to a Christion concept of humility. Madoka's ending with the emphasis on hope was interesting in that respect. It felt like a
hybrid.
I sometimes wonder how well we understund our
own backgrounds. It's probably easy to project unacknowledged elements (or side-effects) of your own experience onto someone else's terminology. Maybe our own behaviour is mostly available to us through concepts (concept-first -- interpretation of behaviour according to our concepts), while other people's behaviour is accessible primarily through observation (observation-first -- we form those concepts by focussing on "surprises").
I'm Austrian. Austria is predominantly Catholic, and I was raised to be one, but I turned out to be an atheist instead. When I came online, I was surprised to find that many people thought of hellfire threats when they thought of Catholicism. I've never once been threatened with hellfire, and I've been an open atheist at least since my early teen years. A few years ago I met my elementary school religion teacher (religion is a default subject in schools, but you can opt out with the consent of your parents), and she told me I complained that the bible was unfair to snakes. They're not evil; they're just snakes. That seemed to have been a fond memory, the way she talked. (I didn't remember that at all, but I'm not surprised. I was more into zoology books than the Bible at that age.) If anything, the Catholics I met who talked about religion at all, would emphasise "love thy neighbour", and "judge not lest you be judged".
That may very well have been a local emphasis. But one of the results of the emphasis on "judge not lest you be judged" is a sort of politeness rule that under an ethic that favours honesty might be decried as "hypocrisy", or a "double moral" - do as I say, not as I do. In everyday life, "sinning" is fine, as long as you have the decency to be embarrassed about it if found out. If you're too strict, abiding too much by the letter, in word or deed, you're "holier than the Pope" ("heiliger als der Papst"). It's interesting really.
Now what's my point? If I tried to construct Catholicism from my experiences rather than from the doctrine I learned, I might have come up with something much like Buddhism - there might be crucial differences, but they mightn't be practically relevant in most situations. So why, then, do I get Buddhist but not Christian vibes from the treatment of wishing in
Madoka? What's the difference really? And how do I extract culture from religion? I've thought about Buddhism in terms of attachments so far, so is this it? But isn't - at a certain level of abstraction - thinking about attachments compatible with thinking about the distinction between life and afterlife? At a certain level of abstraction, concepts just seem to blur into each other.
Finally, if Japanese culture is influenced by Buddhism, and Japanese Catholicism is influenced by Japanese culture, then wouldn't this make for an interesting mix? Add to that that it's me making sense of that mix from a position of an Austrian Catholic(-in-name-only) atheist, who has been watching anime from Childhood on (a vital part of my childhood cartoons were shows from the
World Masterpiece Theater,
Sindbad,
Captain Future, or
Kimba the White Lion), so that certain narrative concepts are pretty familiar to me already, and I get a situation where I simply don't trust myself to unravel such a metaphysical/metaphorical mess.
Once I check out
Maria-sama I'll be sure to post comments. I'm very curious right now, but might not have much time in the next few days.