Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 10, 2023 / 07:00 am (CNA).
A western U.S. Catholic institution is debuting an education degree program meant to train up teachers and administrators in what one official says is the “embrace of more traditional forms” of Catholic education.
The Augustine Institute in Denver says on its website that the organization exists to serve “the formation of Catholics for the new evangelization” by “equip[ping] Catholics intellectually, spiritually, and pastorally to renew the Church and transform the world for Christ.”
The institute, founded in 2005 as a Catholic graduate theology school, currently hosts a little over 300 students. It hopes to add several hundred to its newly formed MA in Catholic Education program, which is debuting with a “soft launch” in October.
Christopher Blum, the institute’s provost as well as a professor of philosophy and theology, told CNA the program is meant to serve as “a contribution to the ongoing renewal of Catholic schools.”
Many Catholic schools across the country are increasingly turning to “classical” forms of education, which focuses on liberal arts such as grammar, rhetoric, geometry, astronomy, and other historically celebrated forms of learning. Catholic schools who adopt this model of curriculum do so with an emphasis on Catholic teaching, scriptural study, and abstract yet well-studied concepts such as truth, goodness, and beauty.
A growing number of Catholic institutions have been adopting this style of education: The Diocese of Marquette, Michigan, for instance, became in 2020 “the first [diocese] in the nation to fully move all of its schools to a classical Catholic curriculum.” Schools in Colorado, Washington state, Kentucky, and numerous other states have moved toward this model in recent years as well.
Blum said the new Augustine Institute program was founded with “an explicit commitment to the new evangelization and the embrace of more traditional forms of education.” He said though that style of pedagogy is most often referred to as “classical,” the more accurate descriptor is “Catholic liberal education.”
The program is “grounded in Scripture and Catholic doctrine,” Blum said; it “offers pedagogical training from a Catholic and classical perspective” and allows students to specialize according to their own area of teaching, with concentrations in grammar school, classical pedagogy, humanities, science and math, and catechetics.
Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute, told CNA there was considerable interest in the program prior to its development.
“Bishops were asking us: Hey, can you provide us with something more focused on education? It’s a huge need,” he said.
Gray said they already have a sizable class signed up for the inaugural program.
“It’s a mix [of students],” he said. “We’ve got pastors who say, ‘I’m starting, or just started, a classical education school, or we’re renewing our Catholic school and we want to get our faculty on this.’ We have a lot of schools that want to send their teachers as cohorts. We’ve also heard from individuals.”
“Some [students] are just getting out of undergraduate, maybe it’s a teacher who wants deeper formation,” Gray said.
He estimated that the program will draw in “a couple hundred students in three years.”
The ongoing school choice movement, Gray suggested, will generate considerable need for more teachers in Catholic schools.
“A lot of these voucher programs in red states — that is going to bring in a wealth of students and money for Catholic schools,” he said. “So they need to train people up.”
In places where school choice has been expanded, Catholic schools have frequently benefitted.
In Iowa, Sioux City Bishop R. Walker Nickless said earlier this year that a major school choice program there would “help parents keep their child in the Catholic school of their choice and assist us in enhancing quality education.”
The Florida nonprofit Step Up for Students, meanwhile, reported last month that choice programs there were helping to drive Catholic enrollment, with “the number of students using state-funded school choice scholarships to attend Florida Catholic schools [having] tripled over the past decade.”
Blum noted that the MA program is “not a conventional education program” and “does not prepare students for state licensure in any of the 50 U.S. states.” However, it will “welcome students who are preparing for a career as teachers,” he said.
The program, meanwhile, has high entrance requirements, including at least a 3.25 GPA, a “demonstrable ability to read and synthesize insights into thoughtful written work and expression,” and a “commitment to evangelization and the renewal of education.”
The other key requirement for aspiring applicants: a “strong Catholic identity.”
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The SWOT analysis comprises an investigation of a situation’s or proposal’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. In examining Weaknesses and Threats one looks for related Strengths and Opportunities. Do a SWOT analysis for US Catholic education as well as for non-Catholic and secular. The examination of the negatives for Catholic education can come out something like this list below that I have enumerated. It can help to build a solidarity and forge a shared ethos among religious and secular schools.
All parts of society are encountering the negatives, it’s not just Catholicism.
School shootings may not affect you directly but they create social and psychic turmoil and impart a kind of generational gloom. Some of this is deliberate, I think, Satanic psychological warfare.
I am not American and do not reside in the US so not all factors are accounted for here in my list; also you have to add in local issues.
“Kennedy Catholicism” is my term that allowed me to capture the sense of things “socio-political” and their general sway in the nation over the decades – from looking at this since the Eighties. Then I discovered Anne Hendershott’s video, in the link, that fixed it for me.
The list also helps to uncover how the negatives may interrelate and how they advocate for one another. Some contain self-contradictions. In the Catholic religious sphere, there is a blindness that asserts “TLM is nostalgia” when actually so much of the excessive expressive behaviours overtaking the Novus Ordo is really about nostalgias, self-soothing, acting out and gratification.
In fact my listing describes a definite anti-virtue strain; where some of it is accidental and a lot of it is highly organized, while all of it is delinquent with misplaced conviction. If you reflect, Rectitude is needed for sound Convictions and merited Resolutions.
People don’t seem to grasp that worldliness ends badly, or empty, for everyone. For religious it is IN ADDITION grave infidelity.
I wanted to mention for Grondelski’s essay under Demographic, that local situations may buck the trend he has described; it’s not necessarily a blanket negative.
1. Kennedy Catholicism
2. Land o’ Lakes
3. LCWR
4. Jesuit Network and religious disaffiliation in general
5. Worldliness (the real kind)
6. DEI
7. Liturgical abuses [ “TLM is nostalgia” – Pope Francis ]
8. Anarchisms – Pink Tide, Wokeism, etc.
9. Homosexualist Movement-Channeling
10. Funding pitfalls State, Federal, Private / Legal Defects
11. Demographic
12. Narcotics
13. “Random violence” and mass shootings
“Kennedy Catholicism”
Dr. Anne Hendershott: The Origin of Pro-Choice “Catholics”
Franciscan University of Steubenville | Jan 7, 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayBxbxuepMs
Newman Society re Land o’ Lakes
https://cardinalnewmansociety.org/land-o-lakes-statement-caused-devastation-50-years/
Boston College re Land o’ Lakes
https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/offices/mission/pdf1/cu7.pdf
Jesuit Network
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2023/04/03/dei-is-a-trojan-horse-inside-the-catholic-school/
Worldliness
https://news.yahoo.com/sisters-charity-nuns-plan-end-124237618.html
https://buffalonews.com/news/national/the-end-of-an-era-for-the-sisters-of-charity-of-new-york/collection_9457f62e-44d2-59b5-89f3-75b3b943e902.html#1
Pink Tide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_tide
Demographic
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2023/09/02/why-catholic-college-enrollments-are-going-to-crater-very-soon/