According to the Vatican yearbook, the Annuario Pontificio, there are north of 5,000 Catholic bishops in the world today. They share certain characteristics and attributes. But I doubt that there is any other among them who would open a pastoral letter on “The Joy and Wonder of Catholic Education” as Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, recently did:
I am not one of the millions of children who received a Catholic education in this great country. Nor was I Catholic when I showed up as a freshman at the University of Kansas in the early 1970s. My main interests at the time were basketball and the Grateful Dead, and KU had them both!
Bishop Conley is a friend of long standing, although I have never been able to appreciate his appreciation for the Grateful Dead – any more than I could appreciate the affection of distinguished Polish Dominicans I know for Deep Purple. “60s Gold” is one of my most-listened-to stations on Sirius XM (which may confirm the views of some that I’m a closet Modernist). But I draw the line on electrified Sixties’ music at the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, Chicago, the Grass Roots, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Or thereabouts.
But I digress.
In his pastoral letter, which should be read by every Catholic educator at every level of Catholic education, Bishop Conley describes his conversion to Catholicism amidst his undergraduate experience of classic liberal learning and the Great Books at KU. He then borrows from our mutual friend, Vancouver’s Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, to propose five “essential marks” of an authentically Catholic education. Let me briefly note those, offering my own reflections on each as a supplement to Bishop Conley’s explication of what we might call “Miller’s Marks.”
An authentic Catholic education is inspired by a supernatural vision. We are not congealed stardust, the fortuitous result of impersonal cosmic biochemical forces that just happened to result in…us. No, we are creations, formed by a loving creator for eternal communion within that creator’s light and love. We learn our true dignity as human beings when we come to know that we are made in the image and likeness of God. Catholic education thus liberates us from cynicism and its cousin, despair, to live in awe and wonder at what we are, and how everything that is came to be.
An authentic Catholic education is founded on a Christian anthropology. We are not made for self-satisfaction alone. Nor are we individual monads, sentient billiard balls careening around a terrestrial pool table and occasionally colliding. There is a human nature, and that human nature is ordered to holiness. We are made to be saints, and we become saints through relationships with others called to holiness by the sanctifying, triune God. Catholic education should thus inspire a burning desire to be more, rather than just to have more, even as it helps us understand that “being more” is a work of grace, not merely of my efforts. Catholic education should draw us to be like Christ, who, as Vatican II taught, reveals the truth about us as well as the truth about God.
An authentic Catholic education is animated by communion and community. The “actors” in Catholic education – students, parents, teachers, coaches, administrators, consecrated religious, priests, deacons, bishops, philanthropists – are like the cells of a living body: each distinctive, but each intrinsically related to all the others. That communion is best experienced in a Catholic school’s spiritual and sacramental life (especially in the Eucharist), but also through a Catholic education that immerses us in beauty through music and the visual and dramatic arts. Catholic education is also education for responsible citizenship, not a bunker in which to hide from the surrounding cultural chaos: catholically educated Catholics work to convert the culture, and thereby renew public life.
An authentic Catholic education is imbued with a Catholic worldview throughout the curriculum. Chemistry is chemistry, physics is physics, and math is math. A Catholic education, though, will approach those disciplines as doors through which we come to know the divine ordering of the universe, not just the periodic table, relativity theory, or quadratic equations. All truths tend toward the Truth, who is God. Catholic education fosters that sensibility.
And authentic Catholic education is sustained by Gospel witness. Truly Catholic schools are shaped by truly Catholic teachers and staff, who model Christian virtues in their own lives and urge their students to live those virtues in service to others.
In that kind of education lies the hope for rescuing our culture, our nation, and indeed, our civilization.
(George Weigel’s column ‘The Catholic Difference’ is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.)
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If you want your child to abandon Catholicism and grow into an adult who hates everything you believe in; the greatest thing you can do for them is send them off to Catholic school.
I have yet to meet any former Catholic school students who have remained faithful. Instead they grow into bitter, angry and abusive adults with hearts so full of hate they are incapable of displaying even a modicum of basic human decency.
The purpose of sending ones child to Catholic school seems to be for either molding your child into an insufferable bully or a faithless drug abuser. No thanks.
That seems a bit harsh to me. I know a few elderly ladies who went to Catholic school who remained faithful. I note, however, they are in the minority, and a rather small minority at that.
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I homeschooled my children, and did my best to provide a Catholic education. The oldest two no longer go to any kind of church and likely will not. The youngest (he too is an adult though) is part of a “praise and worship” kind of community that seems very popular with a lot of younger families.
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It’s a toxic culture Mrs. Hess & it affects our children even when we do the very best we can. We may not know how our hard work & faithfulness blessed our children in this life but I pray we will in the next.
God bless you & your family today.
🙂
Stewart I Think parents have more to do with your description more than the Catholic School. Will add your comment suggest to me you are a grumpy sourpuss or possibly a Chicago White Sox Fan, which could effect anyone’s disposition.
We all speak from personal experience I think but that hasn’t been my experience Stewart & I’ve worked in a Catholic school, served on a parochial school board, & homeschooled for many years.
Everyone has a different story & differing experiences. Catholic schools can always stand improvement & so can Catholic parents. It’s been a group effort to get to the place we are today.
Note that the illilustrious bishop of San Diego refuses now to allow homeschooling parents to use parish property to educate their children in the faith. My guess he’s frightened that they might infect the woke Catholics with their “Backwardist” theology.
That’s pretty sad for the San Diego diocese families. Even our local public school board has facilities open for homeschooling parents who want to take advantage of them.
In addition to the rebuilding of religious life with the charism to educate children, lasting reform must include:
blended learning, transparent education outcomes, a living wage for educators, etc.
For hope and inspiration, here are a few wildly successful examples operating in Texas:
https://www.setonpartners.org/
https://www.thecatholichomeschool.com/support/states/texas/
https://www.greatheartsamerica.org/people/
https://www.aristoiclassical.org/
About Catholic education and vision, and about educational subject areas, we still read that “[c]hemistry is chemistry, physics is physics, and math is math.”
As another who was “not one of the millions of children who received a Catholic education in this great country”—and for reasons too tangential to explain—yours truly takes special note of what scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer observes about open human minds:
“Our civilizations perish; the carved stone, the written word, the heroic act fade into a memory and in the end are gone [….] Yet no man, be he agnostic or Buddhist or Christian, thinks wholly in these terms. His acts, his thoughts, what he sees of the world around him—the falling of a leaf or a child’s joke or the rise of the moon—are part of history; but they are not only part of history; they are part of becoming and of process but not only that: they partake also of the world outside of time; they partake of the light of eternity.
“These two ways of thinking, the way of time and history and the way of eternity and of timelessness, are both part of man’s effort to comprehend the world in which he lives. Neither is comprehended in the other nor reducible to it [!]. They are, as we have learned to say in physics, complementary views, each supplementing the other, neither telling the whole story” (J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Science and the Common Understanding,” Simon and Schuster, 1953, p. 69).
True, Oppenheimer did not yet grasp that substance is spiritual, and then that the Triune God of substance is self-disclosing (the Incarnation). But Oppenheimer does remove a common cerebral obstacle, in a fallen world, enabling a scientific world to at least considering in true human freedom the factual and historical “Word made flesh” (John 1:14).
So, about “complementarity”…what might this aspect of reality suggest about binary and complementary human sexuality, as now obsolesced in the post-Christian and post-Western secular world?
And, about new clericalists within the Church, likewise intent on obsolescing the nuptial relationship between the incarnate Christ and his Church? That is, between the successors of the Apostles “sent” by Christ, and an entropic and unisex hierarchy invented from below?
And, of course, about a “sociological-scientific” pontification from the incomparable social scientist Cardinal Hollerich, and from the word-merchant chorus of Radcliffe and Martin? And, of Fernandez’s invertebrate double-speak in Fiducia Supplicans?
Like Galileo, is much of the synodalized Church now to remain under house arrest as a “special case”? The new “periphery(!)”: all of continental Africa, Poland, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Peru, the Netherlands, parts of Argentina, France and Spain, plus the now estranged Orthodox Churches.
SUMMARY: With Oppenheimer, maybe history and eternity are not reducible? And, therefore, maybe it’s not so true that “time is greater than space” (Evangelii Gaudium, 2013)?
Whenever I hear about Oppenheimer I recall that on two occasions he attempted homicide-once on a friend and on his tutor. Perhaps he suffered psychotic breaks but it tends to make me take his words through a different filter.
Yes, thank you. He did lace an apple for a disliked professor (but which remained uneaten), and generally was both brilliant and easily distracted and a bit scattered. In his short autobiography, he remarks that he was so distracted in his lab work, in 1929, that six months had passed before he looked up long enough to notice the market collapse and Depression.
And, so, for today’s now equally distracted technocracy, culture, politics, he offered an appeal for some sort of fraternity…
“As for ourselves in these times of change, of ever-increasing knowledge, of collective power [his leadership under the Manhattan Project?] and individual impotence [himself], of heroism and of drudgery, of progress and of tragedy, we too are brothers. And if we, who are the inheritors of two millennia of Christian tradition, understand that for us we have come to be brothers second by being children first, we know that in vast parts of the world where there has been no Christian tradition [his limited perception Nagasaki?], and with men who never have been and never may be Christian in faith there is nevertheless a bond of brotherhood. We know this not only because of the almost universal ideal of human brotherhood and human community; we know it at first hand from the more modest, more diverse, more fleeting associations which are the substance of life. The ideal of brotherhood, the ideal of fraternity [!] in which all men, wicked and virtuous, wretched and fortunate, are banded together [now as diverse as street gangs and rogue states] has its counterpart in the experience of communities, not ideal, not universal, imperfect, impermanent, as different from the ideal and as reminiscent of it as are the ramified branches of science from the ideal of a unitary, all-encompassing science of the eighteenth century” (ibid, 90-91).
QUESTION: About y/our “filter” versus Oppenheimer’s lab coat myopia, then, on what sounder basis should the Church affirm “fraternity”? Other than, say, his “fleeting” associations in the centrifugal natural sciences with their “paradigm shifts”? In our own distractedness we can still ask ourselves: Other than the spelling and pronunciation, what’s the difference, if any, between Bushido tribalism, Manhattan Project tribalism, abortion tribalism, social media and identity-politics tribalism, or even LGBTQ tribalism?
On what more fully and truly human and permanent basis other than ecclesial paradigm shifts? And, in very clear addition to even the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights as recently invoked in Dignitas Infinita?
Mr. Peter your questions are above my limited pay grade. I just meant that two attempts at homicide would make me see anyone through a different perspective than if they had never done that. That’s all.
I get that, and meant to be supportive; and then found myself seeing a parallel between his overall tendencies and the same tendencies underway in a big way today.
You’re seeing a deeper view Mr. Peter. Thank you for sharing that.
STEWART: I attended Catholic schools from 1st grade through to my Ph.D. and none of what you state is true from my experience. We have to be careful about sweeping conclusions that are not borne out in fact..
Deacon Ed, when your ilk gang raped my little sister at 11 years of age I don’t think “being careful about making sweeping conclusions” (born IN FACT I might add) is something I ever need to worry about.
Even that…you need to forgive. Easy for me to say though. Just like the Israelis and Gazans need to forgive.
The five essential marks are fine. A Catholic school should not be a public school with a religion class. And while a Catholic world view is great, there is a need for Catholic content to be taught. At the risk of seeming old and quaint, the Baltimore Catechism used in the 1950’s taught Catholic doctrine. Doctrine is another word for truths. My experience is that this is what is lacking in Catholic schools today.
I love my illustrated Baltimore Catechism & still use it for reference today. It was an important part of our homeschool curriculum.
It would never occur to George Pollyanna that home school Catholic families exist because Catholic schools have become as hostile to Catholicism as secular schools thanks in large part to anti-Catholic prelates.
“And authentic Catholic education is sustained by Gospel witness. Truly Catholic schools are shaped by truly Catholic teachers and staff, who model Christian virtues in their own lives and urge their students to live those virtues in service to others.”
What about the poor?
“A preferential option for the poor” should be maintained in our Catholic Schools. If we find that we cannot afford to keep our schools open to the poor, the Church should be ready to use its resources for something else which can be kept open to the poor. We cannot allow our Church to become a church primarily for the upper classes while allowing the poor to remain in public schools. The priority should be given to the poor even if we have to let the upper classes fend for themselves.
Practically speaking, the Catholic Schools must give up general education in those countries where the State is providing it. The resources of the Church could then be focused on “Confraternity of Christian Doctrine” and other programs which can be kept open to the poor. These resources could then be used to help society become more human in solidarity with the poor. Remember, the Church managed without Catholic Schools for centuries. It can get along without them today. The essential factor from the Christian point of view is to cultivate enough Faith to act in the Gospel Tradition, namely, THE POOR GET PRIORITY. The rich and middle-class are welcome too. But the poor come first.