The Holy See’s Teaching on Catholic Schools: An Excerpt

In The Holy See’s Teaching on Catholic Schools, Archbishop Michael Miller, former Secretary of the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Schools, gives an excellent summary of recent magisterial teaching directed to Catholic schools.  This excerpt from his book explains how a Catholic worldview should affect every aspect of a Catholic school.

4. Imbued with a Catholic Worldview

A fourth distinctive characteristic of Catholic schools, which always finds a place in the Holy See's teaching is this. Catholicism should permeate not just the class period of catechism or religious education, or the school's pastoral activities, but the entire curriculum....To be integral or "whole," Catholic schooling must be constantly inspired and guided by the Gospel. As we have seen, the Catholic school would betray its purpose if it failed to take as its touchstone the person of Christ and his Gospel: "It derives all the energy necessary for its educational work from him...."

Catholicism has a particular "take" on reality that should animate its schools. It is a "comprehensive way of life" to be enshrined in the school's curriculum. One would comb in vain Vatican documents on schools to find anything about lesson planning, the order of teaching the various subjects, or the relative merit of different didactic methodologies. On the other hand, the Holy See does provide certain principles and guidelines which inspire the content of the curriculum if it is to deliver on its promise of offering students an integral education. Let's look at two of these: the principle of truth and the integration of faith, culture and life.

4.1 Search for Wisdom and Truth

In an age of information overload, Catholic schools must be especially attentive to the delicate balance between human experience and understanding. In the words of T.S. Eliot, we do not want our students to say: "We had the experience but missed the meaning.  On the other hand, knowledge and understanding are far more than the accumulation of information. Again T.S. Eliot puts it just right: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" Catholic schools do far more than convey information to passive students. They aspire to teach wisdom, habituating their students "to desire learning so much that he or she will delight in becoming a self-learner."

Intrinsically related to the search for wisdom is another idea frequently repeated in Vatican teaching: the confidence expressed that the human, however limited its powers, has the capacity to come to the knowledge of truth. This conviction about the nature of truth is too important to be confused about in Catholic schooling. Unlike skeptics and relativists, Catholic teachers share a specific conviction about truth: that they can pursue, and, to a limited but real extent, attain and communicate it to others. Catholic schools take up the daunting task of freeing boys and girls from the insidious consequences of what Benedict XVI recently called the "dictatorship of relativism" — a dictatorship which cripples all genuine education. Catholic educators are to have in themselves and develop in others a passion for truth which defeats moral and cultural relativism. They are to Educate "in the truth...."

4.2 Faith, Culture and Life

A second principle governing all Catholic education from the apostolic age down to the present is the notion that the faithful should be engaged in transforming culture in light of the Gospel. Schools prepare students to relate the Catholic faith to their particular culture and to live that faith in practice. In its 1997 document, the Congregation for Catholic Education commented:

From the nature of the Catholic school also stems one of the most significant elements of its educational project: the synthesis of culture and faith. The endeavor to interweave reason and faith, which has become the heart of individual subjects, makes for unity, articulation and coordination, bringing forth within what is learnt in a school a Christian vision of the world, of life, of culture and of history.

Schools form students within their own culture for which they teach an appreciation of its positive elements and strive to help them foster the further inculturation of the Gospel in their own situation. Yet they must also, when appropriate according to the students' age, be critical and evaluative. It is the Catholic faith which provides Catholic educators with the essential principles for critique and evaluation. Faith and culture are intimately related, and students should be led, in ways suitable to their level of intellectual development, to grasp the importance of this relationship.