Benefits of Catholic Education
August 18, 2002

Last week I wrote about the existence of a Catholic educational system and the fact that in our parish we support a Catholic grade school, junior high school, and high school. I mentioned that there were different opinions as to the wisdom of supporting such endeavors. One of my reasons for supporting Catholic schools was what I experience at Creighton University, a school that publicly touts its Catholicity. This week I came upon an article in America magazine written last May by Cardinal Avery Dulles that said more clearly than I the advantages of a Catholic University. The points he makes about universities, I believe, apply to our more humble educational efforts.

First, Cardinal Dulles notes that, indeed, there are different opinions in our society as to the role of the university in society. The first sees religion as being part of the private sphere and thus religion should not be involved in a university since it is a public institution. The second sees religion as one facet of life and the university should study religion but remain confessionally neutral. The third would advocate the right of a religion to have it own university but that all traditions have a right to maintain their heritage. The fourth, the one Dulles adheres to, asserts that Catholic universities “have unique qualifications to the discovery and dissemination of truth, which is the task of every university.” I would maintain that our Catholic educational efforts on all levels have the same prerogatives. In other words, not only do our schools have a right to exist, but they have a unique role to play in humanity’s search for truth.

Dulles then listed six benefits he believes higher education can receive from being Catholic. I shall list them and apply them to our situation.

1. Personalism. The person is at the center of our Catholic educational system. The basic reason for this is our understanding of the Incarnation in which Jesus, the Son of God, became one of us. All humanity was changed in that instance and called to a higher level of existence, something that would change the very understanding of the person. Each person, then, is called to the highest level of his or her humanity, which has been transformed by Christ. Our education is much more than the acquisition of technical skills or preparation for the business world as has been advocated by so many of today’s educators in our secular community.

2. A Sense of Tradition. All religions have traditions, Dulles, wrote. That is certainly true. We as Catholics have a long tradition of 2,000 years. We need not reinvent the wheel because we share the knowledge and experience of the past and apply it to the new experiences in which we find ourselves, including the various cultures of the world. Our task is to hand on what we have received in a way that forms people with a sense of their importance as persons.

3. Rootedness in the Culture of the West. All societies throughout our world have gifts to bring to the international stage on which we find ourselves today. We are multicultural in ways undreamed of by our parents. Communications today show us things about people that we would never have heard about before. The world is shrinking. Nevertheless, we have a history in our Western Christian, read Catholic, heritage that has much to offer. And, since we believe it to be based on revelation in the person of Jesus Christ and His values, we have something unique to share with the world. In our dialogue with the various cultural histories of the world, we “will have to make use of the full range of wisdom that has been acquired from Christianity’s prior inculturation in the world of Greco-Roman thought.”

4. Unity of Knowledge. The nature of education is to impart knowledge. Today people often see specialization as necessary all the way through one’s schooling. A Catholic approach provides a sense of unity to this search for truth. Through its understanding of the human person in relation to God, all knowledge is seen as springing from this source. Truth, by definition, cannot contradict truth. In a Catholic education, the search for a higher synthesis of knowledge will be kept alive.

5. The Light of Faith. This is, in my mind, the crucial element in my understanding of the necessity of a Catholic educational system. Any school that calls itself Christian and neglects the Word of God deprives itself of an important source of truth. Our schools are to be the place in which faith enters into conversation with reason on every level. Be that at the most elementary level or the highest field of intellectual inquiry, the understanding of our nature in the presence of a God who creates and holds all things in existence is essential.

6. A Sense of Mission. All the knowledge in the world will do little good unless it is transformed into living one’s life in a moral way, working for peace and justice in the world. Who can do this work without a foundation such as has been described above? By the integrity they have learned, students from this background will have much to share with a society that is fractured beyond belief. The education of our children in this manner, with these values, will place us in good stead as we enter more fully into the third millennium.

Our sense of who we are as Catholics and our sharing of our values is what drives our educational efforts in our parish. We have been given a wonderful gift at the same time we have been given a tremendous challenge. My prayer is that we all remain faithful to both the gift and the challenge.

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