A Thought Experiment

Imagine if we took away all the things that make it obvious Canongate is a Catholic school. Imagine if we ceased attending daily Mass, praying the Divine Office and the Angelus, requiring four courses in Catholic theology. Imagine if we stopped training our students in sacred music and art, studying the Church’s language of Latin, and removed the crucifixes from our walls. What would remain? Would Canongate then seem just like a typical public high school? Would the instruction in our classrooms be any different than what students receive in a secular high school? To put it more pointedly, is our Catholic faith simply a religious layer added on to what is otherwise a secular education?

To answer this I am going to make a rather outrageous claim. Both the content and the manner in which a Catholic teacher teaches and a Catholic student learns ought to be radically different from what happens in a secular school. Our Catholicity has its roots in our daily Mass attendance and theology classes, but it extends from there into every classroom. This is not to say that Catholic math uses secret equations or unique symbols unknown to the rest of the world, nor that Catholic science uses its own nomenclature or systems of categorization. Two plus two equals four for Catholics just as it does for everyone else. However, “in the Catholic school’s educational project, there is no separation between time for learning and time for formation, between acquiring notions and growing in wisdom” (Congregation for Catholic Education).

I want to share with you three ways that our Catholicity penetrates and transforms what happens in our classrooms. I will share one of these ways today, and the other two in upcoming newsletters.

First, as Catholics, we understand that the pursuit of knowledge is itself a moral act. To learn is an act of humility before the all-knowing God, a confession of our finitude and dependence on those who have gone before and on the Divine Logos, the source of all truth. Our learning takes place with a spirit of gratitude for the freedom and leisure to study and learn. It is undertaken with thankfulness for the gift of teachers (both living and dead), and the gift of an intellect that can receive the true and the good. For the Catholic, both teaching and learning are ordered to Christ the Teacher, the one “who is before all things” and in whom “all things hold together.”

Hence, as Catholics, the ends which we pursue in teaching and learning are very different from those pursued in a secular context. Blessed Pius IX, echoing St. Augustine, warned that it is an error for Catholics to pursue education for “the knowledge of merely natural things, and only, or at least primarily, the ends of earthly social life.” St. John Paul II put it this way: “Catholic education is above all a question of communicating Christ, of helping to form Christ in the lives of others.” Canongate is a religious school, not only because of our affiliation with the Catholic Diocese of Charlotte but also because we understand that the very acts of teaching and learning must themselves be ordered to God.