Page 12: What Makes a School Catholic?

What makes a school Catholic?

By Curtis L. Hancock

Catholic parents are usually grateful that their children are enrolled in Catholic schools. Often they punctuate their expression of thanks with the remark that “at least there I know my kids are getting some instruction in the Catholic Faith.” When I hear such a remark, I get the impression that sometimes parents think that a school is Catholic because of religious instruction and that the “school part,” the rest of the curriculum, is just a vehicle for catechism. Now, while we certainly celebrate that Catholic schools train children in the Faith, we may still caution parents not to overlook something important: a Catholic school is or should be Catholic in the whole of its curriculum, not just in the part specific to religious instruction. For, while catechism is at the center of Catholic education, the substance of a Catholic school involves religious instruction and more besides.

This follows naturally when one considers that the aim of Catholic schooling is development of the whole person. To fulfill its mission, a Catholic school must do justice to the complex vision of the human person emanating from the Gospel. This vision includes our spiritual destiny, but it includes our natural state as well. Human beings are first natural creatures, who are called by their Christian faith to a spiritual life. But the one does not rule out or defeat the other. A basic Catholic teaching is that grace perfects nature; it does not destroy or replace it. This complex vision of the human person is evident when Jesus commands at Matthew 22:37 that we should love the Lord our God with our hearts, with our souls, and with all our intelligence. Here he is saying that we are to take our natural gifts, in this case those special powers that make us human in the first place, and through the grace of the Holy Spirit convert them into powers for Christian living. This spiritual fulfillment of our human nature is our perfection. Here also is the fullness of education, since true education seeks to perfect us. To play on a remark by St. Thomas Aquinas: Catholic education takes the water of human nature and converts it into the wine of Christian life.

So, whenever instruction is developing our human potentials, it is genuinely Catholic. Accordingly, Catholic instruction does not take place only in the religious education classroom. It occurs also in the gymnasium, the art studio, and the English class. By perfecting any and every aspect of our human nature, we conform to God’s will. For God’s aim is to make us his friends in the fullness of our humanity.

Another way of describing the task of Catholic education is to speak of it as a “liberation.” The Gospel aims to redeem and save us. But it also aims to set us free. It prescribes an authentic sense of freedom and warns against its counterfeit. What is that counterfeit? It is the belief that freedom consists in pursuing whatever we want. Christian wisdom builds on our knowledge of human nature to caution us against that mistake. Once we know what it is to be human, we can judge how humans should live their lives. It is a false and destructive idea of freedom to want something that undermines our humanity, a warning captured in D. H. Lawrence’s remark that a cry for freedom misguided by ignorance “is a rattling of chains and always was.”