Page 5: Five Essentials continued...

I. Parental and State Responsibilities

It is the clear teaching of the Church, constantly reiterated by the Holy See, that parents are the first educators of their children. Parents have the original, primary and inalienable right to educate them in conformity with the family’s moral and religious convictions [4]. They are educators precisely because they are parents. At the same time, the vast majority of parents share their educational responsibilities with other individuals and/or institutions, primarily the school.

Elementary education is, then, “an extension of parental education; it is extended and cooperative home schooling.” [5] In a real sense schools are extensions of the home. Parents, not schools, not the State, and not the Church, have the primary moral responsibility of educating children to adulthood. The principle of subsidiarity must always govern relations between families and the Church and State in this regard. As Pope John Paul II wrote in his 1994 Letter to Families:

Subsidiarity thus complements paternal and maternal love and confirms its fundamental nature, inasmuch as all other participants in the process of education are only able to carry out their responsibilities in the name of the parents, with their consent and, to a certain degree, with their authorization. [6]

. . . .

What role does the Church play in assisting Catholic families in education? By her very nature the Church has the right and the obligation to proclaim the Gospel to all nations (cf. Mt 28:20). In the words of Gravissimum Education is:

To fulfill the mandate she has received from her divine founder of proclaiming the mystery of salvation to all men and of restoring all things in Christ, Holy Mother the Church must be concerned with the whole of man’s life, even the secular part of it insofar as it has a bearing on his heavenly calling. Therefore, she has a role in the progress and development of education.

. . .

Catholic schools participate in the Church’s evangelizing mission, of bringing the Gospel to the ends of the earth. More particularly, they are places of evangelization for the young. As truly ecclesial institutions, they are “the privileged environment in which Christian education is

[4] Cf. Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Gravissimum Education is 3, 6; Pontifical Council for the Family, Charter of the Rights of the Family (22 October 1983), nos. 1-3; cf. John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio; Code of Canon Law, canon 793; Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2229; John Paul II, Letter to Families, 16; Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education, Lay Catholics in Schools, 12; Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2005), n. 239.
[5] Peter Redpath, “Foreword,” in Curtis L. Hancock, Recovering a Catholic Philosophy of Elementary Education (Mount Pocono: Newman House Press, 2005), 19.
[6] John Paul II, Letter to Families, 16.
[7] Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Gravissimum Education is, intro.; cf. Code of Canon Law, canon 794.1.