A Big Moment for Catholic Educators

Many Coeur du Christ faculty take the advice of Joshua Gibbs of The Classical Teaching Institute in starting each daily class period with a “class catechism,” a series of questions and answers that form the interior and intellectual life of the students. Students end up memorizing the answers because of the ceremony and repetition of the recitation. One of the questions that spans across courses is “What does it mean to be human?” Students answer in unison:

This answer slowly over time assimilates into the soul of each student, but that means more than the mere fact that they memorize the specifically worded response to the question. The answer doesn’t obviously address the question, and so it strikes us as odd. Catechisms form student souls to move toward understanding that to act contrary to virtue is in some way to be less human. Vice is dehumanizing to the vicious, and virtue is humanizing to the virtuous. C.S.Lewis famously observed a transition in education in the 20th Century; the old education, he said, was “men transmitting manhood to men.”⁷

 

The same is true of our athletic programs. Each coach, under the guidance of a wise athletic director and a holy mission, sees their activity as primarily about forming saints. When coaches form students to achieve excellence in Football, Volleyball, or Basketball, they are intentional about instilling dispositions that transfer naturally from merely athletic competition to holistic sanctity. They do this consciously aware of St. Paul’s famous athletic metaphors for the Christian faith.⁸ In truth, athletics aren’t important because they are fun or let off steam, or gain a nice reputation and accolades for the school. Athletics are important because they train future saints in virtues by giving teens an avenue to practice pursuing a noble good (victory) in the face of adversity (the other team, the weather), or by giving teens the opportunity for gratitude in the face of terrible hardship (a loss), and humility in success. Ultimately, at the end of each game Coeur du Christ Saints join together to sing Non nobis domine (“not to us O Lord, but only to your name be the glory”).

 

Importance of forming the imagination

Education, then, seeks the interior integration of students and teachers by way of an integrated course of study, holding Theology as the queen of the sciences, for the purpose of cultivating theological, moral, and intellectual virtues in the souls of students. If the newest doctor of the Church is correct on these points, then he would naturally arrive at the conclusion that schools should place a heavy emphasis on the formation of the imagination, perhaps a heavier or equal weight as is placed on the formation of the intellect. Indeed, this is the conclusion of most classical educators today.

Newman argued that the best way to form behavior (e.g., for virtuous acts) is not merely rational or cognitive. Newman argues that “[intellectual] assent does not lead to action; but the images in which it lives, representing as they do the concrete, have the power of the concrete upon the affections and passions, and by means of these indirectly become operative.”⁹ The formation of the imagination consists in filling it with vivid images that order the passions toward goodness and beauty, and away from falsehood and evil. Newman echoes Plato’s claim that being educated isn’t reducible to rule following or passing a test, but in the interior ordering of the passions toward the good, such that we think truly, do good, and love beauty. This truth inspired Stratford Caldecott’s statement that “the best way to communicate morality is not through endless dry lists of what should and should not be done, but once again through the imagination—through stories, drama, and living examples.”¹⁰

Moral Theology at Coeur du Christ is distinctive within the world of Catholic education. We don’t use a mass produced secondary text that distills the important principles for students. Rather, we offer students the original texts from Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas and other doctors of the Church, as well as the Catechism and Scripture. Yet, the use of primary sources is also not the primary distinction. Significantly, Coeur du Christ Saints slowly read Dante Aleghieri’s Purgatorio in concert with Scripture and the Magisterium of the Church. Our students enter into an imaginative world where the vices, virtues, and the paths between are vividly dramatized. We enter into Dante’s imaginative world so that our study can have a real effect in making students and teachers good, so that more than just the intellect is affected. Dante may or may not be an authoritative source for precision in who ends up where in the afterlife, but that question misses the point. We traverse Mt. Purgatory with Dante and Virgil, allowing the imaginative journey to purge us for entry into paradiso. The greatest student compliment I have ever received in my professional career was from a student who took this Moral Theology course and said, “this has helped me to see that sin is ugly.” That affective dimension is the goal. It is where saints are made.

 

The nature of liberal education as distinct from practical education

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of classical education is that it is decidedly not college and career preparatory. Of course, the goods of university education and professional life need not be neglected, but many secondary schools treat university admissions as the highest possible good. Others prioritize the trades, getting into the workforce to make money. In short, the value of education is primarily measured in the number of dollars a graduate may be able to earn. Our 38th Doctor of the Church would reject this position emphatically.

Newman responds to the pragmatist in each of us, saying,

But education is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of in connexion with religion and virtue. …and since cultivation of mind is surely worth seeking for its own sake, we are thus brought once more to the conclusion, which the word “Liberal” and the word “Philosophy” have already suggested, that there is a Knowledge, which is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labour.¹¹

Private schools and universities are expensive. Yet, Cardinal Newman argues that the returns on investment are distinct from anything that can be measured in monetary terms. There is a kind of wisdom that is worth the price-tag of tuition regardless of the professional doors it may open. Such wisdom is the interior ordering of the student. It is being educated, in the highest sense of that term, which is desirable as an ample return on investment.

Every teacher has fielded questions like “is this going to be on the test?” or “how many points is this assignment worth?” or “when am I going to use this in real life?” Many teachers don’t like these questions because they have some awareness of the transcendent value of their discipline, and indeed that’s why they teach it. Newman had this understanding for the whole of education. He is a shining beacon of the kind of attitude that the Catholic Church has taken for the education of her members.

The beautiful thing about classical, Catholic education, though, is that our Lord was right when he taught, “but seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Matthew 6:33). Educators who are intentional about forming students in wisdom and virtue according to the pedagogy prescribed by Cardinal Newman often find that temporal excellence comes along with it. In our young life as a school, Coeur du Christ has already seen this to be true, and we are proud of these fruits. Coeur du Christ Saints are going on to fruitful university life at public and private universities. They are well prepared for these environments and are finding success and fulfillment in their studies. We also have graduates entering the military, workforce, and finishing tradeschool. We even have our eyes on a few graduates, watching for holy marriages and priestly vocations. With two graduating classes so far, we are elated at their trajectory and successes.

Now that Pope Leo XIV has named St. John Henry Newman as both Doctor of the Church and co-patron of education, my prayer for the future of education is three-fold. Firstly, there are non-Catholic classical educators doing amazing work in protestant and public-charter school contexts. I pray that they will begin to see the Catholic Church—founded by Jesus Christ, her head—as “the pillar and bulwark” (1 Timothy 3:15) of all the good principles toward which they aspire in their tireless formation of young people. Secondly, I pray that Catholic educators the world-over would join in the renewal of Catholic education. More than merely forming students for worldly excellence, we must form them to be saints! There are wonderful resources for joining this renewal, from the Cardinal Newman Society to the Institute of Catholic Liberal Education, the Augustine Institute, the Boethius Institute, Adeodatus, the Classic Learning Test, and many more. Third, I pray that more Catholic parents will beseech their parochial schools and dioceses to provide the kind of education called for by St. John Henry Newman.

¹ “…all the sciences come to us as one, that they all relate to one and the same integral subject-matter, that each separately is more or less an abstraction, wholly true as an hypothesis, but not wholly trustworthy in the concrete, conversant with relations more than with facts, with principles more than with agents, needing the support and guarantee of its sister sciences, and giving in turn while it takes:—from which it follows, that none can safely be omitted, if we would obtain the exactest knowledge possible of things as they are, and that the omission is more or less important, in proportion to the field which each covers, and the depth to which it penetrates, and the order to which it belongs; for its loss is a positive privation of an influence which exerts itself in the correction and completion of the rest.” Newman, Idea of a University, III.6.

² John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Sixth edition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 7-9.

³ For a wonderful and illuminating treatment of John Senior and the IHP, see Fr. Francis Bethel’s illuminating text, John Senior and the Restoration of Realism.

⁴ “…in order to have possession of truth at all, we must have the whole truth; and no one science, no two sciences, no one family of sciences, nay, not even all secular science, is the whole truth; that revealed truth enters to a very great extent into the province of science, philosophy, and literature, and that to put it on one side, in compliment to secular science, is simply, under colour of a compliment, to do science a great damage. I do not say that every science will be equally affected by the omission; pure mathematics will not suffer at all; chemistry will suffer less than politics, politics than history, ethics, or metaphysics; still, that the various branches of science are intimately connected with each other, and form one whole, which whole is impaired, and to an extent which it is difficult to limit, by any considerable omission of knowledge, of whatever kind, and that revealed knowledge is very far indeed from an inconsiderable department of knowledge, this I consider undeniable.” Newman, Idea of a University, IV.1.

⁵ Newman, Idea of a University, III.6.

⁶ “This being undeniable, it is plain that, when he suggests to the Irish Hierarchy the establishment of a University, his first and chief and direct object is, not science, art, professional skill, literature, the discovery of knowledge, but some benefit or other, to accrue, by means of literature and science, to his own children; not indeed their formation on any narrow or fantastic type, as, for instance, that of an “English Gentleman” may be called, but their exercise and growth in certain habits, moral or intellectual.” Newman, Idea of a University, Preface.

⁷ C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 23.

⁸ See, for example, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27. For a gripping intellectual justification of athletics in Catholic education, see Fr. James Schall, S.J. “On the Seriousness of Sport” in Another Sort of Learning (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 218-229.

⁹ “It appears from what has been said, that, though Real Assent is not intrinsically operative, it accidentally and indirectly affects practice. It is in itself an intellectual act, of which the object is presented to it by the imagination; and though the pure intellect does not lead to action, nor the imagination either, yet the imagination has the means, which pure intellect has not, of stimulating those powers of the mind from which action proceeds. Real Assent then, or Belief, as it may be called, viewed in itself, that is, simply as Assent, does not lead to action; but the images in which it lives, representing as they do the concrete, have the power of the concrete upon the affections and passions, and by means of these indirectly become operative.” Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, IV.3.

¹⁰ Stratford Caldecott, Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education, 87.

^{11 “}Moreover, such knowledge is not a mere extrinsic or accidental advantage, which is ours to-day and another’s to-morrow, which may be got up from a book, and easily forgotten again, which we can command or communicate at our pleasure, which we can borrow for the occasion, carry about in our hand, and take into the market; it is an acquired illumination, it is a habit, a personal possession, and an inward endowment. And this is the reason, why it is more correct, as well as more usual, to speak of a University as a place of education, than of instruction, though, when knowledge is concerned, instruction would at first sight have seemed the more appropriate word. We are instructed, for instance, in manual exercises, in the fine and useful arts, in trades, and in ways of business; for these are methods, which have little or no effect upon the mind itself, are contained in rules committed to memory, to tradition, or to use, and bear upon an end external to themselves. But education is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of in connexion with religion and virtue. When, then, we speak of the communication of Knowledge as being Education, we thereby really imply that that Knowledge is a state or condition of mind; and since cultivation of mind is surely worth seeking for its own sake, we are thus brought once more to the conclusion, which the word “Liberal” and the word “Philosophy” have already suggested, that there is a Knowledge, which is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labour.” Newman, Idea of a University, V.6.