Truly Catholic Schools Are Urgently Needed

The need for truly Catholic schools is urgent. Catholic schools have always needed to be the schools that God wants them to be, which is to have a truly Catholic identity. More than any time since Vatican II, Catholic schools have the opportunity and the responsibility to distinguish themselves from public schools and secular private schools.

This column will add to an earlier column, “What Makes a School Catholic?”, which made points about a truly Catholic school’s essence, relationship to Faith and Reason, curriculum, experiences for growth in the Faith, and faculty and administration. While that column intended to apply to one degree or another to grade schools, high schools, and colleges, this column focuses on grade schools and high schools.

The Opportunity for Catholic Schools

In order to understand the opportunity for Catholic schools to distinguish themselves from public schools and secular private schools, it is important to understand Wokeism. I will explain Wokeism because I still find people who have no idea what it means. Wokeism is the new word for Political Correctness. It is also known as Intersectionality and Progressivism. Wokeism is Marxism on steroids. Both Marxism and Wokeism look at life very simply: there are the oppressed, and there are the oppressors. For Marxism, the oppression is economic in nature: the oppressors are all business owners and members of the middle class, and the oppressed are all working people. Wokeism accepts Marxism’s economic oppression but extends it to include race, gender, and sexual orientation. So Wokeism’s oppressors are all white, heterosexual, Christian males with traditional values who are guilty until proven innocent of “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” “classism,” “xenophobia,” “imperialism,” “cultural appropriation,” “anti-environmentalism,” “climate change denial,” “fascism,” and other forms of “hate.” Everyone else is oppressed, except the “Uncle Toms” among people of color, non-heterosexuals, and women who at any time are allied with the oppressors. The Woke agenda against “hate” is not love, but the unholy trinity of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” Apparently, you can be a billionaire as long as you are against “hate.” For more on all this, see my column, “The Greatest Challenge to the Catholic Faith,” but substitute “Wokeism” for “Politically Correct” and “Woke” for “PC.”

Wokeism generally dominates public schools and private secular schools. The education establishment – college Education Departments, state and professional accrediting agencies, administrators, faculty, counselors, and educator unions and associations – is Woke. Even with recent pushbacks against Wokeism, its disciples have not lost their missionary and crusading fervor. It would be prudent to assume that Wokeism will be a strong force in education, as well as in the rest of society, for many years to come. For Woke educators, as the intellectual heirs of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, there is no tolerance or liberty, absolute power is the goal, and the end justifies the means.

The opportunity for Catholic schools is to present themselves as clear alternatives to Woke schools. Parents need Catholic schools where their children will not be asked every day what gender they are, will not be encouraged to block puberty and mutilate their bodies, will not be told to keep secrets about their schooling from their parents, will not have drag queens in their schools, will not be told that they are automatically racist if they are white, will not be terrified about climate change, will not hate the United States of America until it is completely Woke, will not otherwise be brain-washed with Wokeism, and in general where parents will be treated as the primary educators of their children.

Catholic schools should gladly capitalize on whatever market there is for non-Woke education, especially with the growing success of public funding of education following the student instead of the school. Catholic schools should be glad to welcome non-Catholic families seeking refuge from Woke schools, whether they are non-Catholic or non-practicing Catholic. Students from such families should be helped to clarify their own philosophy of life without academic penalty, held to Catholic standards of behavior while they are there, and regularly invited to become practicing Catholics while having their religious freedom and human dignity respected. Catholic schools should be glad to ally with non-Catholic schools which are trying to have the right values.

The Responsibility of Catholic Schools

The first responsibility of a Catholic school in the present moment is what it has always been: to be the school that God wants it to be, which is to have a truly Catholic identity. I become only more convinced that the sine qua non of a truly Catholic school is that THE Question is regularly asked and THE Answer is systematically taught.

THE Question is: Why be Catholic? At nominally or confusedly Catholic schools since Vatican II (but not due to Vatican II), this existential question has regularly been dodged. A school is nominally Catholic if its powers-that-be use the Faith as window dressing for its real agenda: academic “success,” athletic championships, social engineering, etc. A school is confusedly Catholic if it is sincerely trying to be Catholic but looks to the wrong sources for its identity. I suspect that the great majority of teachers, administrators, and counselors at most Catholic schools cannot give a satisfactory answer to THE Question. How do you, the reader, answer it?

I suspect that the problem at schools that are admirably striving to have a strong Catholic identity is that students are assumed to infer the right answer, especially the more good religion or theology classes they are taught and the more good liturgical and devotional experiences they are provided. It is far better to assume that students will know the right answer to Why be Catholic? only if they are explicitly asked THE Question and taught THE Answer.

THE Answer, the Catholic answer, is: The reason to be Catholic is that “it is through Christ’s Catholic Church alone, which is the universal help toward salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 816, quoting Vatican II, with my emphasis added). God’s primary way to save the human race, and each student, is the Catholic Church (CCC 774-776).

Of course, students should be taught this Catholic answer, as they should be taught everything else, in pedagogically and developmentally appropriate ways. This can be done! Just as I memorized the Baltimore Catechism’s “God made me to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in Heaven” at an age long before I could begin to appreciably understand it, primary graders can memorize “The Catholic Church alone has the fullness of the means of salvation.” Then, because good education repeats and reinforces previous learning, throughout grade school and high school, students are taught how a unit in Religion or Theology class, how a newly-learned way to pray, how a retreat or day of recollection adds to understanding how the Catholic Church alone has the fullness of the means of salvation.

The truly Catholic school has the responsibility to instruct every student on the following related doctrines:

• It is through the Catholic Church alone that God wholly, most completely, most fully reveals Himself; the best way to know God is in the Catholic Church since Catholic Doctrine is the clearest interpretation of Divine Revelation of who God is and how He acts (CCC 65, 74-83, 846).
• Since Faith is the acceptance of Divine Revelation, it is the Catholic Faith alone through which one fully responds to Revelation as God wants him or her to respond; the best way to respond to God, the best way to be a follower and friend of Jesus Christ, the best way to love God and our neighbor is through the creed, morality, worship, and prayer of the Catholic Church (CCC 84-95, 150-151, 172-175); and the best way to synthesize Faith and Reason (CCC 156-159, and according to the principles of Pope John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio and John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University).
• Catholics have a missionary responsibility to convert the world to the Catholic Church, the universal sacrament of salvation (CCC 776, 831, 845).

Students are taught that a good Catholic is one who is trying to assent in thought and deed to all Catholic doctrines. “Since the faith is one, it must be professed in all its purity and integrity. Precisely because all the articles of faith are interconnected, to deny one of them, even those that seem least important, is tantamount to distorting the whole” (Lumen Fidei, 48). Students are taught that a good Catholic is one who is trying to assent to all Catholic doctrines as objectively true, and not just as personally meaningful. Students are shown that every Catholic doctrine describes reality and otherwise obeys the Laws of Thought. They also learn the meaning of formal heresy, material heresy, and apostasy.

Now more than ever, as humanity conducts an increasing number of experiments in what it means to be human – formally, e.g., in transgender surgeries, and informally, e.g., in dressing like the opposite sex – truly Catholic schools strive to make their students experts in human nature. Students are taught about the Fall, personal sin, grace, free will, virtue, redemption, damnation, and salvation history. They are shown the right relationship between their minds, desires, emotions, and bodies. They are specifically given the intellectual tools and pastoral care needed to prevent seduction by the Sexual Revolution and Gender Ideology.

Implementation

A Catholic school can choose to be truly Catholic at any time, regardless of what its de facto identity currently is. For example, the 2023-24 school year and the 2024 summer could be the time of planning. Here are suggestions, in no particular order, as to how to make a school truly Catholic:

• That the school is faithful in word and deed to all Catholic Doctrine should be publicly and explicitly stated so as to leave no room for uncertainty or ambiguity. Anyone who reads or hears the school’s mission statement and descriptions of itself, marketing and admissions media, teacher and staff contracts and evaluations, and programs for parents should know without doubt that the purpose of the school is salvation.
• Systematic catechesis of the faculty and staff members needs to take place so that they understand essential Catholic doctrines and incorporate them into their teaching, administration, counseling, etc. Such catechesis should be based on a pre-test so that no one is patronized and has their time wasted by being taught what they already know.
• The same is true for the essential elements of human nature and epistemology.
• Student experiences outside the classroom, such as athletics, clubs, and discipline, explicitly incorporate and reinforce Catholic doctrine, morality, worship, and prayer.
• Faculty and staff who do not honestly accept all Catholic Doctrine as objectively true and the Catholic Church as the objective fullness of the means of salvation should have no leadership or pastoral responsibilities. Since the Eucharist is the source and the summit of Christian life, even more so should the Eucharist, understood with orthodox faith, be the source and summit of leadership and pastoral responsibilities.
• Applicants for jobs should be asked explicitly if they assent to all Catholic Doctrine as objectively true and the Catholic Church as the objective fullness of the means of salvation. Those who do not may still be hired if they can play a constructive role in the mission of the school. They should be evangelized.
• Families should be shown how to integrate prayer and discernment with choosing a high school and then a college as a way to grow in orthodox Catholic Faith.

The truly Catholic school aims to inspire its students to know, love, and serve Jesus Christ precisely by embracing the doctrine, morality, worship, and prayer of the Catholic Church as the objective fullness of the means of salvation. It wants every one of its students to become an adult who practices the Catholic Faith in assent to the entire Catechism of the Catholic Church.