What Makes a School Catholic?

What makes a school Catholic is another issue the COVID pandemic can prompt us to reexamine, just as the pause in attending Mass during the lockdown gave us the opportunity to renew our liturgical life. More important than the questions of whether or how to re-open Catholic schools is the question of what makes Catholic schools worth re-opening.

The Essence of a Truly Catholic School

What makes a school Catholic is what makes the Church Catholic. “For 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). Every student of every truly Catholic school hears this doctrine countless times.

So every student is instructed on the following related doctrines:

• God’s primary way to save the human race is the Catholic Church (CCC, 774-776, 845).
• 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 (CCC, 65, 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 is through the creed, morality, worship, and prayer of the Catholic Church (CCC, 150-151, 172-175).

At a truly Catholic school, every student is taught to ask, Why be Catholic? They are then taught the Catholic answer, which is comprised of the above doctrines.

Students are shown that these and every other Catholic doctrine are objectively true. They are therefore instructed that when someone disagrees with a Catholic doctrine, he or she is objectively mistaken, while retaining his or her human dignity and right to religious freedom. They are not taught that non-Catholics are automatically damned, baptized Catholics are automatically saved, or everyone is automatically saved. Furthermore, students are taught that a good Catholic is one who is trying to assent in thought and deed to all Catholic doctrines. They are made aware of the constant availability of God’s forgiveness, properly sought, for the failure to live up to Catholic doctrine.

So a truly Catholic school provides a thorough understanding of that which distinguishes the Catholic religion from every other religion—the Magisterium. Infallibility, Papal Primacy, and Apostolic Succession are clearly and accurately presented. Students are instructed on the difference between doctrine and other teachings of the Magisterium: its prudential judgment, social commentary, theological speculation, and spiritual guidance. Students are shown when good Catholics must agree with the Magisterium and when they may disagree with it.

A school that does not do all of the above does not have a Catholic identity. It has another identity with a Catholic veneer.

True Faith and Right Reason

The truly Catholic school explains to its students the nature of True Faith (knowledge we get from God’s Revelation), the nature of Right Reason (knowledge we get independently of Revelation), and the relationship between them. Students are taught to be neither Rationalists (who disparage True Faith) nor Fideists (who disparage Right Reason). Rather, they are shown that while True Faith gives knowledge unobtainable by Right Reason, True Faith and Right Reason never contradict each other. They are taught to pursue objective truth and always follow it because all objective truth ultimately leads to the Absolute Truth, the one true God.

Truly Catholic schools explain to students that while every academic subject has its own rightful autonomy from the other subjects (as asserted, for example, in Gaudium et Spes, 36), the Catholic Faith completes and perfects every academic subject (as argued, for example, by St. John Newman in The idea of a University). They also are shown that Philosophy is the foundation of every subject. So students are taught not only history, but also the philosophy of history and the theology of history; not only science, but also the philosophy of science and the theology of science; and likewise for every subject.

Therefore, all students are introduced to the basics of Philosophy. They are shown that every time they begin to think in any subject, they are making assumptions about reality. They are taught the basics of metaphysics so they can learn the nature of reality. They are taught the hierarchy of being as well as the differences between form and matter, substance and accident, and actuality and potentiality.

In order to put their students in touch with reality, truly Catholic schools teach the Laws of Thought: the Law of Noncontradiction, the Law of Correspondence, the Law of Identity, the Law of Excluded Middle, and the Law of Sufficient Reason.

The teaching of Logic helps students to defend orthodoxy and refute heterodoxy as well as to think clearly in any subject. Students are taught the differences between induction and deduction, valid argumentation and fallacious argumentation, and sound argumentation and unsound argumentation, as well as the classic forms of deduction and the classic fallacies. Students are made aware that Logic is the common backbone of every academic subject and that what differentiates the subjects is the evidence from which they draw conclusions.

Curriculum

In general, truly Catholic schools ladder their curricula in order to form generalists before they form specialists. Their goal is to provide the knowledge which every well-educated adult should have instead of teaching subjects as though every student will get a Ph.D. in that subject. Students are shown that each academic subject sheds light on only one dimension of reality in order to help them avoid reducing reality to what can be known in a particular subject. They are taught that the different subjects complement each other when grounded in the right Philosophy and capped by the right Theology. This is true even on the undergraduate level. Authentic Catholic colleges give students the opportunity to form a coherent orthodox Catholic worldview as the context for the specialization they pursue.

Especially in high school and college, students are exposed to both the true and the false ideas that have influenced humanity. They are able to draw from the profound depths of the Catholic intellectual tradition in order to refute Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Neo-Marxism that is rampant in contemporary culture as well as any religious idea which contradicts Catholic doctrine.

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 given the intellectual tools and pastoral care needed to prevent seduction by the Sexual Revolution and Gender Ideology.

Authentic Catholic education teaches true social justice. It teaches distributive justice, contributive justice, subsidiarity, solidarity, the common good, human rights, intrinsic evil, and the real meanings of love, hate, equality, and dignity. Students are taught that good Catholics agree on the Church’s social doctrine while being free to have reasonable disagreements about social analysis and prudential judgments. They benefit from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith’s Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation” and Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation and their application to the Neo-Marxisms of today, such as Critical Race Theory. They see that the right of the unborn to be born and the right of the dying to natural death are the preeminent social justice issues of our times.

Students are presented the many contributions of the Catholic Church to world history. They are made familiar with the best in Catholic art, architecture, and music.

The Experience

In a truly Catholic school, students are graded on their understanding of content, including Theological and Philosophical content, and not on their assent to it. Students are not treated as products on a Catholic assembly line since Catholic Faith cannot be manufactured. The Faith is proposed to students; assent is not imposed on them. A climate is established in which all honest questions are welcome when they are asked in a polite manner. Students’ heterodox opinions are not held against them but are used to engage them in the pursuit of truth. The same instruction that serves as catechesis and apologetics for those students assenting to the Faith also serves as evangelization for those dissenting from the Faith. St. Augustine’s dictum to hate the sin but love the sinner is applied to students: students’ wrong ideas are “hated” (that is, critiqued) while they themselves are loved.

Enrolling qualified students who have been baptized Catholic is the priority of admissions. When there is room for non-Catholic students, the school’s identity remains thoroughly Catholic. If a non-Catholic student is uncomfortable in a Catholic environment, then he or she should attend another school.

A truly Catholic school gives its students as many opportunities as it has resources for experiencing and practicing the Catholic Faith in an orthodox way. The Sacraments and devotions are integrated into the life of the school. The Blessed Sacrament is always available. Students are exposed to as much of the prayer and retreat tradition of the Church as possible. Counseling and spiritual direction never contradict Catholic doctrine. The difference between spirituality and Faith is also made clear.

The Faith permeates all aspects of the school. Extracurricular activities, whether athletic or non-athletic, are not idols but sacraments (with a small “s”). Excellence is pursued, relative to the native abilities of students, in academics and non-academics for the greater glory of God, and not for the greater glory of the student, the school, or the religious order running the school. Students are coached in how to form good, healthy, appropriate, and moral relationships of all kinds. They are shown and encouraged to have Catholic sexuality and to live chastely. The goal is to form students who will be practicing Catholics as adults who worship God, not blindly loyal alums who worship the alma mater.

Discipline will be inevitable. It should be based on the dynamic of the Sacrament of Penance: examination of conscience in light of doctrine, admission of wrong, penance to make things right again, forgiveness, and reconciliation with the school community. The principles of classic punitive justice should also be applied: reparation of harm caused, rehabilitation, and deterrence. If a student continues to behave badly in spite of the efforts of a united faculty and staff to guide him or her, that student should be expelled to find another school or institution with better resources to contribute to his or her personal growth.

The Faculty and Administration

Of course, all of these recommendations should be implemented in pedagogically and developmentally appropriate ways by professionals as skilled as their counterparts in non-Catholic education. Homework should be minimal so that students are free to be involved in their families, parishes, extracurriculars, and friendships—and to work when their families need them to make money.

At a minimum, school employees never publicly contradict Catholic doctrine, even if they struggle to be faithful in their private lives. To the extent that professionals at the school do not understand truly Catholic education, vehicles of professional development are used to form the faculty and staff as a community of Catholic educators. There is much work to be done! Resistance to such formation is not tolerated. All instructors and staff members support Theology as the most important subject.

Since the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life, the Eucharist must also be the source and summit of the life of the school and of anyone in a position of authority. It is absurd for non-Catholics to be in positions of authority in a Catholic school.

Too many schools built by the Faith and for the Faith are now serving the agendas of administrators, teachers, counselors, coaches, Boards, alumni, and parents who are Cafeteria Catholics at best. What makes a school Catholic is unmistakable and joyful public fidelity in word and deed to all Catholic doctrine.