Keeping Catholic education great
|According to the Vatican yearbook, the Annuario Pontificio, there are north of 5,000 Catholic bishops in the world today. They share certain characteristics and attributes. But I doubt that there is any other among them who would open a pastoral letter on The Joy and Wonder of Catholic Education as Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, recently did
I am not one of the millions of children who received a Catholic education in this great country. Nor was I Catholic when I showed up as a freshman at the University of Kansas in the early 1970s. My main interests at the time were basketball and the Grateful Dead, and KU had them both!
Bishop Conley is a friend of long standing, although I have never been able to appreciate his appreciation for the Grateful Dead – any more than I could appreciate the affection of distinguished Polish Dominicans I know for Deep Purple. 60s Gold is one of my most-listened-to stations on Sirius XM . But I draw the line on electrified Sixties’ music at the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, Chicago, the Grass Roots, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Or thereabouts.
In his pastoral letter, which should be read by every Catholic educator at every level of Catholic education, Bishop Conley describes his conversion to Catholicism amidst his undergraduate experience of classic liberal learning and the Great Books at KU. He then borrows from our mutual friend, Vancouver’s Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, to propose five essential marks of an authentically Catholic education. Let me briefly note those, offering my own reflections on each as a supplement to Bishop Conley’s explication of what we might call Miller’s Marks.
An authentic Catholic education is founded on a Christian anthropology. We are not made for self-satisfaction alone. Nor are we individual monads, sentient billiard balls careening around a terrestrial pool table and occasionally colliding. There is a human nature, and that human nature is ordered to holiness.