'Opportunities' in Catholic Education

Each morning, right after fulfilling my chivalric duties of devotion, I spend a minimum of fifteen minutes reading. Usually the author who receives my undivided attention at this time is Monsignor Ronald A. Knox (Eton, Oxford). During World War II and the German bombings of industrial and municipal centers, Monsignor Knox had the opportunity to retire to the countryside of England to work on his translation of the Bible. Sounds idyllic, doesn't it? So it is amazing how the Holy Spirit sees things, most often, differently.

Just as Knox was settling into the lovely manor setting, it was decided that the manor would also be an extraordinary setting for Catholic school girls to continue their studies, far removed from the Blitz .

Indeed, now Knox would have the delightful daily opportunity to say Mass, hear weekly confessions, and generally serve as chaplain to gaggles of prepubescent schoolgirls while he attempted his mandated work of translation. Ah, yes. How plans change!

I thought of this as I read Monsignor Charles Pope's post, A Catholic University and Recovered Catholic Identity - A Study of Change and Possibility of Reform (a fine article, but one to which I will not allude here except as a jumping-off place).

When I was confirmed into the Catholic Church ten years ago this summer, I went looking for work and was honored to be offered a teaching position at a Catholic school in northern Virginia (St. Charles Borromeo School, pictured above as it looked when I arrived there). I remained there, a fixture in the sixth grade for nearly all of those ten years (the students, both male and female, probably looked at me as a "fixture" of sorts, also).

While working diligently to fulfill the requirements mandated by the diocesan Office of Catholic Schools, I found some of the most amazing times of learning came in planned, yet never choreographed, moments. For example, each morning students came in, hung up coats, etc., prepared for the day, sat and read the Gospel for Mass for the day, and then answered a related question on the board in their "Bellwork Journal."

Using these questions, I sought to help students move into "higher cognitive thinking" (Bloom) and also make them dig more deeply into the meaning of faith, morals, and other vital teachings of the Church. We would discuss the question and their answers before our Morning Offering and intentions.

I am grateful for the years that our Lord allowed me to teach in a Catholic school classroom. Never neglect to cherish and support your parish school (if you have one) and/or your diocesan Catholic schools. It is a unique place of growing, learning, catechesis, morality in action, and other "opportunities" for the Holy Spirit to help the young to come into a closer, richer relationship with God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ... and their "neighbor as themselves" (Mark 12, 30-31).

In 6 Months It'll Feel Normal

Okay. It's coming, it's more in keeping with ancient texts, it's our opportunity to show we're not fuddy-duddy sticks in the mud. Via New Advent here is what you need to know about the upcoming changes in the Mass.

Reno - Questioning Approach to Education

A very good critique of education.

Teaching in the Twenty-First Century
By R.R. Reno

I find myself questioning our approach—my approach—to education. I wonder not so much about what we teach as how. I worry about the spiritual outlook presently encouraged by higher education. Do we (often unwittingly, and sometimes contrary to our conscious intentions) promise truth without love?
...

Yet endless theoretical elaborations of suspicion remain a growth industry all the same. “Truths are fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten”—it continues to be said in a thousand different ways. The reason, I think, is simple. Critical theory plays a significant and important role in contemporary society: it de-mystifies and de-legitimates inherited beliefs. It is not, as some critics would like to think, simply Leftist ideology. Nor is it nonsense dressed up in fancy French words. These days critical theory is an intellectual project, the main goal of which is to show that conventional ways of thinking are hopelessly naïve, if not malign and corrupt. It is a deck-clearing operation—not to prepare students for truth, but to prepare them for life without truths.

Pope Benedict has called this mode of pedagogy a dictatorship of relativism. It is, of course, a soft tyranny. Nobody is imprisoning college students for having convictions. The dominant intellectual regime is satisfied with two basic strategies: continuous assault and a starvation diet. We take apart the belief-systems of adolescents with our multi-faceted and powerful modes of critical analysis—and we give them next to nothing substantive to believe.

Read the article HERE.

My question is how does one "teach" truth if not from love? If one stands aloof, indifferent and separate from The Source of Love than how does one teach Truth?

Cutting oneself off from the True Vine

I'm not quite certain why, but I am experiencing a new found hope regarding the Catholic faith these days, the kerfuffel at Notre Dame to the contrary notwithstanding.

Perhaps it is best thematized by Bishop Olmsted in a single sentence from his letter to President Jenkins of the University of Notre Dame regarding his invitation to I Won: It is a public act of disobedience to the Bishops of the United States.

Coming from a non-Catholic background myself, I see the long term ramifications of such a disastrous decision on the part of President Jenkins, though, apparently, he does not, being an impatient modern fellow who does not bother his head with Eric Voegelin's warning not to "immanentize the eschaton."

For, firstly, this was and continues to be the heresy par excellence of the Enlightenment project, from the French Revolution through the disasters of the 20th century, and on to the trite mayhem we are experiencing only leading edges of which were heralded in the pagan slogan, "Yes We Can."

But, secondly, Bishop Olmsted is doing more than stating the indicative. He is proclaiming a dread warning to Jenkins: Cut yourself off from the True Vine at your peril. Mainline Protestantism no less than the vast remains of Christendom are withering and becoming dry tinder ripe for the conflagration that Our Lord warns of in John 15.

Even so great an institution as the University of Notre Dame can be so short sighted if so great an institution as the Church in England can also cut herself off from the sole Church leading to the sad, dreadful affair the Anglican communion has become.

I, for one, would hate to see the Golden Dome become a relic of what it once was.

Robert Coles - Sex, Envy, Videotapes

Never mind the videotapes. Educators are fully aware of the insights of Harvard's professor of psychiatry, Robert Coles. For those with mimetic theory ears to hear and eyes to read, the following is a wealth of wisdom.

When Freud listened to his first patients, he observed their substantial difficulty in coming to terms with their sexual thoughts and impulses -- to the point that, he began to realize, this aspect of their lives was hidden even from them, never mind others who might want to attend them, be of help to them. So it was that the unconscious, thoroughly familiar to novelists, and poets and playwrights over the centuries, took on new life as a construct in a neuropsychiatrist's metapsychology -- one, however, derived not from the reveries of a theorist, but from his daily clinical effort to understand his patients. Today, of course, sexuality is a virtual mainstay of our bourgeois, capitalist culture, a commodity, even -- sold, as it were, on the covers of magazines, in the advertisements for a host of products, and increasingly in the advertisements by individuals on behalf of themselves that appear in the respectable press (journals, newspapers), never mind the scandal tabloids ...

Read more …

Hunting for Home(r)

Victor David Hanson explores the difficulties of students seeking a classical education in the day of syllabi driven by post-modern babel:

The Humanities Move Off Campus - As the classical university unravels, students seek knowledge and know-how elsewhere.