Pretense and Catholic Institutions

I’m going to write about something which we all know to be true. Indeed, what I’m about to write is so true, so widely acknowledged and accepted, that it is a rather unremarkable observation.

American Catholic schools are only rarely Catholic. What do I mean by this? If Catholic institutions of learning take seriously their mission, it means working to form a unique conscience in their students apart from their cultural milieu.

It means molding young men and women into independent thinkers capable of parsing widely divergent cultural sways and multimedia programming. It’s been said that the goal of education “is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-found his civilization.”

In this context, we could say that the goal of Catholic institutions, in an earthly sense, should be to form citizens capable of re-founding a Christian civilization, and in a spiritual sense, articulating Christ’s life and promise.

The extent to which Catholic school graduates would be unable to do either is the extent to which we can measure them successes or failures.

And for the most part, they don’t form students at all. They’re about appearances, and in many cases, about alternatives to the street. They try, but often lacking help from families, or the fire of passion from faculty, or souls from the students, those graduates who emerge are wholly of the culture.

That is to say, wholly secular. And so, basically educated, reflexive cynics.

You’re aching for the point, I know. That is: it would be better for students if we were frank with them, at least by high school, about which type of institution they’re attending, about whether to them is being transmitted the great treasury of faith and culture, or not.

About whether they’re being trained, at best, as wage laborers, or whether they’re being prepared as citizens. It used to be that the great miracle of American education was to do both. I’m not sure if that’s true any longer.

A sturdy (rather than cheap) frankness about this might be better than letting them assume they’re getting something they’re not, than letting them think they know the faith, and should be bold enough to speak about it, or the culture, when their education has been a paltry one.

To work against the illusion that the cost of their tuition transformed their disposition.