Catholic Sensibility

Let’s offer up a credal statement–at least that might be what Pope Leo was thinking the day he wrote this passage.

72. For the Christian faith, the education of the poor is not a favor but a duty. Children have a right to knowledge as a fundamental requirement for the recognition of human dignity.

Education as a means of elevating human dignity. Of course, the Holy Father is right.

Teaching them affirms their value, giving them the tools to transform their reality.

A few Catholics might mewl over this, but the route to transformation is always understood as facilitating God’s grace after a student, teachers and mentors have done their preparation work. That work includes cultivating virtues:

Christian tradition considers knowledge a gift from God and a community responsibility. Christian education does not only form professionals, but also people open to goodness, beauty and truth. Catholic schools, therefore, when they are faithful to their name, are places of inclusion, integral formation and human development. By combining faith and culture, they sow the seeds of the future, honor the image of God and build a better society.

One would think that imparting knowledge would register here, but I think faith and culture are far more important. Learning facts and skills is obviously essential, but I approve of Pope Leo’s emphasis here. Do you?

This document is available in multiple languages, as usual, on the Vatican site here. It is also Copyright © Dicastery for Communication – Libreria Editrice Vaticana. The image is from Giotto, early 14th century, Saint Francis giving his mantle to a poor man.

It wasn’t just men, to make an obvious point.

71. Many female congregations were protagonists of this pedagogical revolution. Founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ursulines, the Sisters of the Company of Mary Our Lady, the Maestre Pie and many others, stepped into the spaces where the state was absent. They created schools in small villages, suburbs and working-class neighborhoods. In particular, the education of girls became a priority.

As I read of the occasional hysteria over Christian alarmed at non-Christian invasions of their backyards, one obvious outreach for the Church is the education of children, especially girls. Read more about the Ursulines here.

The religious sisters taught literacy, evangelized, took care of practical matters of daily life, elevated their spirits through the cultivation of the arts, and, above all, formed consciences. Their pedagogy was simple: closeness, patience and gentleness. They taught by the example of their lives before teaching with words. In times of widespread illiteracy and systemic exclusion, these consecrated women were beacons of hope. Their mission was to form hearts, teach people to think and promote dignity. By combining a life of piety and dedication to others, they fought abandonment with the tenderness of those who educate in the name of Christ.

A subset of Catholic finds it amusing to tear away at religious sisters. Sometimes it’s personal. Sometimes a matter of sexism, politics, or even memories of injustice. There’s no denying the orders and their members have done a great service to generations of children, not just Catholics.

This document is available in multiple languages, as usual, on the Vatican site here. It is also Copyright © Dicastery for Communication – Libreria Editrice Vaticana. The image is from Giotto, early 14th century, Saint Francis giving his mantle to a poor man.

Moving today into the 1800s:

70. In the nineteenth century, also in France, Saint Marcellin Champagnat founded the Institute of the Marist Brothers of the Schools. “He was sensitive to the spiritual and educational needs of his time, especially to religious ignorance and the situation of neglect experienced in a particular way by the young.” [John Paul II, Homily for the Mass of Canonization (18 April 1999)] He dedicated himself wholeheartedly to the mission of educating and evangelizing children and young people, especially those most in need, during a period when access to education continued to be the privilege of a few.

More well known to us in North America might be the Italian John Bosco:

In the same spirit, Saint John Bosco began the great work of the Salesians in Italy based on the three principles of the “preventive method” — reason, religion, and loving kindness. [Cf. John Paul II, Letter Iuvenum Patris (31 January 1988), 9]

Have you heard of the Rosminians?

Blessed Antonio Rosmini founded the Institute of Charity, in which “intellectual charity” was placed alongside “material charity,” with “spiritual-pastoral charity” at the top, as an indispensable dimension of any charitable action aimed at the good and integral development of the person. [Cf. Francis, Address to the Participants in the General Chapter of the Institute of Charity (Rosminians) (1 October 2018)]

A book like this one wouldn’t get much notice today, I’d think. Clearly, it upset the bishops of Fr Rosmini’s day. Despite friction with the Vatican, his order and “good name” did emerge intact a year before the founder’s death.  From the Vatican site:

To close the issue definitively, the Pontiff submitted all Rosmini’s works to examination by the Congregation of the Index. On 3 July 1854, it was decreed: “All the works of Antonio Rosmini-Serbati that have recently been examined are to be dismissed, and this examination in no way detracts from the good name of the author, nor of the religious Society founded by him, nor from his life and singular merits towards the Church” (R. Malone, “Historical Overview of the Rosmini Case”, ORE, 25 July 2001, p. 10).

This document is available in multiple languages, as usual, on the Vatican site here. It is also Copyright © Dicastery for Communication – Libreria Editrice Vaticana. The image is from Giotto, early 14th century, Saint Francis giving his mantle to a poor man.

We take schools for granted. There are certainly neanderthals today who want to roll back education for everybody. That would be out of sync from the Church, at least our last four centuries of service. Let’s begin with the Piarists:

69. In the sixteenth century, Saint Joseph Calasanz, struck by the lack of education and training among the poor young people of Rome, established Europe’s first free public school in some rooms adjacent to the church of Santa Dorotea in Trastevere. This was the seed from which the Poor Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools, known as the Piarists, would later emerge and develop, though not without difficulty.

I wonder if Pope Leo is aware of this:

The pedagogical ideal of Calasanz of educating every child, his schools for the poor, his support of the heliocentric sciences of Galileo Galilei, the scandals and persecutions of some of his detractors, and his life of sanctity in the service of children and youth, carried with them the opposition of many among the governing classes in society and in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In 1642, as a result of an internal crisis in the Order and outside intrigues and pressures, Calasanz was briefly held and interrogated by the Inquisition. According to Karen Liebreich, problems were exacerbated by Father Stefano Cherubini, originally headmaster of the Piarist school in Naples who sexually abused the pupils in his care. Father Stefano made no secret about at least some of his transgressions, and Calasanz came to know of them. Unfortunately for Calasanz as administrator of the order, Cherubini was the son and the brother of powerful papal lawyers; no one wanted to offend the Cherubini family. Cherubini pointed out that if allegations of his abuse of his boys became public, actions would be taken to destroy the Piarists.

Naturally the 1% within and outside the Church would be bothered by the education of the poor, especially

Their goal was that of transmitting to young people “not only secular knowledge but also the wisdom of the Gospel, teaching them to recognize, in their personal lives and in history, the loving action of God the Creator and Redeemer.” [John Paul II, Address to the Participants in the General Chapter of the Poor Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools (Piarists) (5 July 1997)] In fact, we can consider this courageous priest as the “true founder of the modern Catholic school, aimed at the integral formation of people and open to all.” [Ibid.]

Another saint:

Inspired by the same sensitivity, Saint John Baptist de La Salle, realizing the injustice caused by the exclusion of the children of workers and ordinary people from the educational system of France at that time, founded the Brothers of the Christian Schools in the seventeenth century, with the ideal of offering them free education, solid formation, and a fraternal environment. De La Salle saw the classroom as a place for human development, but also for conversion. In his colleges, prayer, method, discipline and sharing were combined. Each child was considered a unique gift from God, and the act of teaching was a service to the Kingdom of God.

While there have been scandals within and outside of schools along the way, the overall vector is greatly positive. Despite free education being a thing of the past, mostly, many religious orders and lay people are laboring fruitfully and well in education.

This document is available in multiple languages, as usual, on the Vatican site here. It is also Copyright © Dicastery for Communication – Libreria Editrice Vaticana. The image is from Giotto, early 14th century, Saint Francis giving his mantle to a poor man.

Teaching people. Education is so often seen as one of the most essential ladders to lift a person into success, fruitfulness, a meaningful life. Knowledge is opportunity. It can be, at least.

Pope Leo is going to take us on a historical tour of great saints and their orders who were dedicated to passing knowledge to children, especially the poor. Paragraphs 69 through 71 will remind us of select educators, and 72 will wrap it up, reinforcing education as a duty, not just a good thing to do in our academic buildings.

The Church and the education of the poor

68. Addressing educators, Pope Francis recalled that education has always been one of the highest expressions of Christian charity: “Yours is a mission full of obstacles as well as joys… A mission of love, because you cannot teach without loving.” [Francis, Address following the visit to the tomb of Don Lorenzo Milani, (Barbiana, 20 June 2017)] In this sense, since ancient times, Christians have understood that knowledge liberates, gives dignity, and brings us closer to the truth. For the Church, teaching the poor was an act of justice and faith. Inspired by the example of the Master who taught people divine and human truths, she took on the mission of forming children and young people, especially the poorest, in truth and love. This mission took shape with the founding of congregations dedicated to education.

You may have memories of those religious orders. The Sisters of Saint Joseph were part of my history in my parish and in high school.

This document is available in multiple languages, as usual, on the Vatican site here. It is also Copyright © Dicastery for Communication – Libreria Editrice Vaticana. The image is from Giotto, early 14th century, Saint Francis giving his mantle to a poor man.

The modern West, and likely much more of the world under the thumb of oligarchy, is no less in need of a response to its excesses.

67. The mendicant orders were therefore a living response to exclusion and indifference. They did not expressly propose social reforms, but an individual and communal conversion to the logic of the Kingdom.

How many embittered people would see individual conversion as a likely way today?

For them, poverty was not a consequence of a scarcity of goods, but a free choice: to make themselves small in order to welcome the small. As Thomas of Celano said of Francis: “He showed that he loved the poor intensely… He often stripped himself naked to clothe the poor, whom he sought to resemble.” [Thomas of Celano, Vita Seconda, pars prima, cap. IV, 8: Anal Franc, 10, Florence 1941, 135]

Here’s something that had not occurred to me before: the beggar/mendicant as pilgrim, a traveler, but without the internet for booking lodging and meals:

Beggars became the symbol of a pilgrim, humble and fraternal Church, living among the poor not to proselytize but as an expression of their true identity. They teach us that the Church is a light when she strips herself of everything, and that holiness passes through a humble heart devoted to the least among us.

Quite often the Church is criticized for holding on to museum riches. Perhaps there is something to that. Many museums exist for the preservation of goods. no doubt the Church possesses expertise to curate art, history, and such. But so do other people.

This document is available in multiple languages, as usual, on the Vatican site here. It is also Copyright © Dicastery for Communication – Libreria Editrice Vaticana. The image is from Giotto, early 14th century, Saint Francis giving his mantle to a poor man.