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As we celebrate Catholic Schools Week, I offer profound gratitude and praise to Michael Lancaster and our diocesan Office of Schools staff, our pastors and principals, our teachers and school staff, our parents, benefactors, religious education directors and catechists, and ultimately the students who offer the best of themselves to create Catholic communities of learning and formation, so that our precious young people grow to know, love, and serve Jesus Christ as disciples of the Gospel and as practicing Catholics in love with the Lord.
This year especially, in light of the enormous challenges of COVID, I especially applaud our school and parish leaders who have had to plan, implement, adjust, sacrifice, and give the best they have, in order to continue the formation of our young people.
Combining in-person and virtual learning as needed and possible, our teachers and catechists have striven to keep teaching Christ to our students.
I applaud the generosity, flexibility, and commitment required of all in this enormous effort.
Importance of Catholic education
Perhaps these increased difficulties shine a needed spotlight on the absolute importance of Catholic education; everyone could have easily given up this year or at least have put in just a minimum of effort, given all of the roadblocks, but, in nobly rising to the occasion, the Catholic community has generously demonstrated the high priority we place on the formation of the next generation.
We want to pass the faith on to our beloved children and young people and are willing to spend our precious resources of time, talent, and treasure to do so, regardless of the obstacles.
We know that the Catholic faith is both “taught” and “caught.”
Through catechesis, we impart the intellectual, doctrinal, and creedal aspects of Catholicism, but we also want our children to learn to pray, to be moral people, to become holy, to fall in love with God.
The faith is fashioned in a Catholic culture, which in turn forms a Catholic identity deeply within us. This ideal of transformative catechesis begs the question: What constitutes a Catholic culture?
A Catholic ‘culture’
In response to that question, I ponder the experience of my own childhood.
I grew up in a quietly religious home. Sunday Mass was the center point of the week, preceded the night before by Saturday baths and shoe polishing.
We prayed before meals and offered the Rosary every night together after supper.
Crucifixes, holy water fonts, and religious pictures adorned the walls of our home, reminding us of God’s presence everywhere. I diligently read my Children’s Bible; the pictures were fantastic!
My parents formed us in the practice of the faith through the example of their own sacramental and prayer life, as well as the steady inculcation of virtue and charity within us.
The parish was the center of our family’s spiritual and social life.
My parents volunteered for various roles of service in the community; my father was an usher and a Holy Name Society member; my mother was in Christian Mothers and a catechist aide and their friends and acquaintances were all parishioners as well.
We went to the parish school, where the faith was reinforced by daily Mass and prayer, religion class, and even Catholic textbooks in subjects such as reading and history.
The faculty was a dynamic combination of Religious Sisters and lay people who themselves practiced the faith and were deeply committed to their mission of educating us in all aspects of our humanity.
This description of my childhood may seem like a narrative from a lost world, but it has served me well through the years, giving me a Catholic identity and world view, not in an oppressive or doctrinaire mode, but as the particular way of viewing everything through the lens of Jesus Christ.
Because of vast societal and ecclesial changes since the early 1970s, my experience may not be fully possible or applicable today, but the basics of a Catholic culture remain perennially the same.
The need for faithful families
To form our children as disciples of Jesus Christ, we need families who know and practice the faith at home, in the daily details of their living, praying, loving, working, and playing together.
How imperative to continue to form the parents in our parishes to grow in the knowledge and practice of the faith, to help them know and implement in their homes the basic building blocks of Catholic culture and identity, including the sacraments, the Scriptures, the practice of virtue, and the expression of Christian charity.
Our schools and religious education programs can only supplement and reinforce in our children their practice of the faith; they cannot substitute for it.
In other words, if parents send their sons and daughters to Catholic schools and catechetical programs, but do not go to Sunday Mass, pray at home, practice the virtues, and learn about the saints and the devotions of the Church, our young people will feel the disconnect.
Such a child could say, “My parents say religion is important, but nothing in my home really expresses the honesty of those words.”
We also must strive to make our schools and catechesis so effective and inspiring that even the children who do not receive much in the practice of the faith at home still encounter Jesus and come to know and love God.
The ongoing formation of our principals, teachers, and staff in the knowledge, practice, and pedagogy of the faith is essential in order to sustain and build a truly Catholic culture.
In this heroic effort, our children will come to know, live, feel, and sense the presence and love of God, poured out in Jesus, as the center of their very life.
Have a blessed Catholic Schools Week!