All schools, Catholic and otherwise, are future-oriented institutions. They prepare their students for their next steps in life, and must do so by a specific, non-negotiable deadline: the students’ date of graduation. In our utilitarian age, many think schools exist to prepare students to work in the world, to be “productive citizens” who pay their taxes and obey the laws.
These things are not unimportant, but in the classical view of education, they are not education’s summum bonum, the highest good. Rather, the task of a school is to help students grow in wisdom and virtue, through which they become not producers in the economy, but morally upright people. And the primary means of developing these students is through immersion in the liberal arts.
In other words, the “product” of a good education is not a “good job,” but a “good person” who is an end in himself or herself.
Catholic education has a deeper purpose that takes wisdom and virtue to their highest possible fulfillment: union with God. Wisdom is a gift of the Holy Spirit, given at baptism, fortified at confirmation, and cultivated on the human level through study. Virtue helps a person choose the good, and, thereby, to become good. In living a wise and virtuous life, the person journeys toward God, who is both the source and the goal of his life.
For schools to meet these goals, they must also be fundamentally rooted in the past—backward looking, so to speak. First, they need a source from which they obtain their reason for being. For Catholic schools, that source is Jesus Christ Himself as taught through the ages by His holy Catholic Church. Second, schools need a particular focus to express the universal truth of Christ in a unique way. For many, that focus comes from a religious order’s charism. Were a school to cease looking to its past for its inspiration and its plan for the present, it will become unable to prepare students for the future.
There is a third feature of Catholic schools’ past that is essential to their present and future, one that we call to mind in the month of November as we pray for the faithfully departed: the deceased students, alumni, and teachers who helped shape the “end product”—the students—into who they are today. Few, if any, impacted every student or teacher or parent, but each made some contribution to the lives of at least one other person, if not more, in their time.
All schools contain detailed records of their pasts in the ultimate backward looking medium: the class yearbook, in which time stands still in contemplating the past experiences of a particular graduating class. But for Catholics, we have more than memories of those who have gone before us. Those departed students, alumni, and teachers from years earlier, by virtue of their baptism, are joined to us in the present moment in the communion of saints.
As Joseph Ratzinger wrote in Introduction to Christianity, “the communion of saints…extends beyond the frontier of death; it binds together all those who have received the one Spirit and his one, life-giving power.”
Hence, the faithful departed are not confined to the pages of the yearbook. They become present to us every time schools gather to celebrate the Eucharist as a community. We, of course, do not see them or feel them. But by the promise of our Lord Himself, we know they are present, for all the baptized—past and present—are united together in His body.
And what is the Eucharist? It is the body of Christ. Hence Ratzinger wrote, decades later as Pope Benedict XVI, “Celebrating the memorial of our salvation strengthens our hope…in the possibility of meeting once again, face to face, those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith” (Sacramentum Caritatis 32). In the Eucharist, we have Christ, and in Christ we have one another.
In November, Catholic schools celebrate Masses for All Saints and Thanksgiving Day. They should also offer a requiem Mass for all the departed students, alumni, and teachers. Through this Mass, current students can learn natural and supernatural lessons. Of the former, in an individualistic age obsessed with the present, they will see that they are members of a community greater than themselves, that the past and our departed elders are worthy of our respect, that they themselves can contribute to their school’s life and traditions for years to come.
Of the supernatural, students learn the rarely taught reality of the communion of saints, as well as the reality of Purgatory, and how our prayers can help the poor souls, who become real when understood as students who sat in the same desks as the current ones sit in. In this, today’s students realize that they have a concrete role to play in the life of the Church, and that the ability of others to enter Heaven depends on them. Benedict XVI perfectly expressed this mystery in Spe Salvi:
The belief that love can reach into the afterlife, that reciprocal giving and receiving is possible, in which our affection for one another continues beyond the limits of death—this has been a fundamental conviction of Christianity throughout the ages and it remains a source of comfort today. (48)
How will students learn all this? Not merely through a homily, but through preparation and visuals. They can write down the names of deceased loved ones for whom they wish to pray at Mass, and these names can be placed near the altar. Open yearbooks flanked by lighted candles can be situated before the entrance to the chapel or oratory. The priest can wear black vestments, which would be unknown to the students; that curiosity alone can spike children’s interest in the Mass as never before and open them in a new way to the mysteries being celebrated.
All this is possible because of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist, for in Him past, present, and future converge, especially at the Mass. Benedict XVI summarized this reality beautifully: “For us, the eucharistic banquet is a real foretaste of the final banquet foretold by the prophets and described in the New Testament as ‘the marriage-feast of the Lamb,’ to be celebrated in the joy of the communion of saints” (Sacramentum Caritatis 31).
And there is no better place to make this present to the young today than at a Catholic school, which is itself a cohort in the great army of Jesus Christ that is the communion of saints.
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Another home run by Mr Bonagura. It is consoling to realize that he is one of hundreds of young Catholic educators leading a true renewal of Catholic education.
Interestingly, one of the parents at our school said their child should not be pulled out of class to serve a funeral mass for one of the parishioners. Thought it would put them behind the ones who were still in class. Parent apparently did not connect that life and death are part of the process and education, not to mention that the parish pays a good portion of the school’s expenses.
In seventh and eighth grade we always got pulled from class to serve funeral Masses. It was a rotated duty so you might get 2or3 a year. It was sobering duty for a youth to witness the devotion and sorrows of a requiem Mass. The tears of family members would leaven the careless joys of youthful lads.
One of our duties would be to ring the bell in “toll” mode when the casket was being processed to the front of the church; then, when the procession headed out it was full (joyful) peal mode, I guess you’d say.
After the trip to the cemetery, some very good luncheons the Council of Catholic women put on were sometimes one of our “perks.”
If you don’t want your kids to be Catholic, then send them to a Catholic school.
Vat II destroyed the Catholic school system staffed by nuns who devoted their lives to the children of God.
The bishops are spending countless millions on sex abuse cases while Catholic schools have morphed into elitist (but discounted) private schools for the well-to-do many of whom are not Catholic.
Some years ago information arose that in Wichita Kansas and Lincoln Nebraska some real bishops had made Catholic school education an affordable reality for real Catholic families.
On this age of Modernist ascension one of the greatest ecclesial failings of the Church is the abandonment of her children.
“Feed My lambs” He said. But who hears Him?
It is too bad, in many ways, to say the least. Our school was staffed by Dominicans working for almost nothing. They would sometimes call some of the close parishioners who were farmers for some help with food.
A close relative of mine is either atheist or prob agnostic, but he will resolutely defend the Catholic school system as a model that should be used by the public schools, at least as how it used to be.