Restoring what’s missing in Catholic education

“I sent my children to Catholic school from kindergarten through college, and now they don’t practice the faith.”

It’s painful as an educator to hear these frequent reports from frustrated parents, yet unsurprising when, for decades, we stopped making any serious attempt to pass on the faith. The publishing of The Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1992 marked a turning point, inspiring a new generation of textbooks and faith-filled religious educators. Sadly, however, the drift away from the Church has continued. Something still isn’t clicking.

Pope Benedict XVI identified what we’ve been missing during an address to educators at the Catholic University of America in 2008.

“While we have sought diligently to engage the intellect of our young, perhaps we have neglected the will,” he told those gathered.

It’s not simply enough to give young people information about the faith, no matter how good it may be, without helping them to respond to it and live it out. Among many other influences, faith stands as one more choice to sort out within our individualistic sense of freedom. Pope Benedict urged us to prioritize helping students to encounter Christ and live in relationship with him:

First and foremost, every Catholic educational institution is a place to encounter the living God who in Jesus Christ reveals his transforming love and truth (cf. Spe Salvi, 4). This relationship elicits a desire to grow in the knowledge and understanding of Christ and his teaching. In this way, those who meet him are drawn by the very power of the Gospel to lead a new life characterized by all that is beautiful, good and true; a life of Christian witness nurtured and strengthened within the community of our Lord’s disciples, the Church.

Engaging the will means inviting young people to choose a relationship with Christ and to commit to life in communion with him within his Church.

To thrive, the Christian life requires support, found both in relationships and concrete habits that shape and express faith. The historian, Robert Lewis Wilken, therefore, has argued that “nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin” (“The Church as Culture”). By culture, he meant “the ‘total harvest of thinking and feeling,’ to use T. S. Eliot’s phrase—the pattern of inherited meanings and sensibilities encoded in rituals, law, language, practices and stories that can order, inspire and guide the behavior, thoughts and affections of a Christian people.”

It might seem exaggerated to put that much stock in culture, but it boils down to “live it or lose it.” To follow Pope Benedict’s insight about engaging free will, we need more than isolated choices to sustain faith. We require robust communal life and compelling means to express and sustain the decision to follow Christ.

We generally conceive of education as a process of receiving information and skills to live a successful life in society. More fundamentally, however, it is a process of initiation into a way of thinking and living that includes information, skills, and much more. It entails more than schooling, for education imparts a sense of identity, belonging, and purpose.

Understood in this broader sense, it should be easier to understand why education, Catholic schools included, often meets frustration. We are facing a general breakdown of education because we are not initiating young people into a compelling communal vision and mission, leaving them to succumb to the influences of media and technology. Suffering from existential confusion, we’re unsure of who we are and lack the support to rise above these challenges.

The current school model is insufficient to initiate young people into the Christian life. Without a broader, communal approach to formation, mere academic instruction falls short. The Church actually developed her own educational approach in the ancient world through the baptismal catechumenate, a process of formation that generally encompassed three years. It entailed personal formation through the role of the sponsor, focused on conversion of mind and heart, and integrated converts into communal life. It involved instruction and much more, serving as an apprenticeship for life with Christ at the center. Its pedagogy follows God’s own teaching in the Bible as a gradual, personal, communal, transformational, and embodied process of learning.

For these reasons, the Church has proposed the baptismal catechumenate as the model of all catechesis for an effective means of handing on the faith.

Petroc Willey has recently explored the Catechetical School of Alexandria, the greatest center of Christian teaching in the early Church, in his book Light from Alexandria: Recovering a Vision of Christian Paideia for Education and Formation (Angelico, 2025). The catechetical school contained some of the greatest luminaries of the day, such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Didymus the Blind, who served as lead teachers, and St. Athanasius, who studied there. The “central purpose of the school [was] to teach the core Christian doctrines and the Christian way of life to those wishing to be received into the Church” (122).

More broadly, this “transmission of doctrine, of paideia, is best understood as the handing on of Christian culture, which includes the learning of all of the practices involved in Christian living and the expression of Christian life and belief in and through what one makes and how one acts” (134). The school integrated a robust teaching of the liberal arts and an effective process of personal formation within a hostile pagan culture.

Given the current challenges of Catholic education, it may seem odd to look to the Church’s original, ancient model of education. The catechumenate, however, appears to be structured to make up for what we lack: an engagement with the will and initiation into culture as a way of life. Some catechetical experts, such as Dr. Willey, have explored its significance for religious education, but it is time to examine it as a model for Catholic education as a whole.

If we take seriously the deep connection of the liberal arts, which teach us how to think, and Christian formation, ordered toward transformation in Christ, we may find that our formation will begin to take root, helping to form lifelong disciples.