1. Catholic Education Offers All Of Us Hope.
Catholic education gives the Church and the world hope for the future and into eternity. It offers us hope that there will be a Church in future generations to announce the Good News of Jesus Christ. It gives us hope that there will be an American citizenry in the future who knows how to surrender to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s but also to God the things that are God’s. It gives us hope that there will be doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, business leaders, government leaders and working-class people who are using their God-given talents to serve the King of Kings as well as their brothers and sisters.
2. Catholic Education Forms Students In Moral Virtue.
All agreeable people know there are repercussion in life. Sadly, many people today either do not realize this or want to deny this for subsequent motives.
Nonetheless, a fact is a fact.
One of the repercussion of living in our world today — a world that denies the existence of unrestricted truth and denies (at least in practice) the inherent dignity of every human person — is that we no longer can agree upon what the good life looks like. And, thus, we live in a broken culture where violence, hatred, lying, cheating, etc., are all regular behaviours.
This is yet another motive why I am grateful to be pastor of a Catholic school, a place where we can teach our students about the Beatitudes, about the Ten Commandments and about the cardinal and theological virtues; where conversations about how to improve generosity, honesty, faithfulness, magnanimity, respect, reverence, justice and love are regular behaviours!
3. Catholic Education Instills In Students The Belief That Truth Exists And Is Understood.
As Pope Benedict XVI so often said, our world today is ruled by a “dictatorship of relativism.” We live in a culture and a time that says: There are no faultless, just many opinions.
It was this destructive philosophy that my classmates and I learned growing up, because even if it was never explained clearly, it was implicitly behind every lesson we learned outside of math and science. And it is this “doctrine” that has caused so many challenges in the lives of my peers: drug use, alcoholism, infidelity, pregnancy outside marriage, addiction, etc.
A Catholic school is a place where we can teach our young students that truth exists (you may recall Jesus saying, “I am the way and the truth and the life” in John’s Gospel), that truth has a name — Jesus Christ — and that in seeking, knowing and living the truth they will find the freedom to become happy, holy and wholly themselves.
