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The Role of the Laity in Catholic Education

Presented at the University of St. Thomas in Houston on September 16, 2006.

Fr. Michael Sweeney, OP

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury:

I apologize for the somewhat unorthodox manner of addressing you, but the motto of the Dominican order is veritas, "truth", and no other greeting would so well express the truth of this event.  It is a truth communicated in our very gesture: I stand before you in order to argue a case; you are seated before me to judge it.  This particular truth is, in fact, foundational to the whole enterprise that is education: what the teacher seeks is not merely that his or her students will learn a subject matter, whatever the subject might be; rather, education is complete when the student can habitually judge the truth or falsity of propositions within the discipline.

Teaching seeks judgment.  This is true, in part, because education as we now conceive it is wholly an invention of the Catholic Church.  The universities grew out of the cathedral schools of medieval Europe; many of them were founded by my own Order.  High schools were largely the invention of the Jesuits, and the grade school we owe to the genius of St. John Baptist de la Salle.  In this regard, it is almost certainly misleading to speak of “Catholic education” if, by this terminology, we imply that “Catholic” is a subset of a wider (secular or non-sectarian?) enterprise that is education.  We should, instead, speak of education, and then of “non-Catholic education”, by which we assert that education is thoroughly Catholic in its source and ends, but that it has been diluted over the centuries into an enterprise that is no longer fully Catholic.

The purpose of education as an initiative of the Church is not, and has never been, indoctrination; the purpose of education has been to raise up men and women who are capable of taking up the divine vocation that each has received:

True education must start from the truth about man, the affirmation of his dignity and transcendent vocation. Looking at every young person in this anthropological perspective means seeking to help him develop the best of himself so that in exercising all his skills he may carry out whatever God calls him to do (John Paul II, To The Participants In The Symposium On Catholic Education, 3 July 2004).

In other words, our young men and women must be confident in their own dignity and possibilities, and capable of judging the truth about the human person and the world and culture that we inhabit, and so be ready to carry out whatever God calls them to do.  (Here we see immediately the limitations of an education that is not Catholic; it is frustrated in its purpose.)

In what sense is this educational enterprise a work of the laity?  My topic is to speak, after all, of the role of the laity in Catholic education.  We often hear that the principal justification for lay participation in Catholic education is that we now experience a shortage of priests and religious in the Church, so that the laity must take up the slack.  Such an assertion implies that Catholic education is properly the work of the ordained or of religious.  It also implies ­–and here I invite us to remember our commitment to the truth– that the lay teacher is essentially an inadequate priest or a religious manqué.

I wish to argue, on the contrary, that there is a dimension to Catholic education that is essentially and properly the work of the laity, in the undertaking of which a priest or a religious might be said to be an inadequate layperson. 

If the end of education is the ability to carry out whatever God calls us to do, then we must ask the question, what is it that God calls us to do?  In the light of the Church's magisterium, particularly articulated at the second Vatican Council, we must answer: God calls us to claim our place as his sons and daughters through our worship and through our intervention in the affairs of mankind.  We are called to heal and transform human culture [1] and to restore to creation its original dignity and purpose. [2]   We are to be able to "read the signs of the times" [3] and to judge all things in the light of the Gospel [4] .

What is it, then, to read the signs of the times?  It is to be capable of a judgment that applies the truth that God has revealed in Christ to the practical circumstances of life in this age.  This is no mean task.  The great cultural historian, Christopher Dawson, articulated it well: [5]

... We have no right to expect that Christian principles will work in practice in the simple way that a political system may work.  The Christian order is a supernatural order.  It has its own principles and its own laws which are not those of the visible world and which may often seemed to contradict them.

We see the whole thing manifested clearly and perfectly once and once only, that is in the life of Jesus, which is the pattern of the Christian life and the model of Christian action.  The life of Jesus is profoundly historical; it is the culminating point of thousands of years of living historical tradition.  It is the fulfillment of a historical purpose, towards which priests and prophets and even politicians had worked, and in which the hope of a nation and a race was embodied.  Yet, from the worldly point of view, from the standpoint of a contemporary secular historian, it was not only unimportant, but actually invisible (my emphasis).

Let us pause for a moment to consider what we have just heard: the most significant event in the history of mankind, an event which would, in the end, change decisively and for ever all of human history "... was not only unimportant but actually invisible" to all but a handful of Jesus’ contemporaries.  I submit for your consideration and judgment the truth that the whole of the supernatural order remains invisible to contemporary secular historians of every age.  In fact, the work of the Christian, which must be renewed in every age, is to declare and witness to the revelation of God in Christ, through the Holy Spirit, precisely because that revelation, apart from the work of the Church, is otherwise invisible.

To understand this assertion more deeply, let us again have recourse to Christopher Dawson: [6]

to the ordinary educated man looking out on the world in A.D. 33, the execution of Sejanus must have appeared much more important than the crucifixion of Jesus, and the attempts of the government to solve the economic crisis by a policy of free credit to producers must have seemed far more promising than the doings of the obscure group of Jewish fanatics in an upper chamber at Jerusalem.  Nevertheless there is no doubt today which was the most important and which availed most to alter the lot of humanity.  All that Roman world with its power and wealth and culture and corruption sank into blood and ruin –the flood came and destroyed them all– but the other world, the world of apostles and martyrs, the inheritance of the poor, survived the downfall of ancient civilization and became the spiritual foundation of a new order.

Christianity literally called the new world into existence to address the balance of the old.  It did not attempt to reform the world, in the sense of the social idealist.  It did not start an agitation for the abolition of slavery, or for peace with Parthia.  It did not support the claims of the Jews to national self-determination, or the Stoic propaganda for an ideal world state.  It left Caesar on his throne and Pilot and Gallio on their judgment seats and went its own way to the new world.

The Christian solution was a fundamentally different one from that of social idealism.  And this was not simply due to the fact that the world of the first century A.D. was not yet ripe for idealism.  On the contrary, it had to meet the rivalry of the social millennialism of the Jews, which was more intense, because it was more genuinely religious, than the social millenarianism of modern socialism; and on the other hand it had to meet the humanitarian idealism of Hellenism, which was even more rational and even more humane than any form of modern idealism.  Christianity refused each of these alternatives; it offered, instead the answer of the cross – to the Jews a scandal and to the Greeks foolishness, just as today it is a scandal to the secular reformer and foolishness to the rational idealist.  In the life of Christ the power of the world –the "torrent of human custom"– at last met with another power which it could neither overcome nor circumvent, –the irresistible power met the immovable obstacle, and the result was the tragedy of the cross, a tragedy which seemed at first sight to manifest the triumph of the forces of evil and the victory of the flesh over the spirit, but which was in reality the turning point in the history of humanity and the starting point of a new order.

The decisive difference about Christianity was, Dawson insists, a completely new openness to God and the spiritual world, whereas [7]

... the age or culture that is thoroughly non-Christian is closed to God and prides itself on its own progress to perfection.

It is necessary that Christians should remember that it is not the business of the church to do the same thing as the state –to build the Kingdom like the other kingdoms of men only better; nor to create a reign of earthly peace and justice.  The Church exists to be the light of the world, and when it fulfills its function, the world is transformed in spite of all of the obstacles that human powers place in the way.  A secularist culture can only exist, so to speak, in the dark.  It is a prison in which the human spirit confines itself when it is shut out of the wider world of reality.  But as soon as the light comes, all the elaborate mechanism that has been constructed for living in the dark becomes useless.  The recovery of spiritual vision gives man back his spiritual freedom.  And hence the freedom of the Church is in the faith of the Church and the freedom of man is in the knowledge of God.

But how is the Church to be the light of the world?  How is the hidden intention of God to be made visible in a secular age such as ours?  How can we open men and women to the spiritual vision that restores us to our spiritual freedom?  This is a task that cannot be accomplished except through the laity of the Church.

When Dawson speaks of the invisibility to secular society of the realm of the Church, he respects a principle that the Church has long insisted upon: that we must distinguish between the temporal order and what St. Paul calls the “plan of God revealed in Christ.”  No Catholic can possibly be a fundamentalist if by “fundamentalism” we mean the immediate application of the Gospel to the world of secular affairs.  The secular, or temporal order, the realm of the things that belong to time, are properly distinct from the supernatural order.  It was in order to speak to this distinction that the Church first proposed the idea of the secular; the very notion of the secular is a Catholic idea.

At the Second Vatican Council and in subsequent magisterial documents, most especially Christifideles Laici, the Church entrusts to lay men and women principal responsibility for the redemption and renewal of human society and culture.  In other words, lay men and women might properly be understood to be secular apostles.  But what, more precisely, is the secular? 

Some things belong to God alone; we ourselves do not belong to the world, Jesus instructs us, but to God: “I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one.  They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world” (John, 17: 16-17).   Let us notice, parenthetically, that our freedom in a very practical way has its foundation in this assertion of our Lord.  If we belong to God alone, then we belong to no one else, unless by the free gift of ourselves to another.  Our worship, similarly, belongs to God alone; in our freedom, we are forbidden to subordinate ourselves to any created thing.  But there are very many things that are not ordered to God directly, but rather to the human person.  These are the things that are secular.

In the book of Genesis we learn that God has placed the world and all of its initiatives into the governance of man and woman.  Hence, the arts and sciences, the political order, economics, business, commerce, education, health and welfare, are all directly for the sake of man and woman and are ordered to them.  These endeavors have their own proper autonomy and are governed by their own principles. [8]   For this reason, the revelation of God in Christ cannot be directly communicated by means of them.  So, for example, there is no such thing as Christian mathematics or Christian physics, any more than there is Christian football or Christian golf (golf, of course, is for some a religion in its own right).  Again, should I get a flat tire on the way to the airport I will not conclude that God does not intend that I should catch my plane; I will instead conclude that I ought to have checked my tires.  The proclamation of the Gospel does not directly affect the secular order.  Rather, the revelation of God in Christ remains, in a very real sense, hidden from it. 

The Gospel, instead, is addressed to persons, and it is through persons of faith that the Gospel is a leaven in the world.  God is not indifferent to human work and to human culture; the secular is not to be confused with the "profane" which would stand in some sort of opposition to the "sacred".  Instead, the whole realm of the secular is sacred precisely because it serves man and woman, who are created in the image and likeness of God.  It is in the vocation itself of the human person –the divine call that God addresses to each man and woman– that the world of human dignity and of culture is redeemed.

The Catholic faith, in other words, enables us to judge the value and purpose of secular activities and to see the way in which they are ordered to the good of humanity.  But to make such a judgment it is necessary that we are able both to grasp the principles that belong to secular pursuits and to receive what Christ has revealed concerning our relationship to God and to each other.  And this is very precisely the task of the lay person in the Catholic Church.

Our students must, therefore, be possessed of a double expertise: they must become expert in the secular activity to which God may call them, and they must also become experts in humanity, in the happy phrase of Pope Paul VI.  The lay person must be a bridge, to borrow from the image of St. Catherine of Siena, between the world of secular affairs and the revelation given to us in Christ.  While there is no such thing as Christian medicine, there is such a thing as a Christian doctor.  He or she will master the medical art and will become all the more creative in its exercise by recognizing in it a means to restoring the dignity that God intends for each human person.

The lay person lives in the world and acts for the sake of the world in the light of the vocation –the divine call– that God has placed in his or her heart.  Therefore the first thing that our young people must learn is that they have a sacred obligation not to accept the world as they have found it.  This was, again and again, the message of Pope John Paul II to the youth of the world. [9]   Along with the obligation not to accept the world as they have found it, the holy father insisted that there is a corresponding right: our young people have the right to be exempted from present responsibility for the world in order that they may have the leisure to discern the particular vocation that God has conferred upon each.  They must discern their own “plan of life” according to which they will order the world that they have inherited.  That obligation and that right are at the center of the educational enterprise that is Catholic.

Only the lay person can teach our youth the freedom that is theirs in the world and the secular competence that will be the expression of their freedom.  The priest or the religious can –and must– communicate the integrity of the revelation by means of their word and example.  But in order to do this, they must be exempted from a direct involvement in secular affairs; their governance is not directed to secular affairs.  The lay person, on the other hand, directly exercises a solicitude for the things of the world, and becomes expert in ordering them. 

Our students must be offered the examples of lay men and women who, directly inspired by the faith, have been instrumental in renewing the temporal order.  They should study the history of Western institutions and be able to discern the faith that inspired them – from the invention of Parliament, of the hospitals, universities, guilds and corporations of the Middle Ages, to  the cooperative movement and Solidarity movement in the 20th century.

There are impediments, certainly, that must be overcome if our young people are to receive a truly Catholic education.  These, too, are best addressed by lay men and women, in collaboration with the priests and religious of the Church:

The culture in which we live is not Catholic; it is born of the enlightenment and of the Protestant reformation.  What characterizes our culture is, accordingly, an overemphasis upon the individual; even faith itself is presented as the choice of an individual to follow Christ.  That we are called as a people –and that our personal call is only communicated to us through others– is hardly grasped at all.  We remember Saint Paul: “You are the body of Christ, and individually members of it.”  Our youth, therefore, must be taught their place among God’s people, and that their talents and gifts –indeed their very freedom– will be realized only in communion with the whole People of God.  They must be taught that the things that we hold in common have greater dignity than the things that pertain to us individually.  We are not alone in the world; we do not create our own possibilities, but we discern our gifts and our call in communion with the whole Church, in intimate relationship with others.

Along with an excessive emphasis upon the individual, the culture in which we live has lost confidence in the very notion of community, to the degree that it is difficult even to speak of a “common good.”  The sign of this is the emphasis upon tolerance, which has come to be regarded as the primary –perhaps the only– public virtue.  Tolerance is not a virtue at all; it is a political expedient, invoked when real relationship with others has been despaired of.  Tolerance, as we well know, has no place in relationship with others that is personal.  One does not look with longing into the eyes of one’s beloved and declare, with quivering voice, “I tolerate you.”  (If one does, one likely deserves what follows next.)  We do not tolerate those whom we love.  Our students must be taught to hold fast to the hope that, in Christ, we have access to every man and woman, and that we need not settle for a world in which public discourse requires us to relinquish all conversation that is personal.  “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age” [10] will never be able to be spoken unless we can restore to the culture a political conversation that is grounded in a personal encounter with others in community.

More than this, we must communicate a realism about the world.  Ever since the Enlightenment the culture has assumed the natural perfectibility of the world.  Yet we know that the world will never finally satisfy the desire that has been placed in our hearts, unless we are able to receive it as a sign and promise of what is to come.  We must, in other words, communicate a hope to our students: a confidence that, called by God, they are able to extend to the world Christ’s own redemption in the power of the Holy Spirit, but also the realization that the world –even a world redeemed– was never meant to satisfy us.  Our appetite is for God.  The measure of our happiness will never be found solely in our secular accomplishment, but much more in the relationships that we build as, together, we embark on the work of Christ.  Here I am reminded of the wonderful insight of Jacques Maritain, a lay Catholic teacher whom the whole Church would do well to heed:

At my age, one is not afraid of saying all one thinks.  Looking back on the past, one thing stands out …clearly about our life...  It is that the work naïvely undertaken by us consisted in reality (like all work which tries to open the world of profane culture, of art, of poetry and philosophy, to the energies of the Christian ferment) in attacking the devil on his own territory.  It was a matter of dislodging from their positions those whom St. Paul calls the powers and principalities and against whom he tells us the Christian has to fight more than against flesh and blood.

Conflicts of this kind can only be fought in raids carried out at full speed.  And the territory gained is not gained for long.  For where the prince of this world has his kingdom, the Christian cannot establish his dwelling as if on definitely conquered soil.  On such a domain, what he should hope to see, at certain particularly propitious moments in the course of history, is the flaring up of a kind of cultural blaze; what matters is less the result that can be expected of the blaze than the work of the flame itself while the blaze lasts.

I add that the order of the means corresponds to the order of the ends.  Every founder, whether of a religious order or of a lay institution, dreams of founding for eternity.  But the Holy Spirit is not at work only in the durable institutions which go on for centuries, he is also at work in ventures which vanish overnight and must always be started afresh.  Doubtless one has founded nothing, one sees everything go up in smoke.  But one’s pains are repaid by all that is best in this world, the marvel of those friendships which God induces and the pure loyalties he inspires, which are like a mirror of the gratuitousness and generosity of his love. [11]

With the call of the Second Vatican Council for a new evangelization, and with the concomitant assertion of the indispensable role of the laity in that task, a new requirement has been placed upon Catholic educators: our schools will be the venue in which the Catholic faith is brought to bear on contemporary culture.  Conceived in the light of this requirement, education is truly a lay enterprise.  Even education in the faith is first the responsibility of parents –that is, of lay men and women; we priests and religious may assist them, but cannot fully take their place. [12]   Our role is a supportive one and, in that spirit, I can pledge to do all in my power to assist you in your work, and I can express the hope that you might find consoling the thought that we are right behind you!

--Michael Sweeney, O.P.

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