JULY-AUGUST 2022

The

“Instaurare omnia in Christo”

ngelus
T he V oice of T raditional C atholicism

Catholic Education
Dr. Matthew Childs: Grace Builds Upon Nature
Things Old and New by Robert Wyer
Patrick Murtha, The Loss of God in School
Educating for the Joy of God—Ann Marie Temple
Jonathan Wanner on the Lost Art of Poetic Knowledge

L etter from
the P ublisher
Dear Reader,

Fr. John Fullerton
District Superior of the
United States of America

Nearly a century ago, in his encyclical Divini Illius Magistri, Pope
Pius XI wrote: “In fact it must never be forgotten that the subject of
Christian education is man whole and entire, soul united to body
in unity of nature, with all his faculties natural and supernatural,
such as right reason and revelation show him to be[.]” How far we
have moved from this ideal in the contemporary world.
Education, which involves nothing less than the development
of the intellect, the acquisition of knowledge, and the formation
of character, has been reduced to a mundane means to an emaciated end. Cast in utilitarian terms, education today often means
collecting the requisite pieces of paper from a secondary school,
college and/or trade school, and perhaps a postgraduate program
to secure a particular line of employment. Outside of historically
religious educational institutions, little emphasis is placed on forging
a three-dimensional person: mind, body, and spirit. All that matters is to check off a list of courses intended to make an individual
a good cog in the machine, stripped of any higher purpose or the
authentic freedom that only comes through adherence to God’s law.
In this issue of The Angelus we present a number of articles that
explore how education has been corrupted in our day. And so as to
not present a purely gloomy picture of the state of education, you
will also find in these pages examples of healthy Catholic education,
the sort which the Society of Saint Pius X seeks to uphold in the
face of tremendous pressure to do otherwise. The work of restoring
authentic education, like the work of restoring Catholic Tradition,
is a formidable task, but one which can be fulfilled through diligent
effort and reliance on God’s grace.
We must not despair. We must not retreat from the field. Understanding the corruption of modern education is the first step toward
addressing these problems. It is my hope that the articles in this
issue will assist readers in this noble undertaking.
Fr. John Fullerton
Publisher

ON OUR COVER: The Country School, 1871, by Winslow Homer (1836–1910).
 Most images in this issue are taken from commons.wikimedia.org.

CONTENTS
Volume LXVI, Number 4

JULY - AUGUST 2022
Publisher
Fr. John Fullerton
Editor-in-Chief
Mr. James Vogel
Assistant Editor
Mr. Gabriel Sanchez
Associate Editor
Miss Esther Jermann

FEATURED:
2 FEATURED Grace Builds Upon Nature: The Case for Catholic Liberal Arts
Dr. Matthew Childs

9

T
 hings Old and New: Some Considerations on Parish Schools

Robert Wyer

CULTURE:
15 CONTEXT The Loss of God in School, the Loss of God in the Soul
Patrick Murtha

Marketing Director
Mr. Ben Bielinski

20

Executive Assistant
Annie Riccomini

27

Design and Layout
Mr. Simon Townshend
Mr. Victor Tan

30

Director of Operations
Mr. Brent Klaske

F EATURED

COMMENTARY

Dante’s Divine Comedy: Educating for the Joy of God

Ann Marie Temple
COMMENTARY

A Reflection on My Time at St. Mary’s College

Jane Spencer
LITERATURE

Love’s Atlantis: The Lost Art of Poetic Knowledge

Jonathan Wanner

34

A RT

The Corruption of Art Education in the Modern Era

Prof. David Clayton

37

H ISTORY

The Origins of Education in America

Fr. Daniel Muscha, SSPX

42

R EVIEW

God and Modern War: A Review of Phil Klay’s Missionaries

William Gonch

“To publish Catholic
journals and place them
in the hands of honest
men is not enough. It is
necessary to spread them
as far as possible that
they may be read by all,
and especially by those
whom Christian charity
demands we should tear
away from the poisonous
sources of evil literature.”
–Pope St. Pius X

FAITH:
46 TO THE COMMUNITY Providence and Silence
Dr. John Tardiff

50

S SPX PRIESTS

The Restoration of Catholic Civilization in SSPX Schools

Fr. Gerard Beck, SSPX

56

I NTERVIEW

How to Get a Solid Catholic Formation … in Paris!

Fr. François-Marie Chautard

61

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

The Priest and Catholic Education

Fr. John M. McFarland, SSPX

65

THE LAST WORD

Fr. David Sherry, SSPX

The Angelus (ISSN 10735003) is published bi-monthly under the patronage of St. Pius X and Mary, Queen of Angels. Publication office is located at
PO Box 217, St. Marys, KS 66536. PH (816) 753-3150; FAX (816) 753-3557.
Periodicals Postage Rates paid at Kansas City, MO. Manuscripts and letters to the editor are welcome and will be used at the discretion of the editors.
The authors of the articles presented here are solely responsible for their judgments and opinions. Postmaster sends address changes to the address above.
©2022 by Angelus Press. Official Publication of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X for the United States and Canada

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FEATURED

Grace Builds
Upon Nature
The Case for Catholic Liberal Arts
Dr. Matthew Childs

The sower went out to sow his seed. And as
he sowed, some fell by the way side, and it
was trodden down, and the fowls of the air
devoured it. And other some fell upon a rock:
and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered
away, because it had no moisture. And other
some fell among thorns, and the thorns growing up with it, choked it. And other some
fell upon good ground; and being sprung
up, yielded fruit a hundredfold. Saying these
things, he cried out: He that hath ears to hear,
let him hear. (Luke 8:5-8)

T

he principle that grace builds upon
nature has perhaps become an axiom
so familiar that we have lost the sense
of its urgent implications for education. When we speak to new teachers about
our profession, we often make reference to the
parable of the sower and the seed because our
essential job as teachers is to do what we can
to prepare the soil of our students’ intellects
so they can fully receive the seed of truth and
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bear intellectual and spiritual fruit. This parable and Christ’s own explanation of it vividly depict how grace builds upon nature. The
seed, “the word of God,” comes from the same
source and has the same capacity for life no
matter where it falls; the difference is in the
ground, the receiver. The truth is always the
truth, available for all, but only those who are
properly nurtured and disposed to do so will
fully receive and profit from it. The supernatural virtues are perfect, as the very life of God,
but they cannot act without being received and
they cannot flourish, as a soul matures, unless
they are grounded in the natural virtues. In
establishing the Church, the Word of God, the
good Seed, instructed her leaders to teach and
to sanctify; to educate or to lay the foundation
of natural virtue and “give the increase” by
administering the sacraments. This two-fold
mandate, “the great commission,” is confirmed
by Pius XI in his 1929 encyclical on education
Divini Illius Magistri: “education belongs pre-

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eminently to the Church” (para. 15), and “not
merely in regard to the religious instruction…
but in regard to every other branch of learning and every regulation in so far as religion
and morality are concerned” (para. 23)—which
is every branch of learning, as even progressive
educators prove by their own efforts to undermine the Church’s prerogative and pervert
every part of the educational process.
While formulating a plan for the expansion
of St. Mary’s College to a four-year program,
I read the book Catholic Higher Education in
Protestant America: The Jesuits and Harvard in the
Age of the University, by Kathleen A. Mahoney,
published in 2003. The “reformers” of higher education at the beginning of the twentieth
century proceeded along the very same lines
and presented many of the same arguments as
the proponents for aggiornamento—to get with
the times—within the Church several decades
later. The revolutionaries were attempting to
subvert the Church and academia—and thereby
culture at large—early in the twentieth century.
St. Pius X held them back in the Church, but
they won the battle for the soul of education,
paving the way for their eventual ascendancy in
the Church and in the world in the latter part
of the century. When Catholics chose modern
education over traditional education, naturally
the errors of modernism began to permeate the
“soil” of their children’s intellects. There are two
major points emphasized in Mahoney’s book:
Protestantism is the motivating force behind
the shift from traditional liberal arts colleges
to elective and specializing universities, and
the initial battle for education was lost not on
principle, but because Catholics were drawn
away from traditional colleges to the new, progressive universities. A closer look at the “Law
School controversy” featured in the book can
be read as a cautionary tale about abandoning
the centuries-old tradition of Catholic liberal
arts as well as a motivation to re-assess our attitudes toward the purpose and value of higher
education.
The controversy, which began as a protest by
Jesuit college administrators against discrimination in the admissions process of Harvard
Law School, revealed the agenda of progressives there. Mahoney summarizes the importance of the battle between the university and
the college approaches early in her book: “[c]
ulminating in 1900, the Law School controversy

proved a defining moment in American Catholic higher education… Americans had come
to understand the era in which they lived as
an age of modern progress, a powerful temporal construct making formidable claims on
both Christianity and higher education. Being
timely, modern, and up-to-date became cultural imperatives in many quarters and a driving
force in the university movement” (13). The
desire to get with the times is a normal human
social inclination. What is more important for
our understanding of the qualitative nature of
the educational reform is the deeper motivation,
the ideological driver, so it is critical to know
that “during the academic revolution, religion
helped reshape higher education, with liberal
Protestantism playing patron to the modern,
nonsectarian university” (8). In our times, educators shy away from religion—in its theological form, while pushing the new “religions” of
the day, such as critical race theory and gender ideology—but those promoting the university of elective-specialist approach at the dawn
of the twentieth century were very clear about
the motivating ideology behind their “reforms.”
Mahoney notes that the educational reformers “understood their work as furthering…
Christian goals by freeing higher education

Memorial Hall at Harvard University.
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from the tyranny of tradition and the vestiges of its medieval (read Catholic and European) past that bedeviled the colleges and limited
their effectiveness” (62). The essential conflict
brought into relief by the “Law School controversy” is that between modernism and traditionalism, liberalism and conservatism, Protestantism and Catholicism. On the university
side of the argument are all the characteristics
that always accompany the revolution and about
which the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century popes repeatedly warned: the call for
unbridled freedom, novelty, progressivism, subjectivism, autonomy, and the absolute need to
get with the times, the aggiornamento of Vatican
II and following. In his typically clear and concise way, Archbishop Lefebvre summarizes the
entire thought process in a single word: liberalism, which, in its ultimate manifestation seeks
the “adulterous union between the Church and
the principles of the Revolution” (xvi-xvii), the
confusion of and finally indifference to truth
and error.
Mahoney describes the enthusiasm with
which Americans welcomed the brave new
world of progressive education:
Reform and innovation swept through the
academy; traditional forms of education associated with the collegiate tradition suddenly
seemed out of date. Students flocked to the new
universities with their professional schools,
graduate programs, elective courses, looser
discipline, and vital student life. At the 1893
International Congress of Education at the Chicago World’s Fair, congress organizer Charles
G. Bonney announced unequivocally that the
“educational systems of the past have been
outgrown” (12).

This should sound very familiar to anyone aware of the calls for updating the Church
during Vatican II. Once the appetite for novelty
had been whetted and all the old ways rejected as outmoded, it wasn’t that hard to criticize Catholic liberal arts colleges since they
were committing the ultimate sin of the time:
“Modernity… created a new divide in an academic system already cleaved by the Reformation: the traditional and the modern… a potent
critique of Jesuit education developed: that it
was not modern. Jesuit education… was rooted
in the past and thus irrelevant to the wants of
the day in modern, Protestant America” (59).
The underpinning of the movement was, unsur4

The Angelus u July - August 2022

prisingly, “freedom,” and liberation from a very
specific source—the Catholic Church:
Like their fellow Protestants, the leaders of the
university movement defined Protestantism
as the religion of liberty; this was nothing less
than a bedrock conviction… Insofar as the
Reformation had freed Christians from the tyranny of Rome, the university men argued that
the new universities, as Protestant institutions,
were to be infused with and shaped by a full
measure of liberty not wholly realized in American colleges. “Above all,” Eliot proclaimed in
his inaugural [address as president of Harvard],
a university “must be free. The winnowing
breeze of freedom must blow through all its
chambers.” With nineteenth-century Americans increasingly convinced that they were
living in modern times and headed toward
a progressively better future, the winnowing breeze of freedom assumed a more pronounced temporal hue. Freedom in education
meant emancipation from the deleterious
constraints of an outmoded, irrelevant, past.
(82-83)

As Mahoney notes, this “winnowing breeze
of freedom blew through the curriculum, leaving the traditional, classical course in disarray
and the elective system in place” (85). That elective system demonstrates most clearly the immanential, modernist bent of the university curricular model. Not only were schools freed from
tradition, students themselves became their own
guides. “While the scientific revolution helped
create the curricular problem, Protestant-inspired liberty and the ‘doctrine of individualism,’ as Harper [president of the University of
Chicago] put it, helped produce one solution:
having students select their own courses” (85).
Eliot was very explicit about the motivating
principle behind the approach, confirming “[t]
he elective system was . . . ‘in the first place, an
outcome of the Protestant reformation’” (86).
The revolution always begins with the cry for
freedom, the non serviam or refusal to submit to
the constraints established by God and maintained by His Church and her educational dictates and institutions. In the end, the result is
also predictable, since the revolution always
devours its own. The modern university didn’t
stop at implementing the freedom of Protestantism, it ended up replacing religion altogether: “[w]hile Christians had historically argued
for the importance of the schoolhouse and the

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church, for the university men the schoolhouse
became the church. The ‘university has succeeded to the place once held by the cathedral
as the best embodiment of the uplifting forces
of the modern time,’ claimed Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler” (62).
On the other side of the controversy were
the Jesuits fighting for the rights and value of
their colleges as institutions serving within the
Church and passing down the wisdom, discerned and revealed, of the ages. As Mahoney
puts it, “as the Law School controversy evolved
into a public controversy the Jesuits found themselves on the defensive, forced to demonstrate
that traditional forms of education were indeed
relevant in modern America” (59). That defense
is invaluable for us because those early twentieth-century Catholic educators left us arguments for the significance of a liberal arts education as the necessary basis for any further
specialized study. Their arguments remain
valid to this day, and we would do well to listen this time as we make decisions about where
to send our children to school in an ever more
fragmented and morally corrupt culture. The

strongest, clearest sustained discussion of educational principles from the traditional or Catholic side of the argument came from Fr. Timothy Brosnahan in a response he wrote to the
president of Harvard University, President Eliot
and the Jesuit Colleges, which Mahoney includes
in its entirety as an appendix to her book. Brosnahan very adeptly demonstrates the injustice
of Harvard Law School’s admissions policies,
but more importantly explains why a liberal
arts education is far preferable to the elective
or “majors” system. Brosnahan argued that
“abandon[ing] the doctrine of unity in education… might produce experts… but could not
develop a man,” (269) lowering the standard of
education and the intrinsic value of a college
degree by providing “one-sided formation [and]
unfit men for University work” (267). This misguided approach to education is only exacerbated by the idea that the ones deciding what
to specialize in are the students themselves. Fr.
Brosnahan criticizes President Eliot’s elective
system strongly, saying that the Harvard president “banishes unity from college education
and bows down before individuality” (265). He
goes on to point out the absurdity of demanding
a teenager who, as he says, “will work, like electricity, along the line of least resistance” (267)
to “look out on the wide realm of learning, to
him unknown and untrodden, and to elect his
path” (265). One is led to ask “can the blind
lead the blind” (Lk. 6:39) or “how shall they
hear [or properly select or learn], without a
preacher” (Rom. 10:14)? The university men’s
approach to education that leaves out the foundations of truth, ethics, humanization can’t help
but produce what Richard Weaver, echoing
Brosnahan a half-century into the educational
reform experiment, called “deformed” because
it only “partially developed” (Weaver, 56) men
and women. Weaver’s sustained discussion of
faulty approaches to meaning in Ideas Have Consequences explains perfectly why the Jesuits and
all traditionalists in education insist upon a liberal arts grounding before any kind of specialization: without a moral context of good and
bad, right and wrong, without the “ought” of
the Tao as C.S. Lewis speaks of the natural law
in The Abolition of Man, we lose our capacity to
think and, therefore, to act rightly:
There is ground for declaring that modern
man has become a moral idiot… [m]ultiplying
instances show complacency in the presence
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of contradiction which denies the heritage of
Greece… [w]e are approaching a condition in
which we shall be amoral without the capacity
to perceive it and degraded without means to
measure our descent (Weaver, 10).

A moral idiot cannot choose the good
because he or she doesn’t know (or chooses not
to know) its definition. He or she is precisely the
“blind” person, one “who strain[s] out a gnat,
and swallow[s] a camel” (Mt. 23:24). The traditional liberal arts education the Jesuits were
fighting to retain provides the basis for choosing the good and avoiding the evil because it
defines them in accordance with the wisdom
of the ages. The danger of specialists without a
clear sense of right and wrong should be obvious
to anyone familiar with Frankenstein or, in our
times, anyone willing to admit the disastrous
consequences of putting a career bureaucrat
“specialist,” with obvious motives for power and
financial gain, in charge of guiding the global
strategic response to the recent pandemic. Surely, we would never be foolish enough to allow
a “partially formed man” or a “moral idiot” to
make such important decisions outside his area
of expertise! The essential positions about education highlighted by the controversy between
Harvard and the Jesuits are succinctly summed
up in an observation made by C. S. Lewis: “Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make
the pupil like and dislike what he ought. . . .the
difference between the old and the new education… [is] in a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men; the
new is merely propaganda” (Abolition, 26, 33).
We chose the new, and the disastrous fruits of
rejecting the Jesuits’ stance for the old surround
us on all sides.
The Jesuit defense of traditional education
was brilliant on the level of principles and
adequate to the task, but their arguments fell
on deaf ears. The bitter irony is that “Catholic collegians proved the Jesuits’ undoing… It
was at the very height of their troubles with
Harvard that the Jesuits discovered that most
Catholic students, seeking professional education, academic credentials, and social opportunities, had bypassed Catholic colleges in favor
of non-Catholic higher education” (Mahoney,
13). Surrounded by a dizzying array of scientific
advancements, enticed by material advantages, and concerned with social acceptance—we
may forget how ostracized Catholics were in
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our country at one time—many college-bound
Catholic students opted for secular universities. The purveyors of the university system
won, and we now have over a century of fruits
by which to know them. What do we see? It is
not possible to chronicle all the effects of the
educational revolution of the early twentieth
century, but the most obvious fruits are before
us every day. The moral idiocy that Richard
Weaver decried in 1948 is alarmingly evident
in every profession including science, medicine,
education, government, and finance. We are
told by specialists to mask ourselves and cower
at home in mortal fear of a virus, while infants
are legally murdered by medical professionals
every day. We defer to “the science” but the
scientists and doctors promoted by the government and media are unable (or unwilling) to
confirm basic biological facts, such as the difference between a boy and a girl. We profess
equal rights for women while allowing men to
compete in women’s sports. We promote people
to high judicial positions from which they will
make laws about human rights when they are
incapable of defining the most basic terms about
human beings. Is this not “complacency in the
presence of contradiction”? These are the fruits
of a century of education unhinged from truth.
On the more mundane level, there are plenty
of other indicators of problems in higher education. A post titled “37 Mind-Boggling College
Student Statistics” from July 2021 includes the
following data: 34% of college students in the
US have an anxiety disorder; 49.8% of college
students use birth control; almost 150,000 college students develop some kind of alcohol-related health problem every year; approximately
696,000 college students each year are assaulted
by another student who has been drinking (“37
Statistics”). Statistics such as these indicate that
modern universities are not contributing in a
positive way to the formation of the whole man
or woman. Not even the material outcomes are
all that impressive given the monetary outlay
and the utilitarian aims of contemporary higher education. According to statistics cited in a
2018 New York Times article about the “value”
of a college education, “25 percent of college
graduates now earn no more than does the
average high school graduate” (Shell). Other
studies have found “45% of 2,300 students at 24
colleges showed no significant improvement in
‘critical thinking, complex reasoning and writ-

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ing by the end of their sophomore years,’” and
“that over 75% of two-year college students and
50% of four-year college students were incapable of completing everyday tasks” (Williams).
As for the elective system, it is not promoting
efficiency in degree completion, given that 30%
of all undergraduates change their majors once
and 10% change them multiple times, which
explains, at least in part, why only 33% graduate in four years (“37 Statistics”). Just as Fr.
Brosnahan predicted, curricula have developed
to suit the whims of students who naturally proceed “along the lines of least resistance.” In his
Daily Wire article, Walter Williams finishes with
a list of courses students have elected in our
brave new education world: “What If Harry
Potter is Real?” “Lady Gaga and the Sociology
of Fame,” “Philosophy and Star Trek,” “Learning from YouTube,” “How to Watch Television,”
and “Oh, Look, a Chicken” (Williams). One
final statistic that 62% of institutions of higher education have sanctioned LGBTQ student
groups (“37 Statistics”) highlights precisely what
lies at the end of the road of radical self-determination and amoral specialized skill to which

we have been blown by the “winnowing wind
of freedom” of the kind St. Peter calls “a cloak
for malice” (I Pet. 2:16). Parents with the help
of medical professionals are literally making
Frankensteinian monstrosities of their own children—those they “chose” to be born—based upon
the child’s choice of “gender.” This is the elective system writ large and the specialist gone
mad. One can only imagine—though I suspect
most of us would prefer not to—the extraordinary skill it must require for a surgeon to fashion a boy from a girl and vice versa, but could
anyone other than a moral idiot consent to do
so? In this one phenomenon, allowed by God
in a dramatic attempt to open our eyes to the
fact we are on the wrong road, we see a singular manifestation, the reductio ad absurdum (or ad
monstrositatem) of a profoundly faulty educational approach and the “diabolically disoriented”
thinking and action it engenders—pun intended.
In the “Law School controversy” we find the
undeniable historical fact that higher education
as we know it is directly tied to Protestant liberalism: it is a rejection of traditionalism, not just
in thought or philosophy but also explicitly in
theology. The university men understood what
too many contemporary Catholics still either
don’t understand or refuse to acknowledge or
deem relevant enough to determine their educational choices: traditional liberal arts education
is tied directly to traditional Catholicism and
secular university education is an extension and
expansion of the Protestant revolt. In Pascendi
St. Pius X drew a direct line from Protestantism
to Modernism to atheism (para. 39); the educational revolution that rejected the liberal arts
college accelerated the cultural trend toward
that trajectory’s endpoint. The evidence is overwhelmingly and ubiquitously clear. Confronted
with the horrific fruits of a century of bad education, we ought to learn the lesson and listen
to the Jesuits this time. C.S. Lewis summarizes
the solution as well as he does the problem:
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be.
And if you have taken a wrong turning then to
go forward does not get you any nearer. If you
are on the wrong road progress means doing
an about-turn and walking back to the right
road; and in that case the man who turns back
soonest is the most progressive man… There
is nothing progressive about being pig-headed
and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if
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you look at the present state of the world it‘s
pretty plain that humanity has been making
some big mistake. We‘re on the wrong road.
And if that is so we must go back. Going back
is the quickest way on. (Mere Christianity, 28-29)

In the Church, “going back” means returning to the Faith as taught and practiced up until
the “new springtime” of Vatican II. In education, “going back” means returning to liberal
arts curricula which retain ties with our traditions, grounding students in truth as pursued
up until the dawn of the university age. That is
what we have done at St. Mary’s College from
the start and will continue to do, now more
comprehensively, in our expanded four-year
program. Many people who are well-informed
regarding the dangers of modernism to faith
fail to understand or to appreciate fully the fact
that without sound education that all-important faith is at risk. As Catholics, we understand
Pope Pius XI’s confirmation that “there can be
no true education which is not wholly directed to man’s last end… since God has revealed
Himself to us in the Person of His Only Begotten Son, who alone is ‘the way, the truth and
the life,’ there can be no ideally perfect education which is not Christian education” (Divini
para 7). Going back and finding the right path
toward developing virtue in our children means
rejecting the errors institutionalized in our educational system after the Law School controversy; rejecting, in particular, the materialist
utilitarian approach toward higher education
as merely the means to getting a job. Finding
the right school means more than searching out
a conservative liberal arts college or an engineering program somewhere; it means finding
a school tied to the Truth, truth in its fullness
and in its practice, which can form students who
have the intellectual and moral habits to judge
the “ought” of anything that follows. Archbishop Lefebvre saw the contemporary crisis and
its intensity more clearly than anyone else and
called precisely for a going back, a restoration
in all spheres, telling us “[w]e have to hold on.
We have to build, while the others are demolishing… our enterprises faithful to the social doctrine of the Church… a whole tissue of Christian social life…” (251). He saw the critical role
of education within that effort, directing in his
society’s statutes back in 1970 that “Schools
really free from any constraint so as to be able
to give a thoroughly Christian education to the
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young will be fostered and even founded by
members of the Society. From these schools will
come vocations and Christian homes,” for traditional Catholic education prepares the “good
ground” in which grace can flourish such that
“they who in a good and perfect heart, hearing the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit in
patience.”

Works Cited

“37 Mind-Boggling College Student Statistics.” 16 July 2021,
https://whattobecome.com/blog/college-student-statistics/.
Accessed 26 May 2022.
“Beginning College Students who Change Their Majors Within
3 Years of Enrollment.” Data Point, December 2017, https://
nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018434.pdf. Accessed 26 May 2022.
The Holy Bible, Douay Rheims Version. Bishop Richard Challoner, 1752. Reprinted, TAN Books and Publishers, Inc., 1971.
Lefebvre, Archbishop Marcel. They Have Uncrowned Him. The
Angelus Press, 1988.
Lewis. C.S. The Abolition of Man. Macmillan, 1955.
Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. HarperOne, 1952.
Mahoney, Kathleen A. Catholic Higher Education in Protestant
America: The Jesuits and Harvard in the Age of the University,
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Pius X, Pope. Pascendi Dominici Gregis: Encyclical of Pope Pius X
on the Doctrines of the Modernists. 1907.
Pius XI, Pope. Divini Illius Magistri: Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on
Christian Education. 1929.
Shell, Ellen Ruppel. “College may not be worth it anymore.”
The New York Times, 16 May 2018, https://www.nytimes.
com/2018/05/16/opinion/college-useful-cost-jobs.html.
Accessed 26 May 2022.
Weaver, Richard. Ideas Have Consequences. University of Chicago Press, 1948.
Williams, Walter E. “Fraud in Higher Education.” DailyWire.
com, 7 December 2019, https://www.dailywire.com/news/
williams-fraud-in-higher-education. Accessed 23 May 2022.
TITLE IMAGE: Seven Liberal Arts, Francesco Pesellino, c. 1450.

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Things Old
and New

Some Considerations on Parish Schools
Robert Wyer

M

ost of us could probably readily
agree on what we are against in
education, but consensus on what
we are for is another matter. Few
disagreements are more acrimonious than this
one; it is something akin to a family fight or
a lovers’ quarrel. Just about everyone considers himself an expert on education, perhaps
because most of us have spent so much of our
lives in school. And, to be sure, parents are
meant to be terribly invested in their children’s
well-being; the years devoted to their children’s
schooling occupy a considerable part of their
concern and cash. Any division about what
those schools for their kids ought to look like
stems from different ideas about what a school
is and what it is meant to do, and the answers
to these questions necessarily involve an accurate appreciation of the students we have and
the time in which we live. A school is, by definition, a place of perennial things, but how we
prudentially craft the Catholic school in our

day, given the realities involved, may represent
something that appears innovative, though it
replicates timeless elements. Here, we are concerned with the so-called “parish school,” one
that strives to welcome all (or the majority of)
children associated with a particular place.
Obviously, any school lives by certain principles, and these principles are worth some attention. Beyond these principles, the realties that
distinguish the parish school require a closer
look for our purposes. What remains, finally,
are practical considerations in the life of the
school that predominates in SSPX priories—how
we might do well to structure them to best serve
the children entrusted to our care and the families we seek to assist in the raising of their children in a challenging age.
One of the first principles of any school is the
presupposition that everyone ought to know certain things. These things are worth knowing for
their own sake, because they reflect (in greater or lesser measure) the goodness, truth, and
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beauty that is ultimately God Himself. Knowing these things makes us more of what we are:
creatures, body and soul, caught up to heaven
but rooted in the earth—the unique human place
between purely material creation and the spiritual world of the angels.
For I will behold thy heavens, the works of
thy fingers: the moon and the stars which thou
hast founded.
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
Or the son of man that thou visitest him?
Thou hast made him a little less than the
angels, thou hast crowned him with glory and
honour: and hast set him over the works of thy
hands. (Ps. 8)

Though some of these things learned might
prove useful, that is not the reason we learn
them.
One corollary—because we are human—is
that teachers are more important than the curriculum. Ultimately we learn from others who
know and teach us. Knowledge per se does not
exist in books; it must be known by a knower, exist in the mind of someone. That person,
much as the angels of the various hierarchies
do for each other, communicates to and enlightens others. When an author communicates by
means of written language, he is conveying what
is in his mind to another, and even then, it often
takes a teacher, like St. Philip for the Ethiopian,
to ask: “Thinkest thou that thou understandest what thou readest?” And the student echoes
the eunuch: “And how can I, unless some man
shew me?” (Acts 8) Teachers are the heart of the
school. If what Plato calls the divine spark is not
leaping to and fro in the minds of the faculty in
the conversation within that circle of friends, it
is unlikely it will be firing in the minds of the
students.
From this, it follows that much of educating
involves the cultivation of relationships. Plato
calls teaching “a species of friendship,” and
Garrigou-Lagrange says, echoing St. Thomas’
commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “the perfection of anything is that it become similar to
its cause ... thus, the perfection of the student
is that he become a master.” Or, as one master
put it:
The gratitude a student has towards his teacher,
according to St. Thomas, comes from the fact
that his learning is a “becoming”; the teacher
is the cause of a “similitude” of himself in his
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The SSPX Sisters’ active apostolate includes teaching in schools.

knowing, analogous to a father generating a
similitude of himself in his son.

Offspring, in the physical realm but also in
the intellectual and spiritual realm, is the fruit
of knowing. “And Adam knew his wife, and
she conceived.” Con-ception, the quickening of
ideas (concepts) in the mind of another, requires
the intimacy of knowing the other. The teacher
must love his students, and they return this love.
Ultimately, of course, it echoes and reflects the
knowing and loving that is the eternal life of
the Holy Trinity.
What happens in the classroom itself is not
enough then, partly because of the necessity of
forming these relationships, but there is more to
it. A great deal of the “stuff” of learning exists
outside of the school building. One could insist,
for instance, that without a prolonged exposure
to the natural world, beyond the classroom windows, much of what is attempted inside will not
bear lasting fruit. The cultivation and exercise
of the senses, imagination, and memory necessarily precede and accompany any intellectual
activity. The scholastic dictum nihil in intellectu
nisi prius in sensu (“there is nothing in the intellect unless it is not previously in the senses”) is
not reserved to describe the earliest stages of
childhood development.
Teachers must meet students where they
are. There is always something of returning to
a beginning or an earlier point in the teacher’s
own journey (because he can only give what
he has first received). The goal, the point the
teacher hopes the student reaches (even surpassing the teacher), is real, but so is the starting point. Again, this requires coming to know
the student. For Socrates, this involved conversation, asking questions, probing what the student knew but also countenancing dreams and
passions, even tolerating a certain youthful silli-

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ness. Humans are symphonic beings; they live
on many levels—physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Helping another achieve harmony among these aspects of his being means
knowing something of his story. Talking is how
we come to know another, and close friends
never exhaust this conversation.
Having been reminded of some principles
common to all schools worthy of the name, we
now turn our attention to the parish school. In
schools run by the Society of Saint Pius X in
the United States, most are attached to priories
but all at least to a chapel; in other words, families choose to locate in particular areas because
they want the Mass and desire a school to help
them give their children a Catholic education.
These places of learning represent the parish
school, which exists to serve all of its families.
Despite exceptions for students with special
needs beyond what these schools can provide,
they are meant to take all comers.
Here again, we should pause to consider certain realities that are part of this kind of school.
Two factors seem paramount: size and diversity
of students, and these two factors are related.
The larger the student body, the more likely
there will be a broader range of abilities among
its members. Typically, the parish schools do
not set admissions criteria based on academic performance or aptitude, though obviously
the expectation exists that students admitted
can handle the coursework demands. (Obviously some attrition occurs as the level of study
increases.) Other factors could be involved;
some schools may take boarding students, for
example. A variety of settings also exist, ranging from rural or small town to quite urban.
For the present consideration, however, we will
concentrate on size and student aptitude, which
relate to the question of academic curriculum.
We expect all students to learn certain things.
They should know the truths of the Faith, be
able to read and write, learn something of the
history of the world and the place of Christ and
His Church in it as its central event, be adept
at computation, and know some basic science
that helps to illuminate the world we live in. I
would argue that some familiarity with Latin is
crucial because it’s the language of the Church.
From there, one can add the significant subjects
of music and art. Then, too, physical education is important. The question is: how much
of each, especially of the core subjects, is the

right amount for particular students? Literature
can reach far and high, depending on the texts
selected. Math can venture beyond addition,
subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions into geometry, algebra, trigonometry, and
even into calculus. Natural history and physical
or earth science can quickly progress to biology,
chemistry, and physics.
We want to provide a rich, and even challenging, exposure to all students, taking them as
far as they can go, developing to the fullest the
minds God has given them, but we ought also
to remember that, while all students possess
intellects, not all are destined to become intellectuals. In the history of the world, a relatively
small number of people make up the thinking
elite who shape society in that way and add
their share to that aspect of human endeavor
and the Church’s mission to “go and teach all
nations.” (True geniuses are even rarer.) If one
of the first principles of rhetoric is an awareness
of one’s audience, it behooves us to bear in mind
the true diversity of young minds who present
themselves in our schools.
The Church has always made schools wherever it has gone in promoting salvation. Why?
At least in part because of this truth, which is
remarkably expressed in the words of a Carthusian novice master:
God knows very well how to bypass this
intellectual formation with simple souls, but it
seems that the work of grace is seriously hampered—at least in raising the level of life— if it
does not at least find a clear and honest mind…
in which grace can find a home. But all things
being equal (and often this is precisely the
question!) a certain culture of the mind almost
always offers a richer earth in which grace may
work. At least a certain minimum of culture.

Is it surprising then that the Church has so
assiduously sought to cultivate the soil for the
good heart by nourishing the mind, given that
man is a rational being? We are most like the
angels and God in our intellect and will. This
realization of how grace perfects nature rises
to the level of principle when we undertake
the task of education, informing all that we do.
This attempt to provide “a certain culture of
the mind” is not a mere add-on in the Church’s
mission; it is an essential part of its mission.
The issue is one of degree. Striving to be
“all things to all men” does not mean being the
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same thing to all men. If Christ, as The Teacher, shows us anything, He always goes out to
meet the individual soul where it is. Every soul
is unique, though souls fall into certain classes.
Consider for a moment the marvelous richness
in the history of the Church’s religious orders.
Not only does this diversity reflect the varying
aspects of the Catholic Thing in meeting the
various needs of mankind (teaching the young,
caring for the sick and dying, taking in orphans,
cultivating the mind, providing haven for contemplation and so on), but it also reflects a recognition that souls differ; the path to sanctity is
not the same in the details of its modus vivendi.
In the work of cultivating minds, an appreciation of this ought also to inform what we teach
and how we teach it.
Deciding what to teach certainly depends on
the aptitudes of the students, but also on the age
we live in. If we live in a culturally poor time,
we cannot merely fill the deficit by drowning
them in the best thinkers. One approach would
be: give all of them the very best; the brightest
will hopefully get something enlightening and
permanent—truly formative—from the experience, and those not up to the challenge, well,
perhaps some bits will stick with them. However, does this mindset truly serve the majority of the class? If education is, in some sense, a
“drawing out of” students what they are capable
of, is this the best way to accomplish it?
The Society of Saint Pius X currently has
around 20 parish schools in the United States.
About half are kindergarten through twelfth
grade. They range from 22 to 900 in terms of
students. A number of these have 100 or more
students. St. Mary’s Academy, the largest, has
a number of unique opportunities because of
its size, but such a large school also presents
its challenges. In all of the schools, limited
resources remain an issue. Most importantly,
large schools require more teachers, and the
key here is managing class size because more
can be done with smaller groups of students.
Small is beautiful, in so many things. There
is a scale that seems best suited to human
endeavors, particularly teaching and learning.
Our Lord chose only twelve men to form that
intimate association of those who would witness, hear, and transmit the revelation of His
Father. Big schools simply do not afford the optimal amount of contact and influence between
teachers and students. While we might disagree
12

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SSPX priest teaching at the orphanage school in India.

about that magic number, there seems little
room for disputing that smaller schools permit
the personal interaction and attention best suited to learning. Ultimately, it is an encounter
between an individual teacher and one (each)
student... cor ad cor loquitur.
Another aspect of the cross section of students within the typical parish school is that
it reflects two categories of the lives that students will lead after, the distinction between the
(broadly speaking) intellectual and the “maker”
(to borrow a term from one old definition of
man, homo faber.) Anyone who spends time
teaching the young readily discovers that some
students seem more suited for, and delighted by,
the exercise of their minds, while others flourish
in the exercise of their hands. The Lord God has
simply fashioned them in this way—and glory
to Him in doing so.
Generally speaking, any student’s aptitude
(especially in the sixth through twelfth grades)
becomes more pronounced as the child matures.
Something of a primary disposition emerges;
it is revealed in the things he is attracted to
(though obviously it is not a hard-and-fast division.) He senses a greater fulfillment in, naturally gravitates towards, one activity or the other,
without one entirely eclipsing the other. There is
something beautiful—a kind of richness—about
those who maintain a balance in both worlds,
adept at the exercise of mind and body, knower and maker.
In the parish school, because of its distinctive diversity, both types of students will be
present, and the school and its teachers owe it
to them to work with and foster both kinds. In
large groups, on a day-to-day basis, doing so can
present challenges (again, more so in the high
school years.) In growing and discovering, the
student becomes more of what he is; the gifts he
was born with emerge more clearly and hope-

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fully flourish. Watching this unfold delights the
admiring teacher.
The other broad division, looking farther
into the students’ future lives as adults, concerns the path of vocation: marriage, religious
life, and priesthood. Most will marry and raise
families. In a healthy Catholic society, probably
about a third would become monks, brothers,
nuns, or priests. It seems true to say that there
ought to be more monks and brothers (among
male graduates) than priests. Priests, as a rule,
will come from the smaller percentage of the
more academically-inclined students, possessing the mental aptitude for the study of philosophy and theology required in a seminary.
This being true, one might wonder how this
future reality ought to be reflected and nurtured
during the years in the parish school. Given that
fewer students will be intellectuals (remember:
we are talking about that broad division that
will be found in a school that has to try and
serve all children of the parish), how should the
school, in its life and curriculum, correspond to
this fact? If most will marry, or embrace the life
of monks, brothers and sisters, ought the parish school to be ordered to this eventual reality,
especially in the upper grades?
It has become somewhat common to recognize the existence of “multiple intelligences,”
meaning that intelligence is not limited to the
more abstract, “book smart” caricature. Equally true, to maintain that a curriculum for some
students ought to be perhaps less academic does
not mean that such an education is anti-academic—it remains a question of degree or focus. “In
My Father’s house, there are many mansions”
( John 14:2).
Practically speaking, what do these realities
about the diversity of students mean in terms
of size, curriculum, approach, and the school’s
daily life? What follows, because it is a consideration of how Society schools might better
serve the families who rely on its priests for
their spiritual needs, will be primarily proposals—a series of possibilities or questions. Here,
we will not be talking about principles in the
same way but struggling to suggest a vision of
how things might look and a brief glimpse at
their possible merits.
For one thing, we might need more schools
which would be tailored more to the different
kinds of students, rather than simply trying to

do even more in schools whose size already
makes learning less than ideal.
Not having to expand existing schools
because of increasing enrollment (as in St.
Mary’s), which often presents itself in larger
budgets with growing financial stresses and
costs of additional construction on site or renovating older, existing structures, might provide
some breathing room to increase faculty salaries and eliminate logistical demands of finding
adequate space for classrooms and programs.
Another possible benefit: if some Society
schools could then concentrate on more rigorous academic matters for those students so
inclined, it might actually permit fostering
priestly vocations that would necessarily come
from the boys and young men in those schools.
Part of the Society’s reason for existing (and a
duty explicitly delegated to priors) is precisely
this fostering of vocations to the priesthood.
Other schools (including perhaps some overseen by the Society) could be less challenging
in their academic curriculum. Doing so might
thus serve the other (and larger) population of
students not so inclined towards intellectual
endeavors.
(Before venturing farther, in honesty, I have
to give something of a disclaimer about what
will follow: many of the practical suggestions I
am going to propose focus on the education of
boys because that is what I do and have reflected on more. This is not to say that girls do not
need or have a way that is appropriate to them.
On the contrary, it may be even more important, and someone needs to be thinking seriously about the parish school in terms of the
realties that wait there for those future mothers
and nuns, for those with a more intellectual bent
and for those inclined otherwise. It simply is not
something I will elaborate on here and now.)
We could end up with something like this
for boys, at least: a K-12 (or at least 6-12) school
that spends less time in the classroom, and, as
students enter junior high and high school,
includes experience on a working farm. Part of
the school day could be geared towards exposure to activities that are hands-on: leathercraft,
woodworking, animal husbandry, gardening,
and beekeeping. During the high school years,
they might begin serving some sort of “junior
apprenticeship” in the afternoons a few days a
week, after Mass and a morning in the classroom for English, religion, Latin, and history;
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math and science could be learned outdoors in
the context of building projects and natural history in addition to the work of cooperating with
nature in the cultivation and raising of produce
and animals.
Such a school would not be a trade school—
not mere job training, by any means. It would
maintain an academic (intellectual) element,
but likewise provide the opportunity to participate in (at first just seeing) arts and trades that
might one day provide personal satisfaction in
the performance of skills that could provide
a livelihood for families or add to the monastery or the brotherhood. Students could acquire
ennobling skills that would provide what Belloc calls “status” not mere “contract”—in other
words, they could escape the plight of the wageslave who does a mere job, something another
could easily be hired to do in his stead. (They
could also actually study the social teaching of
the Church—a woefully neglected subject, since
this would be the world they would inhabit and
practice in.)
Among possible entities for these nascent
apprenticeships, one might find carpentry,
masonry, agriculture, metalwork, plumbing,
and electrical work. Even the more artistic crafts
(the province of the artisan) might be nurtured:
things like sculpture, painting, and stained glass
making. When the Society is building (or restoring) churches, it might be one avenue of securing the craftsmen needed to contribute to the
beauty of sacred architecture; instead of searching for those proficient in disappearing skills,
the schools might help to fashion them.
A school along these lines could be a place
where businessmen from the parish could happily be involved in a program for a day school.
Future monks and brothers might grow in
number from such schools. We might see a
new dawning of that happier age when a larger percentage of youth gave their lives to The
One Thing Necessary. Labora, one half of the
Benedictine life (along with Ora), could receive
its due because boys who learned during their
school years the necessity and dignity of manual labor would be better disposed to a life that
honors and embraces this element.
In his sketch “The Saxon School: The Summer of 1002,” Hilaire Belloc depicts a monastic school, “Our Lady of Good Knowledge,”
attached to Hyde Abbey near Winchester. It is
a place of only 20 or 30 students, “for such as
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would learn more than was necessary to every
Christian man”—that is, more than the basic
catechism. At the end of the piece, the monk
who teaches the boys lingers to speak with a
youngster who has reached the culmination of
his studies and will enter the abbey. The priest
tells him, “But if you would come now, first
show me what you know.” The boy (because
“no pupil of his had been so word-perfect since
the child of the London woman had died in the
green Christmas of five years before”) replies at
length... “till it was plain that there was no end
to his learning.”
The old man was ready to take him away, and
they went together over the water meadow
towards Hyde and the city, talking in the Latin
tongue, and without one word in the vulgar,
upon divine things, until they came to the
gate of the Abbey, where Brother Porter, who
had been warned, asked them, as ritual would
have it, in the name of Alfred [King Alfred the
Great, whose bones rest in the Abbey], “whom
he brought there.” The Tutor answered: “One
who would be a priest,” Then the porter said:
“What will he do for his priesthood?” And
the boy answered in reply: “I will forge in the
Abbey forge.” When he had said this they led
him in, and they shut the gates behind him, as
though to cut him off from the world.

Such would be the happiest of outcomes
for all involved and for the world at large, if
many of our students did likewise. There will
be nothing like a Christian culture again until
the contemplative life, the first thing, becomes
first again.
More could be said, but—for now—my hope
is that some questions have been raised, a few
seeds planted, some possibilities envisioned.
The parish school is an ancient and venerable institution. It has existed in European
villages, in the hedges of Ireland during times
of persecution, in the neighborhoods of American cities, and in the mission fields from Africa to Alaska. It is a worthy endeavor, noble in
its effects, and doubtless near to the Heart of
Christ. We owe the superiors and teachers of the
Society’s schools an infinite debt of gratitude for
their heroic labors and solicitude.

CONTEXT

The Loss of
God in School,
the Loss of God in the Soul
Patrick Murtha

T

he public school system has received
no shortage of f lack over the past
years. And it would be foolish to say
that the cause was not just: lewd, sexually explicit, and even blasphemous literature,
obscene sex education, the covert propaganda of transgenderism, school boards shutting
out parents. These realities, as well as others,
have stimulated an exodus of students, and have
threatened to gut or to hollow or, at the very
least, make lean the so-called “hallowed halls
of learning.” But these faults in modern public
education are not themselves the true problems.
They are no more the true problem of public
education than a cough is the true problem of
a cold or of Covid. They are symptoms, serious symptoms, but only symptoms nonetheless;
they are not the source of the problem. But it
has become one of the disorders of modern man
to confuse the symptom for the source. And
so, parents become enraged at the literary diet
their children consume—and rightly so; parents
and the general public become infuriated at

the arrogance of school boards when they are
barred and banned from conversations about
their own children—and rightly so. But to scorn
the symptoms, to attempt to find a solution for
the symptoms, but not to be incensed at the
source and not to attempt to find a solution for
the source is part of this modern madness.
The root of the evil that has come to fruition
today dates back not merely a decade but nearly
two centuries in the United States. It can, not
without good reason, be argued that the heart
of the problem dates even farther back, to the
time when Protestants first stole the keys to the
Catholic colleges and the Catholic curriculum
that had made Catholic education the envy of
the centuries. In the United States there has
never been a time when the state afforded the
citizens the opportunity of a solid education.
In the earliest days of the country, the schools
were religious, but only in a narrow sense—they
taught a sort of religion. Certainly the Bible was
a key text and God’s name flowed regularly off
the tongue of every teacher and was repeated
15

CONTEXT

by every student—not in that vulgar or blasphemous manner His name is regularly mentioned
in schools today; but the religion was no sensible or real religion.. It was a false religion: Calvinist, Episcopalian, Methodist, Unitarian. And
under those conditions, the Catholic parent
endangered his child’s soul to send his child’s
body to a school that taught a God that was
not God. This the Catholic bishops in the U.S.
acknowledged at the First Provincial Council of
Baltimore in 1829, writing in their pastoral letter, “[T]he school-boy can scarcely find a book
in which some one or more of our institutions
or practices is not exhibited far otherwise than
it really is, and greatly to our disadvantage:
the entire system of education is thus tinged
through its whole course; and history itself has
been distorted to our serious injury.” Fourteen
years later, at the Fourth Provincial Council,
the Bishops, without mincing words, warned
again against the danger of a Protestant education: “We have seen with serious alarm, efforts
made to poison the fountains of public education, by giving it a sectarian hue, and accustoming children to the use of a version of the
Bible made under sectarian bias, and placing in
their hands books of various kinds replete with
offensive and dangerous matter… We admonish parents of the awful account they must give
at the divine tribunal, should their children, by
their neglect or connivance, be imbued with
false principles and led away from the path of
salvation.” Such already were the warnings by
the Catholic bishops in 1829 and 1843! And
these warnings continued throughout the rest of
the Provincial Councils, and then into the three
Plenary Councils of Baltimore. How often nostalgia hypnotizes the mind with a hallucination
of a better and more moral age!
Under the influence of Horace Mann, the
schools were diverted into another direction:
tossing even the false God, the false Christ,
from the classrooms. In the name of “getting
along,” in the name of religious liberty, Secularism was enthroned in the school-master’s chair.
Mann, a fellow who seemed “moral” enough,
who appeared to have the vestures of virtue
and religion—I mean, again, a general and shallow religion—promoted personal religion, that
notion of some “superior being” arising out of
the inner chasms of the soul or the gut. But
for him, “organized religion” was not a matter
of the classroom, but only for the individual
heart. The Bible was permitted, but only as a
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literary text promoting general morality and
not the knowledge of God, and definitely not
for the propagation of a particular religion. In
other words, the Word of God was to lead to
“good deeds” without leading to a particular
deity. This idea of Mann was, and still is, rooted in liberalism, one of whose worst symptoms
was, and still is, religious liberty. The secularizing of schools, the segregating of God from the
daily studies of the student, perverts the idea not
only of learning, implicitly and explicitly saying
that God is not relevant to reading, writing, and
arithmetic, but also not relevant to material life
and living. If reading and writing and arithmetic have such value that it must be studied daily
and yet religion is assigned merely to Sunday,
or to a catechism class, then what lesson does
it teach the youth?
The Catholic, in regarding this question of
education, seems caught in a conundrum: should
the Catholic angle towards Scylla or Charybdis? The Catholic, in the words of that great
American idiom, is “caught between a rock and
a hard place.” And rhetoricians will employ this
“either…or…” as a dichotomy: would you rather a Protestant teach your child, at least he will
get some semblance of religion and morality, or
a secularist who may possibly give a veneer of
natural virtue? Are these the only two options?
But the rhetorician in this sense is a sophist.
Concerned more with winning an argument
than with truth, he presents the options as if
there were only two. This is a false dichotomy.
There can never be, in any moral decision, only
two evil choices: how can God be good or just
if He permits only two options, and both evil
and both leading, very possibly, to damnation?
God forbid! It cannot be. There must be a third
option, and possibly a fourth: a Catholic school,
or homeschool at least. In this particular era,
there are very few Catholics, I believe (maybe
naively so), who will risk their child’s soul by
sending him to a Protestant school, to have his
faith be tainted by adulterated doctrines. The
great temptation, I suppose, lies not with Scylla,
that multi-headed monster who reaches out to
pluck the sailors from their boats and devour
them; but the greater temptation lurks with
Charybdis, that monster of the deep, hidden
beneath the water, gulping down whole ships
and vomiting up mere shards of timber. Too
often, even with the terrible symptoms of today,
Catholics, without sufficient and significant reasons, send their children to a public school.

CONTEXT

The problem, I think, lies in a loss of, or a
blindness towards, the principles of Catholicism and education. What Catholic parents—or
any parent at all, worthy of the name parent—
does not desire the best for their child? Quintilian, the famous teacher of orators, though a
pagan, says as much: “I would, therefore, have
a father conceive the highest hopes of his son
from the moment of his birth” (Institutio Oratoria. I.1.). And is it not Christ who says, “Among
yourselves, if a father is asked by his son for
bread, will he give him a stone? Or a fish, will
he give him a snake instead of a fish? Or if he
asked for an egg, will he give him a scorpion?”
(Luke 11: 11-12). Just as no one does anything
without seeing some apparent good, so no parent sends his child to the public school without
some thought of seeming goodness. But what
is this goodness? To one, it is participation in
sports. To another, more variety of classes. To
another, more options for college. The reasons
are nearly as infinite as human excuses. But the
reasons are principally material, disregarding
the spiritual; primarily temporal, devaluing the
eternal. For what is a football season in relation
to eternity? What good is landing scholarships
to Harvard or Yale if the soul sinks into Hell?
These must be, in the Catholic conscience, if the
Catholic truly believes in eternity, among the
first considerations. But the excuses themselves
indicate a certain secular spirit or a materialistic attitude: “How is a man the better for it,
if he gains the whole world at the cost of losing his own soul?” (Mt. 16: 26). The parent is
short-sighted, at the very least. To lose one’s
own soul, I dare say, is a careless and appalling thing; to lose another’s is callous, cruel, and
contemptible. “How would your hearts be torn
with grief did you foresee, that through eternity those objects of all your best feelings should
be cast into outward darkness, where there is
weeping and gnashing of teeth! ... But, dearly beloved, this is too frequently the necessary
consequence of a neglected or an improper education. God has made you guardians of those
children to lead them to His service upon earth,
that they might become saints in Heaven” (Pastoral Letter, 1829). What conscientious and vigilant parent does not frequently shudder at and
even lose sleep over those terrible words of the
Eternal Judge: “And if anyone hurts the conscience of one of these little ones that believes
in me, he had better have been drowned in the
depths of the sea, with a mill-stone hung about

his neck” (Mt. 18:6).
The great danger and evil of secularism in
the school, as well as in society, is not my own
concoction. My mind does not arrive at this
judgment solely on its own, even though it has
often seen its paganized and atheistic fruit in
students once Catholic. I hold it most strongly by the authority of the Church through the
magisterium of the popes. Leo XIII, in no fewer
than eight different encyclicals, rejected the
notion that a school can separate God and religion from education. (These schools were often
called “mixed” or “neutral.”) “To divorce these,”
writes the pope, “is to wish that youth should
be neutral in regards its duties to God; a system
of education in itself fallacious and particularly fatal in tender years, for it opens the door to
atheism and closes it on religion” (Nobilissima
Gallorum Gens, 1884). He says that such an education not only risks the child “drinking in the
poison of impiety” (Sapientiae Christianae, 1890)
but “prepares, not defenders of the nation, but a
plague and a scourge on the human race. Once
God is suppressed, what can keep young people
dutiful or recall them when they have strayed
from the path of virtue and fall into the abyss of
vice?” (Militantis Ecclesiae, 1897). Pius X, following in his predecessor’s footsteps, issues similar
warnings, saying, “There both teachers’ lips and
students’ ears are inclined to godlessness. We
are referring to those schools which are unjustly
called neutral or lay. In reality, they are nothing more than the stronghold of the powers of
darkness” (Editae Saepe, 1910). Pius XI encourages founding schools with religious instruction,
saying that without them they “quickly become,
by logical and psychological necessity, pagan
things” (Non Abbiamo Bisogno, 1931), and warns
that this wrenching of Christ from the curriculum “foster[s] materialism which is the fertile
soil of Communism” (Divini Redemptoris, 1937).
In six different encyclicals, Pius XI condemned
this deviant divorce of the schools from God
and promoted the necessity of Catholic education, writing in Divini Illius Magistri (1929)—a
jewel of the Catholic ideal of education, “From
this it follows that the so-called ‘neutral’ or
‘lay’ school, from which religion is excluded, is
contrary to the fundamental principles of education. Such a school moreover cannot exist
in practice; it is bound to become irreligious.
There is no need to repeat what Our Predecessors have declared on this point, especially
Pius IX and Leo XIII, at times when laicism
17

CONTEXT

was beginning in a special manner to infest
the public school. We renew and confirm their
declarations, as well as the Sacred Canons in
which the frequenting of non-Catholic schools,
whether neutral or mixed, those namely which
are open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike,
is forbidden for Catholic children, and can be
at most tolerated, on the approval of the Ordinary alone, under determined circumstances of
place and time, and with special precautions.”
And Pius XII, in speeches—many of which can
be found in volumes of The Pope Speaks—and
encyclicals, decries this same aberration. So the
popes taught until the Second Vatican Council
after which the voice of the pontiffs became
enfeebled, devitalized, and wearisome with
the specter of so-called dialogue which is poor
excuse for spiritual pacificism. Paul VI’s anxiety, for example, was for immigrants “los[ing]
their respect for the priceless cultural heritage
of their native land” and “reminding [all men
of good will] that civil progress and economic development are the only road to peace”
(Po­p u­l orum Progressio, 1967). What is culture
and economy and civil society without Christ,
but tepid, vapid, and dead! How little is said of
losing the Faith and the consequence of that,
losing the soul!
In the same spirit of the pre-Vatican II pontiffs, the 1917 Code of Canon Law is most
explicit about “the most grave obligation to
take care as far as [the parents] are able for the
education of children, both religious and moral,
as well as physical and civil, and of providing
them with temporal goods” (Can. 1113). This
is similar to the current Canon 1136: “Parents
have the most grave duty and the primary right
to take care as best they can for the physical,
social, cultural, moral, and religious education
of their offspring.” This is another instance of
the post-Conciliar Rome switching priorities:
before the Council, religious and moral education held the opening thought; after the Council, they hold the tail-end of the sentence. While
Canon 1113 (1917) and Canon 1136 (1983) seem
similar, if having same words is all that matters
and order is no concern, the Johanno-Pauline
Code is missing one of the vital pieces that the
Church, in her right as parent to the spiritual life
of the child, issued: “Catholic children should
not frequent non-Catholic, neutral, or mixed
schools, namely those that allow non-Catholics
to attend. Only local Ordinaries can make deci18

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sions in accord with the instructive norms from
the Apostolic See concerning circumstances of
things and any necessary precautions that will
prevent the danger of perversion, [and] whether
these things can be tolerated and such schools
used” (Can. 1374). This law specifies that the
parent or the student, not only in grammar and
secondary schools, but also in colleges and universities, must obtain permission from the diocesan bishop to attend a non-Catholic school. So
immediate and so grave is the menace of secularism to pervert peace of soul and the preservation of faith, that this permission must be
sought from the custodians of the faith, from
those Fathers of the spiritual life in their dioceses. Archbishop Joseph Ritter, whom Time
magazine reported to be a progressive in the
Council, was no progressive in his reminder to
Catholics of their obligation in 1960:
We are indeed gratified and pleased to see so
many high school graduates decide to pursue
higher studies… At the same time, however,
we are alarmed and grieved at the number
of graduates who are selecting secular and
non-Catholic colleges… Many do not follow
the requirements of the law that they seek our
permission which is to be secured through
their devoted pastors to attend these secular
schools… we remind them and their parents
that they must always be far more concerned
about nurturing and protecting their Faith
than they are about pursuing higher studies…
Parents and students have, therefore, the grave
responsibility of choosing Catholic colleges
where the atmosphere and the teaching are
conducive to the proper end of Christian education. Only a grave reason will excuse this
responsibility. (Canon Law Digest, 1963)

And lest the should not frequent in the translation of the Canon confuse a person into thinking that this law is more or less a suggestion, a

CONTEXT

strong recommendation, Rome issued specific guidance on the circumstances when permission can be granted, such as for a lack of a
Catholic school or for a lack of suitability. But
as Fr. Augustine clarifies in his Commentary on
Canon Law (1923):
This suitability must not be identified with
mere fashionableness, for there is no proportion between danger to faith and “stylishness.”
Hence the instruction continues: “Parents who
neglect to give this necessary Christian training
and instruction to their children, or who permit
them to go to schools in which the ruin of their
souls is inevitable, or, finally, who send them
to the public schools without sufficient cause
and without taking the necessary precautions
to render the danger of perversion remote, and
do so while there is a good and well-equipped
Catholic school in the place, and while they
have means to send them elsewhere to be
educated;—such parents, if obstinate, cannot
be absolved, as is evident from the moral
teachings of the Church.”

For such is the attitude of the Church: “Make
it your first care to find the kingdom of God,
and his approval, and all these things shall be
yours without the asking” (Mt. 6:33).
The current code has softened the law, and
by softening the law has lost the urgency and
the justification. First, it is stated that “Parents must possess a true freedom in choosing
schools” (Can. 797)—is this freedom to choose
only among Catholic schools or license to
choose any school? It is not specified, though
the following Canon might suggest the former:
“Parents are to entrust their children to schools
which provide a Catholic education. If they are
unable to do this, they are obliged to take care
that suitable education is provided for their children outside the schools” (Can. 798). This final
Canon in no way carries the weight of its former
counterpart Canon 1374 (1917). While Canon
798 (1983) states the obligation, there is no insistence, there is no mention of the explicit danger,
there is no consequence. The urgency and the
significance of the law is watered down. And,
for legalists and literalists always looking for a
loophole, Canon 797, with its ambiguous pledge
of freedom, counters the obligation of Canon
798 to choose rightly.
If the current Canons create an ambiguous
situation, Archbishop Lefebvre, in his defense
of orthodoxy, is not ambivalent in the least. If

a Catholic truly believes that Christ is king of
all and everything, then he must hold there is
a great danger to faith, and if danger to faith,
then danger to the salvation of the soul, if Christ
is removed from even one subject, one class,
one moment of life of a Catholic student. It is
for this reason that Archbishop Lefebvre insists
on Catholic schools and insists that parents be
willing to make great and significant sacrifices
for the Catholic education of their children. “Do
not hesitate,” says the Archbishop in a sermon
on July 27, 1980, “to send your children, however far away it may be, to Catholic schools.” This
imperative is no small thing: protecting reason,
religion, salvation. How trite are the excuses
that excuse a Catholic child for attending a public school: sports, friends, college opportunities.
This imperative is for a great and significant
thing: that the Catholic may grow in reason and
wisdom and virtue in his youth, that with these
virtues he may work out his salvation in the
society in which he lives his adult life, and that
he may attain salvation for his soul and the souls
of those entrusted to him. But with the principles of secularism tainting the young scholar, the pupil runs no remote risk of converting
into a pagan, or worse an atheist. If Christ is
expelled from the classroom, there should be no
surprise to find no Christian principles in the
classroom. It should be no surprise to find the
young apostatizing, from both faith and reason;
doubting not only the definitions of doctrines
they cannot see but even definitions in nature
that they can see. And if a student survives the
onslaught of immorality and dechristianization,
which no doubt some have, it must be chalked
up to another miracle of grace. Archbishop
Lefebvre says:
No doubt we would need many more priests,
many more Catholic teachers, but whatever it
may be, we shall bend all our efforts, I am sure,
and you will do the same, to refound Catholic
schools, so that your children, after a careful
upbringing at home, may not be corrupted in
the schools and put you in a hopeless situation.
How many parents tell us this—by letter and in
person! Their children are fine until about the
age of ten, or twelve or fifteen and then—all of
a sudden—they fall away from the straight and
narrow path of faith and morals. Parents are
grief-stricken at this terrible situation—the ruin
of mind and heart. (Sermon on July 27, 1980)
IMAGES: Schoolboy, Young Girl Reading, Albert Anker, 1883.

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COMMENTARY

Dante’s Divine Comedy:

Educating for
the Joy of God
Ann Marie Temple
When he had brought his lecture to an end,
the lofty scholar looked into my face,
searching to see if I seemed satisfied;
and I, already thirsting for more drink,
kept silent, wondering:”Could he, perhaps,
be tired of all this questioning of mine?”
But that true father, sensing my desire,
which was too timid to express itself,
spoke first, and thus encouraged me to speak.
Purgatorio XVIII, l. 1-91

I

n his Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (12651321) creates himself as a character in his
own work of art and unfolds before our
imagination the process of his complete
education, on an allegorical journey through
Hell, Purgatory and Heaven (for “there was no
other way to save his soul,” as Beatrice explains
in Purgatorio XXXI). “The lofty scholar” above
is Virgil, and the one who says “I ” throughout
the poem is Dante “the Pilgrim.” Dante was
both scholar and student himself, and his teacher of predilection was St. Thomas Aquinas, who
had died only ten years after Dante’s birth. 2
The education which the Pilgrim receives over
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the course of the Commedia is in fact a Thomistic
education. In the passage quoted above, the pilgrim Dante and his maestro Virgil are halfway
through their climb of Mount Purgatory, and
their discussion in these central cantos of the
Divine Comedy takes us to the core of the principles of St. Thomas on teaching. Virgil, the educator, true father, attentive to the soul entrusted
to him, seeks every means to satisfy the blessed
thirst which God placed at the core of every
man. “Sensing my desire,” in a union of charity,
Virgil “spoke first, and thus encouraged me to
speak,” to act, to choose, in an apprenticeship
of freedom which will end finally with the gift
of Dante’s will to God in the enjoyment of the
beatific vision. In the following pages, I would
like to offer the words of the poet as illustrations
of the teaching principles of St. Thomas. I have
chosen the verses and scenes which most struck
me in the classroom and in my own reading as
embodiments of St. Thomas’ vivifying ideas. I
hope this taste will encourage other Catholic
educators to open the Divine Comedy and drink
for themselves with confidence at the source.

COMMENTARY

Education: A Participation
in God’s Creative Love
“One of the great pleasures of the intelligence is in unity, in fruitful unity,” writes Dom
Paul Delatte, 3 and the “fruitful unity” of the
Divine Comedy and of St. Thomas’ philosophy
of teaching is in the notion of love. “That true
father, sensing my desire… spoke first, and
thus encouraged me to speak… ‘So I beseech
you, father, kind and dear,’” begins the disciple Dante, heartened by Virgil, “define love
for me, please.” Dante constructed his Divine
Comedy on love: the “geography” of the realms
and the movement of souls are determined by
relation to the love of God. So also does St.
Thomas establish his philosophy of education
on the love of God: the first principle behind
the nature and the movement of teaching is
the goodness of God, origin of all things, the
divine Freedom creating in an unexplainable
act of love. “The divine goodness is the cause
of things’ being brought into existence, for God
wished to communicate His goodness to others
as far as this was possible to creatures,” writes
St. Thomas in his treatise On Providence. Love is
the mystery of God, an eternal procession within His Trinitarian life and the motive of all His
external action. God creates souls out of love, in
order that they might love Him, and He allows
educators to participate in His creative love by
giving them a power to help souls attain their
perfection of freely choosing Him.
The Soul “Sprung from Her Creator’s Joy”
From the first canto of the Inferno, we learn
that the stars shine because “Divine love set
their beauty turning” (l. 40).
Looking upon His Son with all that love
which each of them breathes forth eternally,
that uncreated, ineffable first One,
has fashioned all that moves in mind and space
in such sublime proportions that no one
can see it and not feel His presence there.
(Paradiso X, l. 1-6)

We “feel His presence there,” looking to the
Heavens, by the stars’ reflection of God’s uncreated, absolute perfection. Creation mirrors
God; we perceive its order and proportion like
a radiance, a ray of being shining back in witness to God’s infinite Being. The heavens recount
the glory of God, the Psalmist sings, and He calls
all the stars by name,4 but His spiritual creation is

dearest to Him, because each soul is capable of
reflecting back to God not only the simple radiance of its being but also a particular, personal
love. Angels and men, spiritual beings, reflect
God more intimately, and the progress of education is a progress of increasing this resemblance
to God. The souls at the base of Mount Purgatory are urged on the path “to make their beauty
whole” (Purgatorio II, l. 75), to perfect the particular union of mind and will with their Creator
which will define them as saints. Each sanctified personality is “a facet of the immeasurable
Diamond of Divine Perfections,” as the Dominican Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré expresses it:
“God is so inexhaustible in Perfection that each
one of the elect is entrusted with reflecting one
of the little sparks of His boundless radiance
and so represents as it were an aspect of His
Beauty.”5
Education is therefore a preparation to adore.
“Thy kingdom come to us with all its peace,”
pray the souls in the first Terrace of the Purgatorio,
And as Thine angels offer up their wills
to Thee in sacrifice, singing Hosannah,
let all men offer up to Thee their own.”
(Purgatorio XI, l. 7-12)

This return of love for love constitutes the beauty of the personality. “The love that makes me
beautiful / moves me to speak,” begins St.
Bonaventure in Canto XII of the Paradiso (l.
31-32). Love makes beautiful; “sin is the only
power that takes away / man’s freedom and his
likeness to True Good,” Beatrice explains, “and
makes him shine less brightly in Its light” (Paradiso VII, l. 79-81). In the first sphere of the Paradiso, the sphere of the changing moon, we meet
the soul of Piccarda, who “was a virgin sister in
the world,” but whom family members obliged
to leave the convent and not fulfill her vows. She
is blissful but pale in her reflection of God, her
face barely discernible, and the reason is her
instability of will, consenting in some degree to
her removal from the cloister. When Beatrice in
her clear, dazzling beauty, looked at Dante after
the departure of Piccarda, he explains,
her eyes
sparkling with love and burning so divine,
my strength of sight surrendered to her power –
I was about to faint. (Paradiso IV, l. 139-142)

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As star differs from star in brightness, soul differs from soul in beauty: in the degree of gift
of will to God. Our action flows from what we
are. Despite original sin, the soul yearns for
its Creator because sprung from His love and
made for Him, and the Catholic educator has
to recognize this fundamental feature of every
child before him. In the central canto of the
Divine Comedy, Virgil describes to Dante the
direct creation of each human soul, fashioned
by God’s tenderness:
“From the fond hands of God, Who loves her even
before He gives her being, there issues forth
just like a child, all smiles and tears at play,
the simple soul, pure in its ignorance,
which, having sprung from her Creator’s joy,
will turn to anything it likes.”
(Purgatorio XVI, l. 85-90)

The soul, “sprung from her Creator’s joy,” is
joy-aimed. She is God-aimed, good-aimed, on
a quest of loving inclination to fill her spiritual
capacity for absolute Joy.
“The soul at birth, created quick to love
will move toward anything that pleases it,
as soon as pleasure causes it to move,”

Virgil explains, and he answers Dante’s question: “that inclination is love.”
“Just as a fire’s flames always rise up,
inspired by its own nature to ascend,
seeking to be in its own element,
just so, the captive soul begins its quest,
the spiritual movement of its love,
not resting till the thing loved is enjoyed.”
(Purgatorio XVIII, l. 19-33)

Pope Pius XII refers to this same section in the
Divine Comedy to show the God-instilled dynamism of the soul toward the good and at the
same time the child’s need for guidance in the
choice of particular goods:
An irresistible instinct for the true and the good
carries the “simple soul which as yet knows
nothing” toward sensible objects; and all this
sensibility, all of these sensations of the child…
need an education, an instruction, a vigilant
direction… if we are to avoid any compromise
or falsifying of the normal awakening and regular function of the noble spiritual faculties.6

The fundamental inclination of the soul to
good, which St. Thomas calls synderesis, exists
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in a fallen nature, and the child needs an education to virtue which will habituate him to recognize and choose legitimate goods. Love is “the
source of every virtue, every vice” (Purgatorio
XVIII, l. 15), because the intention of the will
to love rightly determines the moral value of an
act. Virtue “winnows out the good love from the
bad” (ibid., l. 66), the objects worthy of man’s
choice from those which lead him away from his
end. The educator’s role is to help the child recognize “the good love,” nourishing the child’s
imagination by surrounding him in order and
beauty, habituating him to love uprightly, training his reason to recognize truth and discern
the virtuous action.
The Soul Sealed with the Light of God
Throughout the domains of the Inferno and
the Purgatorio the poet insists that the mind’s
desire to know is insatiable because the only
good which will entirely fill the intellect is the
vision of God. Virgil fosters Dante’s healthy
thirst for knowledge, urging him to question
and discover. In Canto XX of the Purgatorio,
Dante describes his “violent desire for the truth”
(l. 147) at the shaking of the mountain, utterly
unexpected and accompanied by a great cry of
Gloria in excelsis Deo:
The natural thirst which nothing satisfies
except that water begged for long ago
by the poor woman of Samaria
Tormented me… (Purgatorio XXI, l. 1-4).

In this permanent thirst of our intellect, which
nothing slakes but the vision of God, we again
see the mark of the Creator on our souls. In
his treatise on The Teacher, St. Thomas calls
the created light of reason “a kind of likeness
of the uncreated truth.” “The human mind is
divinely illuminated by its natural light,” St.
Thomas explains, and he quotes Psalm 4, which
the Church sings every Sunday at Compline:
“Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui, Domine,”
“The light of Your countenance is signed upon
us.” By our intellect, we are stamped with the
seal of God’s own power to know.7
As we saw the educator strengthening the
student’s will to choose the good, so also the
teacher is a strengthener of the intellect, not
somehow injecting his ideas into the mind of the
child but instrumentally helping the child form
true concepts and actively draw conclusions.
We saw Virgil encouraging Dante to ask the

COMMENTARY

question he was too timid to express; throughout the Inferno, along the paths which Virgil
had already trodden, we see him continually
foreseeing the route and adapting his pedagogy to foster Dante’s learning. Whether alerting Dante to what he will encounter, allowing
Dante to live an experience and then formulate
his own questions, or pausing to give philosophical explanations and discuss the reasons for
what they have seen, Virgil is always aiming at
the most effective manner of awakening Dante
to grasp truth for himself. St. Thomas explains,
“The teacher’s presentations are like tools that
the natural reason of the student uses to come to
an understanding of things previously unknown
to him.” As the doctor gives medicine so that
the body will heal itself, so the educator fulfills
all of his tasks so that the student’s soul will
reach knowledge and virtue by its own power.8
“Our role in class,” confirms Dominican Mother Hélène Jamet in a letter to teaching Sisters,
is principally to help each child to discover, in
each domain, and in an atmosphere of generosity and freedom… the few central notions
which he must make his own and which he
must be able to use as his own.”9

The educator initiates and mediates the process
of discovery, but the mind of the student works
his own knowledge, just as his will works virtue.
The Teacher: A Manifestation
of the Goodness of God
St. Thomas insists that the teacher is genuinely a cause of goodness and knowledge in the
child, albeit instrumental. The teacher really
does share in God’s power to do good; the educator saves. “Virgil, sweet father,” Dante cries,
“Virgil to whom for my salvation I gave up my
soul” (Purgatorio XXX, l. 50-51). It is Beatrice by
her action who has brought Dante to the heights
at which she leaves him:
She, with the tone and gesture of a guide
whose task is done, said: “We have gone
beyond –
from greatest sphere to heaven of pure light,
light of the intellect, light full of love,
love of the true good, full of ecstasy,
ecstasy that transcends the sweetest joy.”
(Paradiso XXX, l. 37-42)

Detail from Empyrean—A fresco by Philipp Veit, Dante Hall,
Casino Massimo, Rome, 1818-1824.
Source: Sailko, https://commons.wikimedia.org/

[the created universe] together by the order and
interconnection of causes”: the order of the universe is a fabric of interdependence, “for the
primary Cause, from Its outstanding goodness,
makes other things not only to be, but also to
be causes.”10
Just like the sun’s outpoured rays, which not
only illumine other bodies but make them to be
sources of light, too… similarly, in the ordering
of the universe, as a result of the outpouring of
God’s goodness, superior creatures [men and
angels] are not only good in themselves, but
also are causes of goodness in others.11

Virgil and Beatrice stabilize Dante in truth and
in orientation toward the good by guiding him
to perform acts of discovery and freedom. The
angels in the Paradiso illustrate the interconnection of teachers and students in human education:

The teacher collaborates with God in bringing the soul to such sublimity. God has “woven
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All of the angelic ranks gaze upward,
as downward they prevail upon the rest,
so while each draws the next, all draw toward
God.
(Paradiso XXIX, l. 127-129)

Through all those who educate, God is glorified
by His goodness in sharing His power.

The Sacred Acts of Education
St. Thomas begins at these heights when he
speaks of education. The immediate and glorious filiation of every human soul from the hand
of God makes it a sacred thing, and baptism
brings this resemblance of nature to a sonship
in grace. “When I say that [a child] resembles
God by his baptism,” writes Fr. de Chivré,
I am saying that he resembles three Persons… It is the joy of the father, the joy of the
mother… to sense in [their child] a heart beating in unison with three Persons… As a priest,
I have to tell you that your children have spiritual reactions that you do not even suspect.12

Every educator–priest, parent or teacher–
moves in a divine realm, acting as an instrument to bring the intellect and will into the
fullness of a divinely-bestowed power to act,
helping strengthen the soul in its God-given,
God-aimed movement. “The end of education
is that the child come to prefer freely and forever the true over the false, good over evil, the
just over the unjust, beauty over ugliness, and
God over all,” explains theologian and educator
Fr. Victor-Alain Berto.13 The educators whom
we encounter in Dante’s Divine Comedy offer us
models to apply these principles faithfully, in
actions that are true to the sacredness of our
task.
Education Is Charity and Generosity
Dante asks Virgil to define love for him, but
Virgil’s actions have been defining love from
the first moment he took Dante under his care.
“Have pity on my soul,” are the first words cried
out by Dante, lost in the “dark wood,” to the dim
figure approaching, in the first canto of the Commedia. Virgil’s mission of goodness was initiated
by the pity of the Blessed Virgin: “A gracious
lady sits in heaven grieving… and her compassion breaks Heaven’s stern decree” (Inferno II, l.
94-96). Education is an act of mercy, descending to the aid of a misery, a need in the student,
and it is rooted in the paternal mercy of God.
“Anyone who exercises providence over another
24

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shares in the character of a father,” St. Thomas
writes in his Summa Theologica (IIaIIae, q. 102,
a. 1). Virgil the teacher is a father to Dante, and
education is a process of paternal tenderness.
Envy has no entry where teaching is participation in divine goodness. Virgil’s mission
began in a conspiracy of intercession, the Blessed Virgin sending St. Lucy who sent Beatrice
to summon Virgil from Limbo to help the
wandering Dante. Virgil “crowns and miters
[Dante] lord of himself” at the top of Mount
Purgatory (Purgatorio XXVII, l. 142) and passes
his charge on to Beatrice, the blessed; Beatrice
herself passes Dante finally to St. Bernard (Paradiso XXXI), so that he might intercede with the
Blessed Virgin to obtain for Dante a glimpse
of the beatific vision before his time. Envy has
no place in sanctified society: “The more souls
there above who are in love / the more there are
worth loving,” explains Virgil (Purgatorio XV, l.
73-74), and the souls in the sphere of Mars sing
out, “Behold one more who will increase our
love,” as Virgil and Beatrice approach (Paradiso
V, l. 105). “Never be jealous of your influence,”
writes Fr. Berto.
We can never be too many doing good. Moreover, be sure that your influence will increase
to the extent that you facilitate that of others.
Do not forget that souls are born for God,
and that it would be a crime to stop them at
ourselves.14

The educator is entirely focused outside of himself, on the good which he desires the student
to obtain. When Dante and Beatrice pass into
the sphere of the sun and Dante finds himself
more open to the divine light and approaching
the goal of his quest, he momentarily forgets his
guide. “And now give thanks,” Beatrice says,
“thanks to the Sun of Angels by whose grace
you have ascended to this sun of sense.”

COMMENTARY

No mortal heart was ever more disposed
to do devotion and to yield itself
to God so fully and so readily

He answered me, speaking with experience:
“Now here you must leave all distrust behind;
let all your cowardice die on this spot.

than mine was at her words. So totally
did I direct all of my love to Him,
that Beatrice, eclipsed, had left my mind.

We are at the place where earlier I said
you could expect to see the suffering race
of souls who lost the good of intellect.”

But this did not displease her, and she smiled
so that the splendor of her laughing eyes
broke my mind’s spell. (Paradiso X, l. 52-63)

Placing his hand on mine, smiling at me
in such a way that I was reassured,
he led me in, into those mysteries.
(Inferno III, l. 1-21)

The educator who is in order delights to be
eclipsed by the light and to see his student gradually confirmed in confident, independent, virtuous action.
This sacred generosity sparks in the student a
desire for the good and the energy to pursue it.
“Love, / kindled by virtue, always kindles love”
(Purgatorio XXII, l. 10-11), and the virtuous love
of the teacher inspires love in the student. Dante
describes his final firm resolve to begin the path
to virtue: at Virgil’s words,
…such warm courage flowed into my heart
that I spoke like a man set free of fear:
“O she, compassionate, who moved to help me!
And you, all kindness, in obeying quick
those words of truth she brought with her
for you –
you and the words you spoke have moved my heart
with such desire to continue onward
that now I have returned to my first purpose.
Let us start, for both our wills, joined now, are one.
You are my guide, you are my lord and teacher.”
These were my words to him and, when he
moved,
I entered on that deep and rugged road.
(Inferno II, l. 131-142)

At every step of the rugged road, Virgil is ready
with attentive goodness. Virgil and Beatrice
guide Dante out of love, and love binds him to
his guides: their wills are one, joined in desire
for the same good.
Education Is an Apprenticeship of Trust
Rather than obedience, Virgil asks of Dante
trust. The Pilgrim trembles at the moment of
passing through the gates to “the Doleful City”:
“Abandon every hope, all you who enter.”
“‘Master, I said, ‘these words I see are cruel.’”

Virgil’s rational encouragement is joined to gestures of affection, and Dante finds the strength
to move forward.
Yet dangers are real, particularly in the Inferno. Gorgons perched on the walls of the City of
Dis, the domain of hell reserved for the demonic
sins of malice, summon Medusa to freeze Dante’s will with despair. The threat is not empty:
Virgil not only warns Dante, “Turn your back
and cover up your eyes,” but as Dante tells us,
“he turned me round / and did not trust my
hands to hide my eyes / but placed his own
on mine and kept them covered” (Inferno IX, l.
55-60). Half of the voyage through the Inferno
is spent in the realms of fraud and treachery,
and Virgil has to be particularly on his guard
for his charge. They travel down into these lowest depths on the back of the mythical dragon
Geryon, “that repulsive spectacle of fraud,” “the
one that makes the whole world stink” by the
rotting corruption of death it causes in society.
His face was the face of any honest man,
it shone with such a look of benediction;
and all the rest of him was serpentine.
(Inferno XVII, l. 1-12)

Virgil does not let Dante witness his negotiation
with this “malignant beast,” but sends him out
of earshot. When Dante returned, he tells us,
I found my guide already sitting high
upon the back of that fierce animal;
he said: “And now, take courage and be
strong…
Get on up front. I want to ride behind,
to be between you and the dangerous tail.”
…I felt those stabs of shame that make
a servant brave before his valorous master.
As I squirmed around on those enormous shoulders,
I wanted to cry out, “Hold on to me,”
but I had no voice to second my desire.
25

COMMENTARY

Then he who once before had helped me out
when I was threatened put his arms around me
as soon as I was settled, and held me tight…
(Inferno XVII, l. 79-96)

Virgil’s prudence and Dante’s docility make
every experience serve Dante’s growth in virtue.
A trusting, ordered affection makes Dante
quick to receive guidance from Virgil and saddened at the least hint of displeasing his educator. “All absorbed” in the low debate between
two souls in the Inferno, Virgil said to him merely, “Keep right on looking, / a little more, and I
shall lose my patience.”
I heard the note of anger in his voice,
and turned to him; I was so full of shame
that it still haunts my memory today…
“Less shame than yours would wash away a fault
greater than yours has been,” my master said,
“and so forget about it, do not be sad.
If ever again you should meet up with men
engaging in this kind of futile wrangling,
remember I am always at your side;
to have a taste for talk like this is vulgar!”
(Inferno XXX, l. 130-148)

This filial turning to his maestro forms Dante’s
conscience; it is an exercise of sursum corda, an
act of openness preparing him for the divine
light that will eventually flow directly into his
strengthened eyes.
Virgil encourages Dante to trust so that he
might learn to act on his own. “O my dear son,”
Virgil reassures Dante, as they are about to pass
through the wall of purifying fire at the top of
Mount Purgatory,
“Remember all your memories! If I
took care of you when we rode Geryon,
shall I do less when we are nearer God?...
It’s time, high time, to put away your fears;
turn towards me, come, and enter without
fear!” (Purgatorio XXVII, l. 20-24, 31-32)

Perfect love casts out fear, and Virgil uses all
his influence to bring Dante toward a final act
of will, confirming him in the pursuit of good.
A Curriculum of Beauty
“Good perceived as good enkindles love,”
Dante answers St. John, who is testing the graduate for entry to the vision of God (Paradiso
26

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XXVI, l. 28). In the Inferno, Virgil mediated
Dante’s journey through the disorder of those
“who lost the good of intellect,” but it is particularly in the Purgatorio that we see the chosen
curriculum of the Church for souls in grace.
Before the joy of the Beatific Vision, souls
advance in the joy of the Beatitudes. Christian
art surrounds Dante as he climbs: “all the inner
cliff” of the first Terrace of Purgatory “was pure
white marble,” forming an image of the Annunciation. Gabriel, “carved in an attitude of marble grace, / an effigy that could have spoken
words,” seems to be saying “Ave!”
for she who turned the key, opening for us
the Highest Love, was also figured there;
the outlines of her image carved the words
Ecce ancilla Dei, as clearly cut
as is the imprint of a seal on wax.
(Purgatorio X, l. 29-42)

Song, story, drama, history sacred and profane… organized, ordered, infuse order in souls.
Fr. Calmel indicates an application of this same
principle of educating through art:
In school, what has in itself the most power to
form the children – whether girls or boys – is
their contact with beautiful works (and later on
with a philosophical and theological teaching)
that express man in the use he makes of his
freedom.15

The liturgy of the Church envelops souls in
their climb up Mount Purgatory. “I could hear
voices,” Dante tells us from the third Terrace;
Each prayer they sang began with Agnus Dei;
the same words, sung in unison, produced
an atmosphere of perfect harmony.
(Purgatorio XVI, l.16-21)

“There is no infallible means of education,”
warns Fr. Berto, “but we hold for certain that
education through Gregorian chant is the best,
being the most theological and at the same time
the most apt to forge characters.”16 Dante educates as the Church educates: through beauty,
to adoration.
Invitation to Receive a Tradition
“I think it best you follow me,” is Virgil’s
invitation to Dante in the first canto of the
Divine Comedy. St. Thomas describes education
Continued on page 29…

COMMENTARY

A Reflection on

My Time at
St. Mary’s
College
Jane Spencer

I

n the children’s novel Carry on, Mr.
Bowditch, ship clerk Nathaniel Bowditch
teaches his uneducated shipmates to navigate by measuring the stars. “It [does]
things to a man,” Nat thinks, “to find out he
has a brain.” The point isn’t that the ship arrives
at its destination any more efficiently manned
by a whole crew of navigators than by one. Nat
is just glad that the men are intellectually satisfied and consequently happy. When I arrived
as a first-year student at St. Mary’s College, I
was surprised to find that—like myself—many of
my classmates hadn’t originally wanted to come
to St. Mary’s. They were persuaded by parents,
mentors, religious or friends to make a decision
which, to an ambitious teenager, seemed pointless: working hard for two years at an unconventional liberal arts college which wasn’t even
fully accredited. In hindsight, I see that this
decision was a mark of freedom: only a free
person “wastes” time on an education which is
simply good for him.
This essay reflects on the relation between
freedom, which has grown misunderstood (and
consequently fragile) today, and the mission of
St. Mary’s College. It draws three connections

and explores how the liberal arts are critical in
the connecting: the first is between freedom and
time, the second between freedom and understanding, and the last is between freedom and
pilgrimage.
My two years at St. Mary’s were a step out of
time. I remember trying to capture one night,
shortly before graduation, when my friends and
I sat on a dock watching the stars come out.
It was an “eternal moment,” like Dostoyevsky
described, or T.S. Eliot’s “intersection of the
timeless with time,” and I told myself that it
would stay for the rest of my life, continuing
somewhere in my soul. Two years had passed
quickly, but they had also been marked by interior stillness and a freedom from time because
what would come after was not the purpose of
what happened during those two years. Some
educations are preparations for a busy life in
the world: Nursing students study to take care
of the sick, MBA students study so they can
become successful businessmen, and students
of trades study to put their trades into practice.
The present is dominated by the shadow of the
future, and the education isn’t free; it is at the
service of something to come. At St. Mary’s,
27

COMMENTARY

however, the future held the mission to carry on
what we were doing in the present. Rather than
preparing us for life as nursing school prepares
functional nurses, our liberal education marked
us with the mission of returning to itself and of
spreading it into whatever active role we played
in the world. It established a core of contemplation which defied being “useful” because it,
itself, was the final goal. A liberal education is
a journey to the heart of what is—not to manipulate, cure or fix it, but simply to contemplate
its deepest reasons. This is why the liberal arts
have been dismissed by a use-driven society:
they can’t be used, but only lived. Learning
dead languages or theology yields no method
for making factory production more efficient,
and no one dissects Homer’s Iliad to harness
the words into something practical for ending
poverty or curing cancer; the essence would be
lost in the harnessing. Instead, the persisting
same-ness of the piece testifies to the persisting truths which it celebrates. When Francis
Bacon—at the beginning of the scientific revolution—re-defined “the true ends of knowledge…
[to be] benefit and use,” he sapped education of
its inherent worth: learning was no longer contemplative but became a tool whose worth was
measured by its productivity. Since our minds
are so closely tied to our identity, this is only
a step away from the conclusion that people
themselves should be measured by their productivity. Bacon’s modern day disciples champion
an exclusively STEM system of education in
which the classroom is merely a springboard to
material inventions. The liberal arts classroom
is not a springboard, but a resting place. It is
free from the passage of time because its value
doesn’t lie in a subsequent product or event, but
in the activity of the present moment.
At St. Mary’s, this activity was one of understanding: we were invited to know the way
things are most deeply, as a whole, and from a
higher perspective. My liberal arts classes were
like a kaleidoscope in which many layers contributed to a whole picture which, while greater than any individual subject, depended on
all of them. In history, we learned the context
of the ideas we discussed in philosophy. At the
same time, we saw these ideas play out in the
art of epic poetry and novels, and ultimately
sought the source of truth in theology. In a spiritual conference, one of the priests at the college explained that our education was freeing
us from our own opinions. We could step from
28

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the world of our own prejudices to the world
as it is, which was always more beautiful. It’s
true that this inspired us to plan for vocations
which would “set fire to the earth,” but even
more importantly our new understanding set
fire in our hearts: cor ardens was our college
motto. This was the point of our freedom: not
primarily in anything we would accomplish,
but in setting our minds on noble things to
understand and love, and in our consequent
happiness. Freedom depends on understanding
not only because we need to know what a man
should be before we can choose to be a good one,
but because understanding is the heart of the
human identity. Aristotle says that contemplation, or a wondering gaze at the highest truths,
is the act which defines a human person; we
are men because we can see the way things are.
Our desire to understand is consequently closely tied to our desire to be, and an exploration
of the world through the liberal arts is an act of
being. As Aristotle explains, “a human being is
free… when he is for his own sake and not for
someone else.” The liberal arts are deeply for
our own sake—not, however, enclosing us on
ourselves. Aristotle’s understanding of “for our
own sake” is expansive rather than isolating
because he sees our highest fulfillment to be
an act of contemplation: we gaze in worship at
God, the deepest Reason of all. The liberal arts
open our minds to contemplation, the friendship with Christ which is our purpose.
At St. Mary’s, we were told that we were, at
heart, pilgrims. Pilgrimage was “a microcosm of
life,” in the words of our chaplain. Freedom is an
invitation to enter into pilgrimage because our
identity is, first of all, a call towards a goodness
which must be pursued. Aristotle defines identity as a readiness for action. He calls it a “starting point”: from the moment of our conception
in the womb we have the capacity to thrive,
while actualizing this capacity is the journey of
a lifetime. The destination—our perfection—is as
fixed as a lighthouse, but this doesn’t make us
any less free in pursuing it because perfection
is the purpose of freedom. Our being, with its
aspirations, weaknesses and complex union of
body and soul, can’t be changed to serve other
ends; we can’t alter human nature to further
medicine, advance the arts, or stop wars. The
constraints of the puzzles we solve in life are
set by, rather than imposed on our nature. This
makes our identity and our pilgrimage to fulfill it free, subject to nothing but itself and its

COMMENTARY

author, God. It also means that the knowledge
of what we are and of what goodness means—a
knowledge pursued in the liberal education—is
essential to freedom. People don’t find liberation by removing every constraint, but by learning and embracing the essential constraints,
journeying towards what is best for them. Seeing the world truly is an invitation to set out
boldly towards the good.
One of Solzhenitsyn’s reproaches to the Russian people is that they “didn’t love freedom
enough,” causing apathy and cowardice in the
rise of Soviet power. It isn’t a coincidence that
Stalin targeted the educated, seeing them as a
special threat to his regime. Study which uncovers reality as a unified whole in light of the stars
safeguards a man’s freedom by allowing him
to order his life for his highest good. My peers
from St. Mary’s have gone on to start families,
work in trades, enter careers, pursue higher
education, or enter the religious life. We were
educated, however, for no particular vocation
except one: a friendship with truth in the Per-

son of Christ.
In the years since I’ve left St. Mary’s, I’ve
become grateful for something which I hardly noticed at the time. It is the strong sense of
humor of our professors and priests, and their
inability to be scandalized or to take offense.
Laughter is easy in an atmosphere of freedom
because it flows from trust: trust in one another,
in the good of the present, and in the promise
that truth will end up on top. Our classrooms
were places for hearty attitudes and hard laughter because we knew that the truth was trustworthy. It wasn’t sensitive or overly delicate.
Remembering this has given me confidence in
moments when the principles I learned at St.
Mary’s have been challenged in broader environments. While I might feel shaken and inexperienced, I can rest knowing that my mentors
passed through the same challenges, and after
years of trial, have preserved and refined conviction in the truth which is deep enough to be
merry.

Dante’s Divine Comedy: Educating for the Joy of God
Continued from page 26
as a leading by the hand, a manuductio, a gradual
advancing, together, in confidence. Both Dante
and St. Thomas were poets and philosophers,
but most of all they were teachers, guides of
souls; they can be our guides as we rediscover the vivifying principles of Catholic education. May we believe in charity, take the hand
they offer, and receive from them a tradition of
teaching able “to forge characters” in love with
the good.

Endnotes
1

2

Translation of the Divine Comedy by Mark Musa (The Portable
Dante, Penguin Books, 1995).

See Pope Benedict XV’s 1921 encyclical honoring Dante on
the 600th anniversary of the poet’s death, In Praeclara Summorum: “Among the many celebrated geniuses of whom the
Catholic faith can boast who have left undying fruits in literature and art especially and to whom civilization and religion
are ever in debt, highest stands the name of Dante Alighieri.
Dante lived in an age which inherited the most glorious fruits
of philosophical and theological teaching and thought, and
handed them on to the succeeding ages with the imprint of the
strict scholastic method. Amid the various currents of thought
diffused then too among learned men Dante ranged himself
as disciple of that Prince of the school so distinguished for
his angelic temper of intellect, Saint Thomas Aquinas. From
him he gained nearly all his philosophical and theological
knowledge, and while he did not neglect any branch of human

learning, at the same time he drank deeply at the founts of
Sacred Scripture and the Fathers.”
3

Third Abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Solesmes and
former professor of Thomistic theology. Retraite avec Dom
Delatte, Solesmes, 1991, pp. 56-57.

4

Psalm 18:2, Psalm 146:4.

5

The Mass of St. Pius V, STAS Editions, 2010, p. 57.

6

Pius XII, Allocution to Italian Mothers, October 26, 1941.

7

Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate, q. 1, a. 1, sc.

8

On the Teacher, De Veritate, q. 11, a. 1.

9

May 1953. Mother Hélène was Superior General of the
Dominican Teaching Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus of
Toulouse.

10

On the Teacher, De Veritate, q. 11, a. 1.

11

On Providence, De Veritate, q. 5, a. 8.

12

Le Mariage, Carnet spirituel 1, Association du R.P. de Chivré,
June 2004, p. 28.

13

Theologian of Archbishop Lefebvre at Vatican II, Dominican
tertiary, founder of the Dominican Sisters of the Holy Ghost,
in Réf lexions sur l’éducation.

14

Letter of December 28, 1934, in Notre Dame de Joie, Nouvelles
Editions Latines, 1973.

15

Ecole chrétienne renouvelée, Téqui, 1958, p. 63. Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel was a friend of Archbishop Lefebvre and chaplain
of the Dominican Teaching Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus
of Toulouse.

16

“L’Education par le grégorien,” in Itinéraires 246, Sept.-Oct. 1980.

29

LITERATURE

Love’s Atlantis:
The Lost Art of Poetic Knowledge
Jonathan Wanner

“Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.”
—Aquinas

W

hen students dip their toes into
a poem, they usually wade their
way through its figurative language until they wash up to some
shore of meaning. The problem is the students’
eyes: they believe they’ve discovered a new continent when, in reality, they’ve hit a sandbar.
The irony is that the poem’s meaning is not even
on land: it is in a New Atlantis fathoms below,
and you must drown a little to see it. To show
you what I mean, here are a few “sandbars” my
college students recently discovered:
Student 1: Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality” poignantly reminds
readers to appreciate nature with
child-like wonder.
Student 2: Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality” touches upon some
rather deep feelings about youth,
nature, and growing up.
30

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Student 3: Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality” really paints a vivid
picture in the reader’s mind through
the use of imagery, personification,
and metaphors.
No one would disagree, and that is precisely
the problem. These observations are so universal, so agreeable that they lack purpose entirely: the first two are true of nearly every Wordsworth poem, and the third describes millions
of literary works. Student 1 already knows that
he should appreciate nature as children do;
Student 2 simply records a list of themes he
found on LitCharts, neither specifying them
nor explaining why they matter; and Student
3—utterly confused about the poem’s content—
avoids interpreting it altogether, commenting
only on stock stylistic devices. In each case, the
student affirms familiar notions at the expense
of new-found wisdom, at the expense of experiencing the poem’s true artistry. They would
be better off if they drowned a little more in the
inconvenience of wonder.

LITERATURE

To be fair, these catch-all formulae are not
without incentives: they abolish the risk of disagreement; they hasten the writing process; and
most primary and secondary schools explicitly
encourage them since 1) they are easy to imitate, and 2) the appearance of logic is easier to
teach than actual logic. One can scarcely imagine what chaos—what anarchy!—would ensue if
we removed the “funnel” of meaningless generalities that must inaugurate every introduction: e.g. “Since the dawn of time people have
been quite fascinated by the beneficial influence
of nature. One such person is Wordsworth…”
Surely our memories would sink into oblivion
if the conclusion of every two-page paper did
not repeat what immediately came before it.
Surely morality would dissolve if we did not
tyrannize teenagers to memorize bullet-point
indexes of trite platitudes. Lady Liberty herself
would crumble lest we forget the laundry lists
of character names, literary devices, and banal
plot summaries…
The bare truth is that poetic knowledge is
not so quantifiable as mainstream schools, textbooks, and Sparknotes make it seem. There is,
Cleanth Brooks reminds us, a certain “heresy”1
of paraphrasing a poem: a curtailed summary, a familiar maxim, a handful of figurative
devices are poor substitutes for the total aesthetic experience of reading—the “living out”
of creation’s vacuity and transcendence in the
composite intimacy of the soul. Imagine if a
memory machine could vacuum up your childhood experiences, with all its scrapes and ice
cream, and replace them with a bullet-point
list of “themes.” It would be a curse nothing
short of diabolical! Nor is a simple reminder
“to know, love, and serve God” a fair replacement for a first-hand encounter of sanctification:
the salt-tears of a frank contrition, the lisping
of nuptial vows, the aroma of chrism seeping
into your pores. This is the stuff of poetry—the
grit and silk, the ebb and flow of meeting your
own humanity face-to-face, with all its trials and
transfigurations.
Of course, describing what poetic knowledge
is only takes one to the edge of the precipice:
poetry is an intuitive acquisition, and you must
leap to really know what the plummet feels like.
You cannot pin this kind of knowledge down
with scientific abstractions. It is not a moth collection. It is a living, intuitive knowing grounded in a constant fluctuation of colors, pitches,

odors, flavors, and textures. Reading a poem
is like peeking through a kaleidoscope where
contraries exchange and collide in patterns ever
new, mixing the familiar with the strange, pleasure with pain, life with death, order with chaos,
grief with joy.
So the canvas spins,
Never twice the same.

Only in those best of moments, the colors stop
their heaping. Through this little telescope of
shards and light, something beatific—what it is,
who can say?—shines:
Through the stillness the glass holds
(In its frame and in our eyes)
The raiment of the morn.
For an instant, the little world pauses
As a second sun.

When the vision fades, all that is left is wonder.
What did you find, you ask, through the kaleidoscope’s narrow way? You close your eyes. You
look up: you are back where you were before.
And yet, a ring – new-made –
Is stamped about your brow.
Look down. You might mistake the tube
For a flute that breathes colors instead of
notes
Or a pipe that endlessly drains the stain
Of every worldly thing.
But whatever your mistake,
Captured somewhere in this cylinder,
Which is as long as your vision,
Is a paraphrase of the dawn.

At its best, poetry is a seeing of the divine: a
“peering through the lattices” (Song of Songs
2:9). It wipes the dust off our eyes so we can get
a better glint of how the world is “apparelled in
celestial light.” 2
Of course, poetry is sublunary as well. The
angelic inevitably encounters the bestial as
high meets low, as the extraordinary greets
the ordinary. A poem could be as casual as a
stubbed toe or as set-apart as the marbled eyes
of a new-breathing babe. A poem is a zip-line
through the Alps, or a waltz in the rain, or the
crest of a tsunami, or a hornet’s sting, or the
puzzlement of a perfectly aggravating riddle.
Over daffodiled hills, through wasted plains,
you laboriously plod or skate with graceful ease.
You skim and dive and sometimes drown. You
seek, you sometimes find and often yield, but
31

LITERATURE

whatever is lost or found you return always to
the meter’s drumming, the ink’s humming, the
lyre’s strum. Always the heartstrings tug: a sad
mirth here, or there a pleasing pain—and the gut
cries that you have imagined more than you will
know. The lights dim, the curtains close, and
the world keeps its habit of going on. Yet the
memories whirl in the cosmic space between
your ears—the music of spheres, Dante’s rings,
and the elliptical planets on peacock tails. 3
Of course, peacocks do not trail literal solar
systems behind them, and most educators would
hardly believe that even a feather has a cosmic
purpose, or that every little ornament of nature
tends toward time’s ultimate end. Poetic fancy,
they presume, is only meaningful when it teaches students “innovation” or when it fools them
into learning quantifiable facts and catch-all
platitudes. A castle in the sky, under terms of
common sense, becomes an O-so-fun! opportunity to learn about meteorology, or to teach
a lesson about cloud pollution, or yet another
random occasion to remind children to “just be
nice.” How easily we demote the fine arts by
performing them like servile arts, as if poetry
were just like hiring a mechanic or prescribing the right medication. If we believe the only
point of a castle in the sky is to “get the job

done,” then we miss the opportunity of actually
looking at it, of admiring its Edenic glory. What
fool would say that God made roses beautiful
only so that we could make money selling them
or only so that children would have another
noun to memorize? The purpose of their beauty is desirability: we are drawn to them for
their own sake since, in themselves, they are a
foretaste of the divine. For “the beauty of anything created is nothing else than a similitude
of divine beauty,” so that to gaze upon a rose is
to touch, in a simple way, God’s transcendental
desirability, to peer at our very likeness of God,
and to ennoble the soul with an encounter of
its origins: indeed “divine beauty is the cause
of… all that is (Ex divina pulchritudine esse omnium derivatur).”4 How much more useful beauty would be to us if we used it a little less and
instead listened to its sparrow’s song, touched
its hem, smelled its incense, tasted its savor, and
watched it ebb and soar.
Still, to the angel-eyed, there is an indulgent taint to the aesthetic encounter: stopping
to smell the roses, even in the phantasmic theater of the imagination, feels so material, so
mutable, so vain. Surely infatuation with art
pales in comparison to the eternal realm of
immaterial concepts and universal essences.
As high-witted as this view may seem, Thomas Gilby assures us it is snobbery: “We must
distrust the philosophical journalese that …
imagines the mind as a cold impersonal being
lodged in us somehow, but quite apart from
the rhythm, the color, the scent of life, from
the untidiness and infinite variety of individual wholes.”5 Roses are undeniably corruptible,
contingent, not an ultimate end in themselves,
yet their concrete presence, their individuality,
their transience are the very reasons we coil
them in the palms of our hands:
“oh, the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die.”
—William Johnson Corey

William Allingham by Helen Allingham, 1876.

32

The Angelus u July - August 2022

There is a simple and immediate contact with
the real when we contemplate the particular
existence of beauty, not with the bestial appetite
of a Netflix binger, but with the all-encircling
body-mind union of a lover.
Certainly abstract concepts have some share
in this encounter. Dogs cannot comprehend
what a rose is, so they cannot understand a sonnet about one. Yet, universals do not beget or attract

LITERATURE

except in so far as they are in particular 6 and He
who is drawn to something desirable does not desire
to have it as a thought but as a thing.7 Contemplating what a rose is universally is not the same as
contemplating this rose. In the words of Gilby,
“Though the contemplative reason must rest in
types rather than in things for the present, the
mind still aspires to a closer imitation of the
divine knowledge, which regards first the individual distinctions of things, not their common
denominators.”8 To put it more simply, “Beatitude is not in principles but in things.”9
Mendelssohn, when pressed to explain the
meaning of his Song Without Words, simply
played the piece over again. In a brief instant,
he found that ineffable crossroad between the
senses, reason, and love.
Loving draws us to things more than knowing does.10
A thing may be loved more than it is known.11
A thing can be immediately loved though mediately
known.12

Yet, for all art’s beauty, students have no time
to look, no time to rest in the cross-eyed vision.
They are too busy working, and teachers are
too busy pouring the “imperial gallons of facts”
into the “vessels” of the student’s brains: the
catch-all generalities of PowerPoints slides and
Sparknotes webpages; the pre-packaged summaries of Youtube, Google, and Reddit; the
mass-produced trends of television and social
media. Plug in the formula, type your answer
in the search bar: at the touch of your fingertips
a screen or an arbitrary stranger can hand you
the facts, and “In this life, we want nothing but
Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!”13 Why even read
the poem when you can skip to “what it means”?
The “liberal” in “liberal arts” insinuates freedom: freedom from the flux of a groupthink
mentality, freedom to exercise the higher dials
of the body-soul union. Ironically, what English
students need is less support and fewer answers.
They need to sit in a silent place, blink at nature,
gape at art with senses wide open. They need
to listen to their own breath, trace their palms’
cracks, touch the million pore-holes that prick
about their skin. They need to sing stories
from their throat’s vessel, versify them, illumine them, scratch them on pulp. They need
to drown a little more in the world around so
that they can breathe a little more in the Atlantis it has always been.

A Herbaceous Border, Helen Allingham (1848-1926).

Endnotes
1

Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure
of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1947), 193.

2

William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,”
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 10th ed. (New York:
W.W. Norton and Company, 2018), 347.

3

Cf. Flannery O’Connor, “The King of the Birds.”

4

Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism and the Frontiers of Poetry, trans. Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1974), 31. Quotations from Aquinas’ Commentary
(lect. 5).

5

Thomas Gilby, Poetic Experience: an Introduction to Thomistic
Aesthetic (New York: Sheed & Ward Inc., 1934), 34.

6

Thomas Aquinas, Comm. In I Meta. Lect. I. 1a: V: 3, ad 4.

7

XXII de Veritate, 3, ad 4.

8

III Contra Gentes, 63, 1a: XLVII: I.

9

Thomas Gilby, Poetic Experience: an Introduction to Thomistic
Aesthetic (New York: Sheed & Ward Inc., 1934), 9.

10

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1a-2ae: XXII: 2.

11

Summa Theologica, 1a-2ae: XXVII: 2, ad 2.

12

Q. de Caritate, 2, ad II.

13

Charles Dickens, Hard Times (London: Chapman and Hall,
1905), 3.

TITLE IMAGE: Sunset over a Mountain Lake, Albert Bierstadt
(1830–1902).

33

ART

The Corruption of

Art Education
in the Modern Era

Prof. David Clayton

Crucifix of San Damiano - Santa Chiara - Assisi.
© José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 4.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/

ART

T

he Church has always seen the need of
art for the communication and sustenance of the Faith. The Seventh Ecumenical Council, which closed in 787
A.D., did not simply permit the use of images—
rather, it mandated the veneration of images of
Christ, Our Lady, and the Saints as an essential
aspect of devotional prayer and worship of the
prototypes that the images depict.
Every Catholic church therefore must have
images that inspire in the faithful right worship
and devotion. Such images will not only have
the right content—what they portray—but also
must portray that content in the right way—how
it is portrayed. The style of the art is just as
important as the content, because style enables
the artist who understands what he is doing
to convey both visible and invisible realities
through his painting.
Visible realities are conveyed by conformity to natural appearances. Put simply, we
know that we are looking at a painting of Jesus
because it looks like what we all believe Jesus
to have looked like, as handed on to us through
tradition.
Invisible realities are conveyed by partial
abstractions—slight deviations from natural
appearances that are undertaken by the artist
in such a way that we perceive truths about that
person that visual appearances alone could not
convey. For example, a man has an invisible and
immortal soul. An artist conveys to the viewer
that this person is alive and possesses a soul by
deviating from a strict naturalism. The viewer
understands that what is represented is not simply a model that is identical to a man in every
visible detail.
The precise way in which the artist deviates
from strict naturalism gives him or her a distinctive and recognizable artistic style. We recognize a Fra Angelico, not by his adherence to
natural appearances, but by the way he consistently deviates from them. Furthermore, we
recognize Fra Angelico as a great Christian
artist because tradition has judged his stylistic vocabulary to consist of a partial abstraction that abstracts—i.e. draws out— and hence
reveals even greater truths than mere naturalistic appearances alone could portray. This is
why, for example, the modern style of photorealism or the 19th-century realism of artists such
as Bouguereau are not considered authentically
Christian. They are too naturalistic.

Sketch for The Crucifixion, Graham Sutherland, 1946.
https://www.wikiart.org/

Similarly, this partial abstraction can be
done well or badly. Consider, for example, the
work of Picasso. His works were a deliberate
distortion of naturalistic appearances inspired
originally by traditional west African artistic
styles. He wished to portray man as the innocent noble savage, uncorrupted (as he saw it)
by a society of Christian values. This Romantic
anthropology, which originated with Rousseau
in the seventeenth century, manifests itself in
Picasso as both a false (and not to mention highly patronizing) view of west African society and
culture, and of Christian society and culture.
Given what Picasso was setting out to do, we
should be highly suspicious of any attempt to
portray Christian subjects in his style or those
that are consistent with any wrong anthropology. A painting of the Crucifixion in, say, a
20th-century expressionistic style will very
likely have within it an inbuilt contradiction.
The content might speak of Christ, but the style
speaks directly against it by design. To admit
such works into our churches is to risk undermining the Faith. Picasso himself painted a Crucifixion which is so distorted that it is just about
unrecognizable; one should not be surprised
that an avowed atheist should be so disrespectful of the subject. However, we see also what is
to my eye grave distortion of the 16th-century
Isenheim altarpiece—or at the very least a significant departure from the Christian tradition—in
the expressionistic style of the crucifixion painted in 1946 by the British artist Graham Sutherland. Sutherland was a convert to Catholicism
and so was presumably sincere in trying to por35

ART

tray the Christian message. This ignorance goes
all the way to the top: a version of Sutherland’s
Crucifixion is held in the Vatican Museum.
The reason that such works of art do make
it, and so often in the recent period, into our
churches, is that so few artists or those who
commission their work, even committed Catholics, understand Christian traditions of art.
They most especially misunderstand how both
style and content can work either for against
the Gospel. There are some who hate the Faith
and seek deliberately to use art to undermine
the Church. However, they would not get very
far if everyone else understood the traditional
ways in which Christian traditions in art balanced naturalism and idealism so as to convey
the mysteries of the Faith.
There is a need, therefore, for the re-establishment of the principles of a traditional
Christian approach to the formation of taste
and artistic skill. The essential elements of such
a formation are as follows:
First, the observation of natural appearances and the study, with explanation leading to
understanding, of past works of great Masters.
For those who wish to learn to draw and paint
this would involve copying nature and past
Masters from a canon of works. The choice of
Old Masters copied by artists in their training
dictates the natural style of the artist. So while
there is always a distinctive individual component as well, those who want to paint icons
should copy lots of icons, and those who want
to paint in the baroque style should copy many
examples of 17th-century baroque art.
Second is the study of the mathematics of
beauty. This is the traditional mathematical
system of visual harmony and proportion that
informed art and architecture for centuries
prior to the 20th century. It comes from the
study of musical harmony, the beauty of the
cosmos, and the numerical patterns and symmetries that exist within the isolated world of
mathematics itself. The figures most commonly
given credit for Christianizing this field of study
are St. Augustine and Boethius.
And third is a general Christian inculturation and spiritual formation. This would involve
not only the study of the Faith and Christian
culture, but for the greatest effect, a living of
the Christian life according to this pattern. It
would not have been so necessary to teach this
in the classroom in the past. Artists would have
36

The Angelus u July - August 2022

been immersed in a Christian culture in which
the very pattern of Christian living impressed
itself onto the hearts of the faithful. Even those
who rejected the Faith could not but help reflect
unconsciously aspects of Christian culture in
what they did. Today we are not so fortunate,
and are at a point where even Catholic artists
require such a formation.
Someone who went through such training would immediately understand why this
9th-century crucifixion, the San Damiano Crucifixion in Assisi, looks as it does. Every aspect
of this style is carefully worked out to portray
someone suffering as man, but immune to suffering as God.
If we look at mainstream art schools at our
modern universities, I cannot name one that
offers such training. In fact, most have abandoned every single element described above.
If the skills of drawing and painting are taught
at all, then it is highly unusual that it is to the
level that one would have expected 200 years
ago. Most do not even acknowledge beauty as a
property of being, and consequently most faculty at such schools would not even be aware that
mathematics of beauty even exists.
Finally, most not only do not offer a Christian inculturation, but they also enforce an
anti-Christian inculturation. This will be either
a modern twist on the Romantic worldview that
emphasizes any subjectivity and emotion, provided that it does not coincide with a Christian
worldview, which is generally forbidden. Or
more commonly nowadays, it will emphasize
an explicitly anti-Christian, anti-Western formation. Art departments, next to perhaps the
English literature departments in our modern
universities, are the most aggressive in pushing
this propaganda and excluding people who dissent from their orthodoxy.
One thing is certain: I would not send Catholic children to any of our modern universities to study art. They will almost certainly be
expelled for failing to conform, or will emerge
as radical revolutionary Marxists.

HISTORY

The Origins of
Education in
America
Fr. Daniel Muscha, SSPX

Colonial Times

A

merica has always been seen as a land
of opportunity; a land that allowed a
new way of life and a freedom from
the institutions and restrictions of
England and Europe. This is proven by the
fact that Harvard, the first American college,
founded in 1636, granted its first degree in 1642
without receiving authority of any kind! This
might pass unnoticed except for the fact that
in England the Bachelor of Arts degree could
be awarded only by Oxford and Cambridge
and only for law, medicine, theology and the
traditional seven liberal Arts. Thus, Harvard
granting degrees was as Samuel Elliot Morrison
explains, “almost a declaration of independence
from King Charles.”1
America never had any distinction between
college and university as Europe did, where
a college was a place to receive instruction,
was largely self-governing and had no power
to grant degrees, and where a university was a

degree-granting institution having received this
special authority in the form of a papal bull or
a Royal or Parliamentary charter. With Harvard granting its first degree independently of
any authority, the precedent had been set and
by the time of the American Revolution there
were at least nine institutions granting degrees.
The universities of Europe date back to medieval times, and so received a medieval heritage
of being run by clerics. They were largely independent of government control and consequently removed from politics. They possessed rich
tracts of lands, large endowments, and buildings for support. Free from government control,
they were given to free academic pursuits and
learning.
In America the college or university depended directly upon the support of the local government and people around them. Lay boards oversaw their welfare and ensured they remained
in touch with the community upon whom they
were directly dependent. Nor did the American
37

HISTORY

college have any pool of well-educated men to
draw from in forming the staff for the colleges
and universities. Thus, the staff was often young
and inexperienced and could not expect the
deference and respect that would protect them
from lay control. This is why the President and
faculty ruling the institution but subject to veto
by an outside body became the pattern for the
American college and university and continues to this day. This meant that the American
colleges and universities were not going to be
self-governing institutions for the learned, but
rather centers for the diffusion of learning.
It is not hard to see that this outside control of the American university made it prone
to ideology, pressure, and politics. The American educational system was more concerned
with the diffusion of learning to all rather than
the advancement and perpetuation of learning.
University education for all practical purposes
became “under-graduate learning.” The purpose of education was to supply each region
with knowledgeable ministers, doctors, lawyers,
merchants, etc., and so the American College
was at the center of each colony’s affairs.
The early universities were run by religious
sects and as each religious sect opened a college, it was a good reason for other opposing
sects to open their own college to save the youth
from the untruths of their competitors. This
largely religious nature of the college necessarily caused the secularists to open their own
institutions free from any religious affiliation.
The competition among institutions caused the
number of institutions to increase exponentially. From 1746-1769, twice as many colleges were
founded than in the previous 100 years, and
from 1769-1789 twice as many again than in
the previous 20 years!
This competition among institutions, coupled with the sparse population, necessarily
led to the faculty of these institutions being
composed of rivaling sects with often only the
president being from the sect of the institution.
However, such competitiveness also led to the
recruitment of students, and no religious institution imposed a religious test as a condition for
entry. All of this had a liberalizing effect and
practically “unity in diversity” was the spirit of
the American university.
By the end of the colonial era, nearly every
type of recruitment of students other than the
sports scholarship was used. Fancy brochures
38

The Angelus u July - August 2022

and alumni, acting as recruiting agents, were
common. This recruiting necessarily led to
the lowering of standards for admission and
graduation and the adding of popular courses.
John Trumbull complained in 1773, “Except in
one neighboring province, ignorance wanders
unmolested at our colleges, examinations are
dwindled to mere form and ceremony, and after
four years dozing there, no one is ever refused
the honors of a degree, on account of dullness
and insufficiency.” 2 America was not just offering education to all—it was offering an inflated
intellectual currency! The purpose of American
education had been set, and it was to make good
citizens. American education was concerned
with diffusing, not deepening, learning, and so
education was becoming more and more subservient to economics.
Another factor in education was the need
for men to perform a variety of tasks which in
Europe were reserved to specialists. The shortage of personnel and the frontier character of
America, as well as poorly defined roles, caused
citizens to be jacks-of-all-trades. A successful
New England clergyman was likely to be something of physician, politician, teacher and other
roles as well. An American businessman’s skills
needed to be broad and fluid rather than specialized.
This blurring of roles also included women.
For example, in frontier America the need for
women’s help in trade and on the plantation was
crucial. Scarcity of help removed social prejudices. Thomas Jefferson admitted that with his
own daughter, Patsy, her education needed to
be “considerably different from what I think
would be most proper for her sex in any other
country other than America.”3
The Democracy of America needed lawyers,
since every colony needed law, and most especially while the colonies were being founded
and established. However, the need and the
looseness of education in America did not lend
itself to specialized lawyers as in England. A
lawyer in America could even be handicapped
if he was “too systematized,” and so American
legal knowledge became simplified and popular.
The same need also led to a certain simplicity and lack of refinement in medicine, farming,
and science. Men were not specialized in their
craft and so practicality, and often crudeness,
in craft was the norm in early colonial America.

HISTORY

There was more emphasis on “popular science”
or things that could be understood by everyone
rather than refinement of craft.
When Abbé Raynal said in 1774, “America
has not yet produced one good poet, one able
mathematician, one man of genius in a single
art or science,”4 Thomas Jefferson was annoyed
but could only say that the colonies had not had
time yet to produce a Homer or Shakespeare,
but then pointed to George Washington as a
great military leader.

Post-Colonial Years
In the years after the Revolution, America
was lost in the struggle to establish a national identity. Having broken from England, she
wanted to throw off her English habits and
develop a culture of her own. This is what drove
Noah Webster to publish his “American Spelling Book” in 1789 and his first dictionary in
1806. He wanted to establish the “purity of the
English language” which he thought had been
destroyed in England by writers of the 18th century.
With his spelling book and use of the spelling bee, Webster sought to change the spelling
and pronunciation of the English Language to
an American language. The American pronunciation of the language became what the word
“ought to sound like” rather than by custom.
This is clear when he says in the preface to his
dictionary “those people spell the best, who do
not know how to spell.”5

With the influx of people to America, the
great melting pot, there were in the 19th century many words from other language which
became part of daily speech. Slang became so
commonplace that truly the American language
is one of slanging.
The opportunity for the common person to
own land was arguably the single most important factor in drawing people to America. This
was impossible in England as the land was
owned by a few. America was seen as a land of
opportunity, and following the Revolution the
American businessman was born. Often coming
from lowly roots, men in the 19th century had
an irresistible urge to “improve themselves.”
This improving, though, most often meant making money and lots of it. Thus, Alexander de
Toqueville says of Americans that they were
taken with the pursuit of money. This desire for
money led to the over-emphasis on the practical
and useful in America. Even education suffered
more and more from this.
In the 19th century the expansion of America grew at an exponential rate. With the founding of each town, county, territory, and state
there was an overwhelming need for politicians.
Thus, there was a great emphasis on politicians
in America; this need even began to affect the
primary schools. American politicians were not
men of great learning but practical men who
often possessed little education; they became
self-taught orators as politicians. Thus, even in

A Dame’s School, Thomas George Webster (1800-1886). Dame schools were small, privately run schools for young children that emerged
in the British Isles and its colonies during the early modern period.
39

HISTORY

Elementary school class on Native American Culture. Photo: Frances Benjamin Johnston, ca. 1900.

the primary schools, increasing importance was
placed on rhetoric and debating.
The McGuffey Readers, published in 1836,
made reading a “rhetorical exercise” and listed twelve rules regarding articulation, inflection, accent emphasis, modulation and poetic
pauses. Children in primary school were often
promoted by grade according to their ability
to read aloud, while in secondary schools there
were public ceremonies held to demonstrate this
ability. In the university, rhetoric, elocution and
oratory were essential subjects.
The McGuffey Readers presented the great
speeches, often of politicians, which were memorized until history became almost just a series
of great speeches for children. From the Revolution to the Civil War, history seems almost
to have been enacted by great speeches. John
Adams in 1816 wished to collect the great orations and “then write the history of the last
forty-five years in commentaries upon them.”6
Indeed the history of many a politician such as
Daniel Webster or Abraham Lincoln could be
followed by his great speeches.
America was seized by the spoken word and
a religious leader not uncommonly held his post
purely because of his ability to preach captivating sermons. Davy Crockett was largely uneducated and had contempt for book learning. Yet,
40

The Angelus u July - August 2022

by his speeches which were uncouth and full of
slang, he appealed to the common man and was
elected to Congress.
The use of the McGuffey Reader directly
led to a decline in the reading of the great classic works and was replaced by short phrases,
speeches, and anecdotes of great literature. The
same began to be true of history, which became
the study of the exploits of the great men of history, especially American history, rather than a
uniform study of events.
America following the Revolution was in
need of heroes. Popular literature used both
information and disinformation to form legends
around popular figures such as Daniel Boone,
Davy Crockett, Mike Fink, Kit Carson… This
literature combined humor with fantasy and
was crude and lowbrow, but popular. True literature requires an audience with sufficient education and free time that was often absent in
early America.
By the time of the Civil War, the Federal
Government possessed vast tracts of land and
used these lands to finance the expansion of the
railroad. Justin S. Morrill succeeded in getting
the Morrill Act passed in 1862, which gave the
state federal lands—30,000 acres for every senator and representative—to be used in establishing a college or university. This gave rise to the

HISTORY

state-sponsored college and university and reinvigorated many an institution with land to use
for farming and the teaching of other mechanical improvements; so began the “agricultural
and mechanical colleges.” However, many an
institution began to change its curriculum and
offer popular degrees and subjects in an effort
to gain some of this public land.

Uniting the Nation
By the beginning of the 20th century, the
expansion of America was largely complete.
Now came an age of uniting America and establishing her firmly in the democratic tradition.
This is reflected in the reform of education at
the beginning of the 20th century.
By the end of the 19th century, it became
firmly established that every man and woman
had a “right” to receive an education. It was
then clear that to prepare the majority of minds
for this education in the college and university,
a new free public school must be available to all
and especially new secondary schools. Thus, the
public high school was born. There was debate
about whether the high school should be for a
few privileged individuals who would make up
an aristocracy and so help the majority by their
privilege, or if it should be completely free and
available to all.
Samuel T. Eliot, one of the most influential
proponents of a public high school, saw it as
allowing the poor child the chance to have the
same education as the rich. John Dewey was
also a big proponent of the free public high
school that would be available to all. Dewey
had a natural abhorrence to an aristocracy, but
sought to change the entire educational system.
Indeed his ideas are responsible for the making of the public school system which we have
today.
Dewey is widely considered to be the American philosopher. Although one may deny
that he is truly a philosopher, his ideas had
far-reaching consequences in education. The
underlying theme of Dewey’s philosophy of education is that the teacher must be sure to respect
and prepare the educational experience of the
child. He saw that children learn in a variety of
ways, and so rather than inflicting a traditional
classroom of learning on the child, the teacher should prepare an environment and various
activities where the child is able to participate
and learn as he chooses. The teacher’s role is to

guide the child’s education by providing these
activities and ensuring that there is a healthy
educational experience.
Through this emphasis on activity as the
essential means for the educational experience, Dewey dissolved not only the old discipline of education but also subject matter and
even curricula. “Growth” became the end of
education and “activity” the means, yet growth
for growth’s sake as Dewey proposed is not a
satisfactory end. As this New Education was
applied, Americans became increasingly confused about the ends and goals of education.
So the American Public High School was
born, and it became the institution which was
to embody the new ideas of education. It is here
more than in the public primary schools that
children were given the new education and
prepared for college and university. The high
school became the largest and best building
in town; really, it became the heart of every
town and so also the heart of America. In 1918
the National Education Association reported and adopted the Seven Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, which became
the credo of the New American High School.
These objectives are listed (without priority) as:
(1) Health, (2) Command of Fundamental Processes, (3) Worthy home-membership, (4) Vocation, (5) Citizenship, (6) Worthy uses of leisure,
(7) Ethical character.
America set out to form a land of opportunity free from the constraints of the Old World
and indeed she liberated herself from them. In
liberating herself in education, she liberated
herself from the traditional values of a liberal
arts education, which led to a system of education serving democracy. It became increasingly a tool forming public ideology rather than a
place of pure academic pursuit.

Endnotes
1

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans, The Colonial Experience (New
York: Vintage Books, 1958) p. 175.

2

Boorstin. p. 182

3

Boorstin, p. 187

4

Boorstin, p. 244.

5

Boorstin, p. 288.

6

Boorstin, p. 310.

41

REVIEW

God and
Modern War

A Review of Phil Klay’s Missionaries
Review by William Gonch

E

velyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited pulls
a fast one on its protagonist, its audience, and maybe even its author. Its
narrator is Charles Ryder, an agnostic English boy raised by an emotionally distant father, who has been starved of art, culture, and human connection. At Oxford in the
1920s, Charles befriends Sebastian Flyte, the
charismatic, troubled, and fantastically wealthy
son of one of England’s great Catholic families.
Sebastian introduces Charles to his family and,
through them, to everything that Charles has
been denied: history, emotional connection, the
great European tradition of art and high culture,
and the Catholic Church. Charles falls utterly
in love—with the family, with Sebastian’s sister Julia, with the great English country seat of
Brideshead Castle. Just as Waugh draws Charles
into Sebastian’s orbit, he invites his readers into
their world through the elegance and beauty
of British aristocratic life between the world
wars. The novel’s style reflects Waugh’s longing
for the same world. He wrote Brideshead while
recovering from an injury during World War

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II, indulging in its lush prose to escape from
wartime drabness and scarcity.
By the novel’s end, the family is scattered,
their cultural world has vanished, and Brideshead Castle has been turned into an army supply depot. The second world war and the characters’ own flaws destroy the world that Ryder,
and many readers, found so appealing. But the
characters find their salvation in and through
destruction, and the novel’s theme is the quiet
action of Grace drawing each character to a
salvation that looks like worldly loss. Take,
for instance, Charles and Julia: after numerous missteps, they finally enjoy a truly happy
and fulfilling romance. The second half of the
novel drives toward their marriage. But both are
divorced, and Julia is Catholic. Charles wishes to marry her, but she realizes that to claim
earthly happiness by marrying Charles would
be to finally reject the God who loves her, and
she refuses to do it. She does not, by making this
rejection, become a holy woman. But she trusts
that “if I give up this one thing I want so much,
however bad I am, [God] won’t quite despair of
me in the end.”

REVIEW

Julia’s rejection of Charles shows how Waugh
tells two stories at once. The “outer story” is a
catastrophe: Sebastian’s family is scattered and
their cultured aristocratic world vanishes. The
suffering caused by this catastrophe is real. But
in the “inner story,” God’s Love saves the characters in and through that same catastrophe.
The inner story transforms those same events
into signs and means of Grace. Julia is not a
saint, but she—and every other character who
receives the inner-story treatment—is on her way
to salvation.
Phil Klay’s recent novel Missionaries is very
different from Brideshead—fast-paced and thrilling where Waugh’s novel is meditative. Klay
writes about war, and his work is sometimes
gruesomely violent, as befits its subject matter.
Nevertheless, Klay is one of the best Catholic
writers since Waugh’s death, and he is working
in Waugh’s mode: here, too, an “outer” story
attracts most of the attention, but an unnoticed
“inner” story draws characters toward God. The
title’s ambiguity refers to both stories. Its protagonists in the American and Colombian military are missionaries for order, freedom, and
democracy, and ultimately their missions come
to naught. But underneath we can see glimpses
of a Divine grace pursuing these lost missionaries of a secular world order. In this way the
title is reminiscent of the Gospel’s irony: when
Roman soldiers mocked Christ with the crown
of thorns, they did not realize they were crowning the true King.
Klay has a powerful gift for depicting war’s
mixture of violence and normality. One soldier-character in Missionaries recounts a raid
on an Iraqi insurgency leader by declaring,
“Al-Zaw­ba’i’s house was the nicest I ever raided. Not the wealthiest—we raided plenty of
pimped-out palaces across Iraq—but it was
classy. More books than I’ve ever seen in any
house, American or Iraqi or otherwise. Some
were in English. Mostly history books but also
a worn old Huckleberry Finn. I won’t forget seeing that.” It is unsettling to think of U.S. special
forces blasting down the door of a house full of
books, unsettling also to think of Al-Zawba’i,
an officer in Saddam Hussein’s security apparatus, as a cultured man of letters. A moment
later there is another shock: an ungainly teenager charges down the room at the soldiers, and
the captured ex-Ba’athist hurls himself in front
of the boy, begging the soldiers not to hurt him.

The boy is Al-Zawba’i’s son; he had been tortured by Shi’ite militiamen, and is now frail and
unstable. You don’t think of Saddam’s henchmen having special-needs children.
Klay knows his subject: he served in the U.S.
Marines from 2005-2009, including more than a
year in Anbar Province, Iraq during the Surge.
His first book, Redeployment, is a collection
of stories about soldiers and veterans during
the global war on terror; the book was widely praised and won the National Book Award
in 2014. He has a gift for finding the poetry in
military lingo and soldiers’ slang: an evening
gathering is “zero dark and cold,” and a platoon
has two Mormons, “the sober Mormon” and
“the drunk Mormon.” There is a lot of profanity but none of it is gratuitous; it is an attempt to
be faithful to the way that soldiers talk. Much
more shocking than profanity is his soldiers’
blunt narration of the war’s strange moments.
One story from Redeployment opens, “We shot
dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose,
and we called it Operation Scooby. I’m a dog
person, so I thought about that a lot.”
43

REVIEW

War attracts people, and Missionaries shows
its attractions. In one scene, a soldier in the
U.S. special forces reflects on the anticipation
of combat, which gives his men a feeling that is
part purpose, part connection with their buddies, and part adrenaline rush. “Before you
hit a target,” he says, “there’s a sharpening to
every second, eyes and ears tensed, the vibration of your heart beating, drumming through
your chest. Your mind stays calm, detached,
registering the fear, the excitement, the small
movements of the men you’ve trained with,
each in their positions, as trained and executed time after time so you don’t have to see but
feel Diego, Ocho, Jason, and the rest… as part
of a larger organism capable of covering every
bloody angle of approach.” But when his “predator instincts” reach out to the enemy, there
is a moment at which they change, taking on
“the alertness of prey.” The soldier realizes that
“the men you hunt are meat eaters too”—that
the enemy experiences the same heightened
awareness, that you and they are equals as you
prepare for combat, which “lends an aura of the
sacred to the profane work to come.” Most of the
characters who volunteer for Klay’s front line
are drawn to this “sacred” blend of adrenaline
and meaning. For all its horror, war gives you
something to love.
Missionaries paints on a wide canvas. The
novel follows four storylines that begin far
apart—in Pennsylvania; in Helmand Province,
Afghanistan; in a small village in Colombia;
and among Colombia’s military leadership.
The stories converge during negotiations to
end one of the world’s longest-running wars.
The Colombian civil war began as a Communist insurgency in the 1960s; by the 2000s, it
had devolved into a many-sided quagmire in
which left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, private militias, and the Colombian state
fought shifting battles against one another. By
the 21st Century the war has lost its ideological
coloring; right-wing and left-wing groups have
become drug-smuggling operations. Nevertheless, their conflicts are as deadly as ever: it’s the
Thirty Years’ War, but with cocaine.
The U.S. backs the Colombian state with
money and military equipment in order to suppress the drug trade, and by the novel’s start it
is putting pressure on the Colombians to conclude peace. The war and the peace process
draw characters toward the war-ravaged town
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of La Vigia, where the fog of war leads them to a
crisis that none of them expected. By following
the convergence among characters who do not
know one another, Klay transforms war itself
into a character. The war follows its own logic,
and decision-makers lack crucial information.
For example, the crisis kicks off when Colombian guerrillas kidnap Lisette, an American journalist in her thirties. The American and Colombian militaries believe her kidnapping to be the
work of Jefferson Lopez, a paramilitary leader
who is the novel’s main villain. They decide to
move against him.
But Jefferson wanted nothing to do with
her kidnapping. Instead, through a series of
misunderstandings, Colombian farmers in
the region became convinced that Lisette was
working with Jefferson. Some two-bit guerrillas have beef with Jefferson; they kidnap her to
get back at him, and he sets out frantically to
try to recover her to avoid becoming the target
of the U.S. or Colombian military. Meanwhile,
the militaries moving against Jefferson are fumbling in the dark.
In short, no one truly chooses the conflict
between the military and Jefferson’s organization. It is initiated by accident and follows its
own logic. In this way, the logic of war appears
as a superhuman and inscrutable force, one in
which human beings are caught up by accident
or chance. By depicting soldiers within the grip
of a system larger than any of them can understand, Klay invokes a literary tradition that
you might call the “Vietnam Theory of War.”
Novels such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961)
and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
depict war, bureaucracy, and the state as inscrutable, impersonal forces that shape our lives but
that sit beyond any individual’s direct control.
Such novels are full of events like Lisette’s kidnapping, in which crucial, life-and-death decisions are made by people with no clear picture
of what is going on. Often, too, they feature
circular narrative structures: characters make
choices and go on wild adventures but end up
back where they started. The lack of progress
or resolution asks readers, “What is the point
of all this war?”
Klay’s account is different. For him, the
“sacredness” of war gives dignity to its participants, but it can be a trap if it competes with
the God Who is the true source of sacredness.
Characters who make an idol of war can find

REVIEW

themselves caught in the circle that Heller and
Vonnegut imagined. One character, Juan Pablo,
an officer in the Colombian military, embraces the war as a choice between sources of the
sacred. He chooses the Colombian state over
God repeatedly until he becomes an agnostic.
He makes a god of Colombia’s attempts to bring
order to the war-torn country but eventually
loses faith even in that. He ends up working
as a mercenary in Yemen, fighting alongside
an international cadre of soldiers-for-hire. He
has no ideological stake in the Yemeni war, but
he aligns himself with modern warfighting as
a form of “progress.” “It does not matter,” he
decides, “if you stirred the passions of the people by demonizing the government or the capitalists or the Liberals or the Conservatives or
the Catholics or the Protestants or the Muslims
or the Jews.” He has seen the world as a conflict
between high-tech, faceless “civilization” and
“primitive,” specific human relationships, and
chosen the former.
Unlike characters in Vonnegut or Heller,
Juan Pablo chooses to make himself a cog in
the machine of war. And Klay offers us an alternative, hidden story that makes even the logic
of war into an opportunity for God’s Grace.
Juan Pablo’s daughter Valencia plays a crucial role in the story’s climax and her actions,
well-intentioned but foolish, cause the death of
an innocent woman. When her father learns
what she has done he is proud of his daughter,

whatever the consequences, because she took
“bold action” amid danger. Their conversation
is painful because Juan Pablo praises her for
actions of which she is ashamed. The scene ends
with father and daughter looking out over the
evening skyline of Bogotá, her father “pointing
to the shifting colors over the mountains, over
the white modern high-rise apartments, the old
colonial buildings of the Candelaria.” Both see
the same city, but while her father marvels at its
beauty, Valencia looks at it as an exile, marked
by her guilt.
Valencia set off toward La Vigia out of “simple faith” and a desire to do good, and she learns
how complicated and broken the world is. But
she learns something greater, too. At the end
of their dinner her father takes her hand and
“his love for her felt painful and cruel, and she
wondered, if there was a God, if that was what
His love actually felt like.” She has learned that
she is a sinner and that if she is to know God’s
love she will need to reach it through suffering.
Don’t be deceived by the language, “if there was
a God.” Although Valencia has not reached a
mature faith, she, like Julia in Brideshead Revisited, is on the road to it. Unlike her father, earthly disappointment does not make her cynical,
and she does not see suffering as something to
be minimized through force. She sees it as the
road to hope, and like Waugh, Klay leaves her
as she takes the first step down that road.

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TO THE COMMUNITY

Immaculate Conception Acad

Providen

Dear Reverend Fathers, Sisters, Colleagues,
Parents, Friends, and Students—

I

t is an honor to be here today. It is an honor to be able
to address you, soon to be graduates, in this special
capacity. I am happy to have the chance to teach you
one last time, and to offer you a bit of advice.
Graduates, you are soon to become part of a very select
group of men, of which I am a member. I speak to you today,
not only as your teacher, but as an alumnus of ICA. Twenty
years ago, I too graduated from this school. I sat in a folding chair next to the stage in the church basement. Petrified with nervousness, I gave a speech, woodenly delivered.
When I graduated I did not expect to stand here before
you today, in this capacity. I had other plans. But divine
providence has brought me here. And I am happy it has.
Of course, thinking about the past twenty years while wondering what to say today, I was led to reflect on divine
providence.
What do we think of when we hear “divine providence”?
Most likely, we think of, well, God providing, especially
in the context of our earthly lives. And, indeed, this is a
part of divine providence. Christ Himself tells us this. In a
very poignant passage in the Gospel of St. Matthew, when
Christ is sending His Apostles out to preach, and they are,
no doubt, anxious about what will happen to them in His
absence; He reminds them of God’s solicitude, saying “Are
not sparrows sold two for a penny? And yet it is impossible
for one of them to fall to the ground without your heavenly
Father’s will… Do not be afraid, therefore. You are more
valuable than many sparrows.” More valuable than many
sparrows! I always liked that line—it would seem condescending, even sarcastic, if it were not said in such a fatherly
way. The tone of the line reminds me very much of the tone
that I, as a father, must use with a very small child who is
worried about Mama, who is not home. I know the child’s
fear is irrational, and even silly, but I also know that the
child’s pain is real, and so I have to remind him, very gently, that Mama has gone to the store, and has not, in fact,
been eaten by a bear. In the same tone Christ reminds me
that I am more valuable than many sparrows.
And this is a comfort! In a bad day, or week, or month,
when the principal is grumpy and the students are restive
46

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TO THE COMMUNITY

demy Commencement Address

nce and Silence
Dr. John Tardiff

and things seem broken and the bank account is
low, I do take comfort in the fact that I am worth
a lot of birds. In fact, because I have delved
deeply into the writings of the Angelic Doctor,
I know that I am worth all the birds. No, I am
worth more than all the birds. In fact, I am more
valuable than the stars in the heavens. And so
are you. Thus God, who through the love that is
His very nature, made us in His image and likeness, and holds us ut pupillam oculi, will never
let us slip through His fingers, provided we do
not wriggle out of them on our own.
But divine providence is so much more
than that. Divine providence is His creating,
and directing, the entire order of the universe
according to His wisdom and knowledge.
Divine providence holds all things in their
natures and directs them to their end. By divine
providence, the stars shine; by divine providence, the oceans heave; by divine providence,
whales are whales. By divine providence Christ
was born, Mary is our mother, ICA is here, and
I stand before you today. And by divine providence you are graduating. It really is worthwhile to meditate on divine providence. Such
a meditation, quite literally, puts all things in
their proper context.
Divine providence has placed ICA here for
a purpose—to educate you, dear graduates. And
what does that mean, to educate you? If I was to
fully unpack that, this would be a very long talk
indeed. So I will put it in a nutshell—ICA aims
to produce prudent men. If you are prudent, you
will have responded well to our teaching. ICA
also aims to produce contemplative men. If you
delight in, and rest in, the truth, you will have
responded well to our teaching.
These might seem rather jarring statements.
Prudent? We must understand what that means.
It does not mean careful. It does not mean slow
to act. In current parlance “prudent” even has
connotations of shiftiness and pragmatism. But

June 5, 2021

that is just because the world is deeply evil. Prudence, in fact, is the queen of the moral virtues,
it is that which makes the other virtues, such
as justice, temperance, and courage, virtues at
all. Prudence, briefly stated, is right reason in
human action. It is acting in accordance with
reality.
But what does this look like, in practice? As
Josef Pieper puts it, “The Christian is prudent;
namely, he does not allow his view on reality
to be controlled by the Yes or No of his will,
but rather he makes this Yes or No of the will
dependent upon the truth of real things.” Thus,
the prudent man conforms his will with the
truth: he does not act against the truth of reality, he does not act in such a way as to attempt
to change the truth to fit his own liking.
Still, this needs clarification. And St. Thomas
clarifies. At one point he rather dryly explains
that three things are required for prudence:
knowledge of principles, knowledge of particulars, and the cleverness to choose the means
to the end. This simple enumeration actually
reveals truths of tremendous depth. What does
“knowledge of principles” mean? On a basic
level, knowledge of right and wrong. But also,
knowledge of what is noble, knowledge of what
the true value of a things is, knowledge of the
goodness of things. All of these types of knowledge come to bear in the virtue of prudence.
Knowledge of particulars is exactly what it
sounds like: knowledge of the circumstances
surrounding concrete actions.
Prudence, then, very much requires a clear
perception of reality. So, too, does contemplation. For what is contemplation but the knowledge of the truth for its own sake, the quiet
vision of truth wherein we delight in and affirm
it as both true and good. In contemplation we
receive a little fulfillment of our intellectual
nature, which desires all truth. This is what ICA
intends you to be—both prudent and contem47

TO THE COMMUNITY

plative. Prudent, to direct your actions well, in
accordance with reality, and contemplative, to
rest in the truth, to know and love God.
Both prudence and contemplation require
knowledge of reality. And it is this knowledge
that we have striven to give you year after year.
In all your classes, but especially in English,
Philosophy, and Religion, we have pointed you
towards the truth and coaxed, cajoled, prodded,
and guided you so that you might look, see,
understand, and affirm. Now that you are graduating, we will not be there for you anymore,
or at least not in the same way, and certainly
not with such frequency. Now it will be up to
you to act in accordance with reality, to direct
yourself with prudence. Now it will be up to
you to recognize what you are, and to feed the
limitless desire for truth that is so deeply rooted
in your very nature as intellectual creatures. To
do these things, you must know, and to know,
you must see and hear.
Christ in the Gospels often repeats some
version of an exhortation to seeing and hearing in the form of “he who has eyes to see, let
him see,” or “he who has ears to hear, let him
hear.” And this is a bit odd for a couple of reasons. One reason is that no one who followed
Christ lacked working eyes and ears—because
if someone did, Christ fixed them. Christ cured
the blind and the deaf quickly, with a word or
a touch. So, obviously, everyone listening and
seeing should have eyes to see, and ears to hear.
Another reason is, of course, that Christ implies
that one may see but not see, and hear but not
hear. In fact, he states this explicitly, and in an
almost impassioned manner, in the Gospel of
St. Matthew. When asked by the apostles why
He speaks in parables, Christ responds:
If I talk to them in parables, it is because,
though they have eyes, they cannot see, and
though they have ears, they cannot hear or
understand. Indeed, in them the prophecy of
Isaias is fulfilled, You will listen and listen, but
for you there is no understanding; you will
watch and watch, but for you there is no perceiving. The heart of this people has become
dull, their ears are slow to listen, and they
keep their eyes shut, so that they may never
see with those eyes, or hear with those ears, or
understand with that heart, and turn back to
me, and win healing from me.

And what did Christ want them to see and
to hear? Why, Himself, of course, and the truth
48

The Angelus u July - August 2022

that He was speaking to them. And it is that
truth that we, too, must see and hear. He is not
here to speak to us with his corporeal body, but
the Church still is. Yet, it is not just the Church
that speaks of God, that speaks truth. As King
David says in Psalm 19,
See how the skies proclaim God’s glory, how
the vault of heaven betrays his craftsmanship!
Each day echoes its secret to the next, each
night passes on to the next its revelation of
knowledge; no word, no accent of theirs that
does not make itself heard, till their utterance
fills every land, till their message reaches the
ends of the world.

The entire world, all of creation, quietly
shouts the glory of God and proclaims the truth,
if only we can see and hear.
So, how do we see and hear? Well, here is
my advice to you, in a form so simple and so
familiar that I hope you remember it: Be Quiet!
God speaks to us in silence, and reality
speaks to us in silence: our silence. God spoke
to Elias not in the storm, or the earthquake, or
the fire, but in the gentle breeze. And Elias,
who was waiting quietly, listening quietly, heard
him. Be quiet. But when I say “be quiet” I do
not mean that you should simply “shut up.”
The fruitful silence is not simply an absence
of noise. Rather, it is a humble attentiveness.
It is a hopeful openness to perception. As Josef
Pieper puts it,
One who is truly listening is not deadening himself into an unnatural and unintellectual dumbness. His silence is also by no means an empty
and dead soundlessness. In this silence there is
not only listening but also answering… Thus,
the world reveals itself to the silent listener
and only to him; the more silently he listens,
the more purely he is able to perceive reality.

Silence is important because it is a prerequisite for seeing and hearing; seeing and hearing lead to knowing, and knowing is what we
were made to do. We are made in God’s image
and likeness, to know the truth, and to love the
good, and ultimately, to see Him face to face.
Yet seeing Him is not something that we should,
at all, put off doing. We should be silent now, so
that we can know Him now. And we know Him
through knowing the reality of His creation. As
St. Thomas says, all of creation exists to imitate
the perfection of God. We can know His perfection through knowing His creation.

TO THE COMMUNITY

Yet, the world is full of noise, more now than
at any time. The devil loves noise. Hell is full
of noise. The devil loves noise because he hates
truth, and noise fills the ears, and yes, the eyes,
and prevents knowledge of the truth. Noise
derails prudence, and shatters contemplation.
Noise obscures the good, and glorifies vice. And
there is something in our fallen nature that loves
noise. Noise is sight and hearing that we enjoy
not because by means of them we know, but
purely for their own sake. It is what St. Augustine calls the concupiscentia oculis, the concupiscence of the eyes, and it leads to a corruption of
the very faculties that make us human.
And noise leads to despair. It leads to the capital vice of acedia, which St. Thomas describes
as a form of sorrow—sorrow in the face of spiritual good. A person infected with this vice fears
God, and not in a good way. He flees from truth,
from spiritual good, as from something that
will do him harm. It is terrifying. Reality itself
causes him sorrow. Distraction, more noise, is
the only way such a one can protect his fragile,
stunted self. He distracts himself with work,
because work makes him feel important, and
when working he does not have to think about
terrifying things like God. He distracts himself
with entertainment, because he can feel shallowly happy, and not notice the gaping chasm
in his being.
A man with acedia cannot be alone with
himself. He cannot bear self-reflection. He cannot bear to reflect on reality. He hates to think.
He must be constantly distracted. He must either
hear noise, or see noise, or make noise.
And the man with acedia is a mocker.
He mocks because he fears. He mocks truth
because he hates it. He mocks God because,
horribly, God causes him sorrow. He mocks so
as to triumph over what threatens him. But his
triumph is false, and hollow, and profits him
nothing, for it only moves him further from his
true purpose.
The man with acedia falls into despair,
because he is, in reality, not enough for himself,
and because the world of noise, work, distraction, and entertainment cannot feed him.
Be quiet.
Be quiet so that you can be the opposite of
the man with acedia. Be quiet so that you can
reflect upon yourself, and know yourself, and
guide yourself. Be quiet so that, if you get married, you can see your wife, and hear your chil-

dren. Be quiet so that you can be prudent. Be
quiet so that you can see the perfection of God
in His creation, and rejoice in the goodness and
truth of Being.
You are about to graduate, and go off into
the “real world,” a term wherein “real” does
not denote being, as it does in philosophy, but
rather seems to refer to getting and spending.
The “real” world is not real. The world as God
made it and guides it, is real. The conception
of the “real” world is a Protestant notion, not
a Catholic one. A Catholic is in the actual real
world from the moment of his birth and deeper in it from the moment of his baptism. Under
the false conception of the “real” world, our
purpose, once we are adults, is apparently to go
out and work hard and earn a living. Yes, we go
to Mass and say the rosary, but we kind of let
God take care of our salvation. Our purpose is
to work. How Protestant can you get?
Gentlemen, we must earn our bread by the
sweat of our brows as a consequence of the sin
of our forefather. Let us not mistake the punishment
due to sin with our purpose in life.
It is a good time, at graduation, to reflect
on your real purpose. Yes, you will have to
work, and sanctify that work, but you were not
designed by God to be fulfilled by mere work.
Recall, quietly, humbly, and attentively, what
you learned as little children from the Baltimore
Catechism. “Why did God make you? He made
me to know, love, and serve Him in this world,
and to be happy with him in the next.” We are
made to know, and to love. That is our purpose.
So, be quiet, that you might fulfill this purpose. Have the courage to be quiet. And it does
take courage: you will be mocked. Turn off
the noise—why do we need music all the time?
(If it is music.) Avoid inane talk. Don’t freak
out about the news. Turn off the screen. Seek
silence, for your soul needs it as your body
needs water. Take a walk. Sit and think. Look
and listen. Read. Read literature, history, philosophy, and spirituality. Pray, pray, and pray,
in silence. Be signs of contradiction to our perverse and noisy age.
And remember, in the trials that you will no
doubt find in the filth of the false world, in the
noise the devil throws at you, that you are more
valuable than many sparrows.
God bless you.

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SSPX PRIESTS

The Restoration
of Catholic
Civilization
in SSPX Schools
Fr. Gerard Beck, SSPX

Fr. Beck, since 2005 you have been
the superintendent of schools for
the US District of the Society of
St. Pius X. In all those years of
working with education, what has
been your central aim? How would
you express the purpose of the
schools of the Society of St. Pius X?

T

he aim of our schools is no different
than the motto of our patron, Saint
Pius X, as set forth in his first encyclical: the restoration of all things in Christ.
We hear this phrase so often it can sound like a
cliché and we do not think about what it means,
so it is good to refresh our understanding. The
Archbishop explained that these words of St.
Paul, in Greek, mean to put everything back in
order under the Kingship of Christ: literally to
recapitulate all things, to put all human reality
under Christ as its head.
The goal of our schools is to work in close
union with Catholic families to help each child
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become the saint God created him to be. A
saint is a person whose entire life is Christ-dependent, every detail in order at the service of
Christ the King. Through the children, with the
families, our schools are meant to help recreate
a Catholic civilization, and give back to society
the Catholic spirit, the sense of God, that St.
Pius X spoke of in his encyclicals.

Father, I imagine most parents
who send their children to our
schools are more thinking about
protecting their children from our
current civilization than hoping
to change it. What would you say
is the biggest threat or obstacle
that the modern world poses to
the education of our children?
Modern society is essentially in revolt
against God’s order. Any attempt to give Christ
back His rightful place in human lives, to order

SSPX PRIESTS

human life under the rule of Christ, is going to
be met with opposition.
We see this opposition on every level, toward
individuals and toward institutions. We have
twenty-two schools across the United States,
and each one is struggling valiantly to accomplish its mission. Large or small, each of our
schools has to swim upstream. Thankfully, we
do not yet face some of the legal obstacles that
Catholic schools in other countries are obliged
to contend with—I am thinking of certain European countries, or our neighbor to the north.
The greatest obstacle to our schools right
now is not official persecution but the ambient
culture of revolt and rejection of order. Twenty years ago, children drank in the spirit of
the world through television and video games.
Today, television has been replaced by the internet, available literally everywhere to children
who have their own cell phones, and video
games have reached a sophistication that really overwhelms the minds and emotions of the
children who play them. Not to mention social
media, which exercises an enormous pull, and
lets young people live alternate, unreal lives
outside the control of educators. It is a nightmare when these influences come into the lives
of our young people.
This culture of revolt threatens differently
the various members of society: children, parents, teachers—all of us. We have to be on our
guard against attitudes in ourselves that actually reflect the spirit of the world and the spirit
of revolt against God.

Our schools have to struggle, because our
work is not flashy or exciting or a work of quick
domination. It is a work of gradual submission
of each individual student to God’s order, in
nature and grace.

Father, how do our schools go
about giving a Catholic education
in this context of universal revolt?
As Archbishop Lefebvre said of the Society, our work is not primarily against the crisis, but for the Mass and the Catholic faith. In
our schools, we strengthen children against the
world by a strong, deliberate, faithful attachment to the traditions of Catholic education.
First of all, the education which we offer in
our schools is Thomistic. St. Thomas Aquinas
is the patron of Catholic schools, and his solid
principles of philosophy and theology are at
the basis of our curriculum and our teaching
methods. These principles tell us about God
and His creation, and especially about human
nature and grace: how grace builds on nature,
how nature grows, how nature is wounded by
original sin. These principles tell us about what
is real, about the world around us and about
ourselves and the truths of our supernatural
destiny. St. Thomas is very realistic, and if we
respect these principles that he presents to us
so clearly, our smallest practical decisions will

Father, isn’t the phrase “the spirit
of the world” a bit of a cliché as
well? What is this spirit of the world
we are so often warned against?
One of the difficulties that we Catholics and
educators deal with daily is that words have
lost their impact, we are so disconnected from
what is real.
The spirit of the world rejects the spirit of
Christ—ultimately, the Holy Spirit, the Holy
Ghost, who makes us cry to God, “Abba,
Father,” as His children, coheirs with Christ.
The spirit of the world is the Non serviam of
Satan, an attitude of independence from God.
Concretely, for us, the spirit of the world comes
whenever we separate the details of our daily
life from the principles of our Faith.

51

SSPX PRIESTS

be grounded in common sense. Our efforts will
be realistic and united toward the same goal,
never random.
So I would say that the first aspect of the
Catholic education that we give is that it is
realistic and ordered. This education takes into
account what is, and aims to bring the students
to live in God’s reality, not in a false, imaginary
world of revolt and “me, me, me.”
Simply by focusing on these solid, Catholic principles, we are already defending children against the world that surrounds them.
The world is suffering from a kind of insanity,
a fever of hatred for anything that comes from
God the Creator, the Father of our souls. It prefers the worst disorder, completely reinventing
the universe, rather than live in an order that
comes from God.

Theology and philosophy seem
a little remote from “reading,
writing and ‘rithmatic,” Father.
Could you give us some examples
of how these principles turn
into practice, in our schools?
Yes, I understand—“philosophy” and “kindergarten” are not usually words we would put
together! But your question is important. We
can take any subject—religion, English, history,
science, math—to see how theology and philosophy really do trickle down to every detail.
Maybe the easiest to start with is science:
human nature develops gradually, and a small
child has to see and hear and touch and smell
and even taste in order to form his first ideas. So
science class in the younger grades is focused on
nature study and bringing children into contact
with what is, by their senses. Children cannot
learn too many ideas at a time, so in the first
years of school science class will be simple, concentrating on one real thing. A lesson might
focus on leaves, for example, and noticing with
the children all of the different trees that grow
around their school or home and collecting a
few samples, observing the different parts of the
leaves, the way the veins of the different leaves
spread out from the center. The teacher helps
the students to observe the differences between
real things, and the class can discuss the reasons why different leaves are shaped in different
ways. So simple, but the child’s intellect is learn-

52

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ing to distinguish between objects and process
ideas and come to realistic conclusions.
The information that the teacher gives, and
the way the teacher gives that information,
follow other principles of Thomistic philosophy. For example, the human mind, child or
adult, loves to discover for itself, and ideas are
only really solid when the child is able to draw
conclusions on his own. At the same time, the
teacher knows more than the child does, and
has to point to what the child should notice and
help the child reason about what he sees.
Then in middle school and high school, science becomes more complex. When high school
students study physics, complicated truths of
mathematics are involved in the discovery of
nature. Yet, the same principles apply: the teacher tries to show the students how real things act
and move, and concrete examples and experiments keep the mathematical formulae realistic for the students. Even though science seems
to become very abstract, in a Catholic, realistic education, it will still be tied to God’s Creation and what is. It is very important that children keep a sense of wonder and awe in front
of nature and its laws, because nature comes
directly from the hand of God and always obeys
Him, in a really beautiful order.
Throughout the grades, this respect of the
stages of development of a child are a major
part of our curriculum: a respect for the way
God created man’s intellect, for example—children form ideas slowly, and if we rush them
to learn faster than their minds can absorb, or
tell them things that aren’t at all connected to
experience, we are not really teaching them.
We are not making a foundation for later years,
for adulthood.

That realism is clear when you
speak of science, but what about a
subject like literature? Isn’t English
class full of imagination and fiction?
Excellent question. Literature is an extremely important tool in education because it shows
children the principles of human nature in a
way that is concrete and very “absorbable.” God
made man in such a way that he loves stories;
stories reach him, and can shape the way he
thinks and acts. So, a skillful author, a true artist, puts us in contact with moral beauty and
truths of human nature, even if he is creating
characters who never actually existed.

SSPX PRIESTS

The books that we study in English class
show in a delightful way the order that God
created and the destiny of man. Well-crafted,
well-written stories give joy and cause admiration, and when a soul is open in this way, much
learning can happen. We know how damaging bad literature can be—think of the vampire
novels or the grim fantasy which are poison
to the young reader, because he soaks in ideas
of disorder as he follows the adventures of the
characters. Good books are powerful to convey truth, in a way that sinks deeply into the
students because they are open and delighted
by a good story.

Do you mean our schools
use literature to teach
students about virtue?
Yes, although indirectly. English class
receives a great deal of time in our curriculum
because of all the human qualities it teaches
to the students. A good book—like any work
of art—awakens the child’s powers in a way
that is ordered, inviting to admire and imitate.
His emotions and intellect and will all become
attentive to receive. The joy of discovery makes
him want to obtain that moral beauty for himself, and he freely draws conclusions about his
own action.
In class, the teacher fosters this effect of a
good book by helping the students read faithfully, reflectively, noticing detail and appreciating the beauty of a work. Class discussion,
with good questions from the teacher, helps
the students identify with characters and their
actions and think about why they do what they
do, what actions are good and what are bad,
what kind of choices are noble and admirable.
When students write paragraphs or essays, this
intellectual process continues. From literature
and through the different ways literature is used
in the classroom, students are gradually drawing conclusions about what is real and what is
good, absorbing principles and thinking naturally about how those principles apply in their
life.
So, yes, literature teaches virtue, always in a
Thomistic, realistic way, and according to the
different stages of maturity. Genuine, ordered
literature makes virtue desirable, by the way
it causes delight and admiration. It makes the
students think about reality and strive toward
heroism.

Father, we have spoken of
Catholic education and not
yet said anything about the
study of Catholic doctrine. Isn’t
religion class the most important
subject in a Catholic school?
Absolutely. In fact, all of the other subjects
prepare the students to receive Catholic truth
in religion class, the way nature is prepared for
grace. In every class, the student is taught to see
the subject in its place in God’s order: science
gives admiration for God’s creation, mathematics give a sense of order by training the logic
and objectivity of the child—something which
grammar does, as well. In history class, our
teachers help the students see the events of the
past as the unfolding of God’s Providence and
also as the results of man’s fidelity and courage,
or his injustice and fear.
No subject prepares for religion class as
closely as English class, though, because of the
sense of admiration and receptivity proper to
our English program. This class instills a sense
of the sacredness of creation and of human life,
the sacredness of anything that touches the soul.
When the student comes to religion class, the
words used to apply to natural realities have
meaning when applied to supernatural realities.

Could you give us an example
of nature preparing for
grace, in that way, Father?
Certainly. One of the major themes in literature—whether children’s books or classical literature—is the idea that a father is sacred, and
that a son receives his own honor and nobility
from the qualities of his father and from his loyalty to what his father has transmitted to him.
In our world, clearly this notion is attacked, and
the strength of a father is caricatured and vilified as “toxic masculinity.” But when children
from the earliest grades receive from literature
beautiful, real examples of paternal love and
kindness and guidance, this word “father” is
full of strong meaning. This word helps children
see their own father more clearly, as someone
sacred, by nature. It also helps prepare children
for the Gospel, because the Gospel is nothing
other than Christ coming to tell us that God is
our Father, and dying so that we would become
truly His sons.

53

SSPX PRIESTS

You can see how English class in our schools
can be a very direct preparation for the child’s
interior life, his spiritual life, as he learns to look
at God as a father and speak to Him with real
filial piety, with awe and affection.
English class also prepares the child very
directly to receive from the Church, his Mother. Cardinal Wiseman said that the Catholic
liturgy is made up almost entirely of poetry,
in one form or another. Look at the preface of
the Blessed Virgin, for example—this prayer of
the Mass uses poetic images, calling Christ the
light, which the Blessed Virgin shone out upon
the world, effudit. So when a child is familiar
with the analogous way words can be used, and
when he is made very attentive to language and
detail, it is obvious that he is going to be more
affected by the words of Mother Church.

Father, you speak of the liturgy.
How many of our schools have daily
Mass available to the students?
Some of our smaller schools, located around
mission chapels, only have Mass occasionally,
often on a Monday or a First Friday when the
priest from the closest priory is able to spend
time at the school. However, sometimes when
Mass is only available infrequently, students
have an even greater desire to attend, and it is
this desire that is most important.
One of our projects as we continually
improve our religion program is to help the students appreciate and sing Gregorian chant, so
that they can receive all the beauty of the liturgy
on the days when Mass is available. Gregorian
chant is the song of the Church to Her Spouse,
and when we are able to join our voices to this
song, it deepens our own spiritual life.
Archbishop Lefebvre taught that the liturgy
is the source of Christian civilization because
of how strongly it unites all the powers of man
toward the adoration of God. Of all the sources of grace, and all the sources of defense and
strengthening against the spirit of revolt and the
corruption of this world, the liturgy is the most
direct and the most powerful.
As educators, we keep this always in mind:
the Church is the source of order and sanctity
in individuals and families and nations. Every
aspect of the school day should prepare the students, directly or indirectly, to receive from the
Church. So religion class has that purpose, to
prepare the children to pray and to be attentive
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to the Holy Ghost who wants to make brand
new saints out of each one of them. And all the
other classes in our school day have this goal in
mind: to prepare nature for grace.

Father, parents probably dread
the day their children step out
of the protected environment of
home and school and enter the
world for themselves. Among
all these details, is there one
key or a secret that you can
give us, for a Catholic education
that stays strong and solid?
The secret is in the interior life of the child,
a life of prayer and openness to grace which has
to build from the very beginning. It is absolutely essential that our young people come to love
their faith so genuinely that when they leave
home and leave school they will not be tempted by the false, flashy attractions of the world.
If we do not give students a deep spiritual life,
a life of sursum corda, and we only expect them
to repeat catechism questions back to us and
behave externally according to the rules we give
them, certainly, we are building on sand. But if
we help students love the Gospel and the liturgy
and help them receive from it, we are building
on the rock of God’s grace. We are preparing a
new generation of heroes of the faith, who will
reclaim and renew civilization, instruments of
the Holy Ghost.

Father, you said in the beginning
of this interview that schools
have to work in close union with
Catholic families. What is the
relationship that should exist
between parents and schools?
Parents can give their children no greater gift
than the witness of unity among the authorities
whom God has established over His faithful. In
the plan of God, parents and the Church work
together, like nature and grace. The schools of
the Society of St. Pius X are part of the Church,
a work of the Church. So parents and school
authorities have graces of state to work together for the same goal of educating children. This
is a very consoling doctrine, because it means
God wants to guarantee the unity of education
by promising His grace to each educator. These

SSPX PRIESTS

questions are treated very clearly in Divini Illius
Magistri, Pius XI’s encyclical on Catholic education.
A Catholic sense of trust, based on supernatural motives, needs to be the basis of any
relationship between home and school. In God’s
plan, a stable, loving home is absolutely necessary to a child; this education in the home
is primary in the sense of fundamental. Parents are irreplaceable, and the school can only
do a limited good if the child is not receiving
deep, ordered affection at home, in a genuinely
Catholic atmosphere. When children receive
the same Catholic principles at home and at
school, from the family and from the Church,
they realize that what their parents tell them is
real and universal and eternal—not just “what
mom and dad say.”
One of our most important tasks in the District is training our teachers, so that they are
able to correspond to their own grace of state
as Catholic educators. Every summer we host
Catholic Teacher Seminars, in a cycle that lasts
two years, uniting practice and principle. The
deeper the Catholic formation of teachers and
parents, the more we will be united.

Do you have concrete advice
to parents on deepening
their formation and helping
their children receive?
The source of all formation is always the
Church. Go to the liturgy, go to our Mother
and learn to receive from Her. Learn to love
Gregorian chant and attend the High Mass with
your children if at all possible. Read The Liturgical Year of Dom Guéranger. And cultivate the
grace of state which you possess by your marriage; for example, listen to the conferences or
read the book by Fr. Grün on the Wine of Cana.
Angelus Press has other good resources as well,
the Art of Parenting conference series, for example. Take advantage of any formation that is
offered by your priory or mission.
Communication is hugely important. Speak
to the principal of your school, ask about what
is taught in the classroom and how you can help
your children receive. In most of our schools,
children do their work in beautiful permanent
notebooks; look at what your child brings home,
discuss it with him. Show your children that
what they are learning is important. That kind

of parental attention increases a hundredfold a
child’s desire to learn.
Be aware of the things that undermine Catholic principles by disordering the emotions of
the children so that the truth is less welcome.
Sentimental or violent movies, sensual, rhythmic music—these sterilize the soul of the students and keep them from desiring what the
school tries to give.

Father, do you have any final
words to summarize the
situation of our schools?
We have to be souls of hope. Supernatural hope is realistic, because it is based on the
almighty power of God and His love for us. We
are doing His work. Providence has brought
us very far. We do see some beautiful results
in our graduates—solid vocations to the priesthood and the religious life, and young Catholic families starting a new generation—children
and even grandchildren of students enrolled in
our schools. Archbishop Lefebvre hoped our
priories and missions would be like miniature
Christendoms, seeds of Catholic civilization.
But supernatural hope is also realistic in
that we cannot count on ourselves. The situation of the world today is humanly hopeless,
and the task before us is gigantic. We have the
principles, we have the teaching methods, we
have many good teachers, we have parents with
strong faith who support our schools, and we
have students ready and eager to receive. But we
are still very, very fragile in ourselves. Many of
our schools cannot afford to hire teachers at a
living wage that would allow stability of staff, so
we are continually training new teachers. And
all of us need to be more completely penetrated
by the Catholic principles which we are trying
to transmit to the students. If we are souls of
hope, we will not be impatient and discouraged,
first of all with ourselves. The task is immense.
But if we are souls of hope, we will see each
moment and each trial as a way to anchor ourselves more firmly in God, who loves nothing
more than to show Himself a Father. He is able
to surprise us with graces and victories beyond
what we can imagine.

55

INTERVIEW

How to Get a
Solid Catholic
Formation …
in Paris!

Fr. François-Marie Chautard, Rector of the Institut Universitaire Saint-Pie X

Could you tell us a little
about the IUSPX?

T

he Institut Universitaire Saint-Pie X, or
IUSPX, is located in the heart of Paris,
near the Rue du Bac and Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, in a land which
was part of Christendom for centuries and
whose history is full of memories of St. Thomas, St. Louis, St. Francis de Sales, as well as
Abelard, La Fayette, and Napoleon.
The IUSPX was founded in 1980 by university professors desirous of founding a truly Catholic university, one that would guarantee reliable teaching free of modern errors. After the
riots of May 1968 (in France but also elsewhere),
they wished to create a college where they could
pass on the cultural, intellectual, and spiritual
heritage of our Greco-Roman and Christian
civilization to the young people who desired
to receive it.
From the outset the Institut was entrusted
to the Society of St. Pius X at the request of its
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founders, who went to Archbishop Lefebvre in
February 1980.

What degrees does the IUSPX offer?
Classical Literature (now officially known as
Humanities), History, and Philosophy.

Why these three majors?
Because they are particularly conducive to
ennobling the minds of our students, and what
we seek first and foremost is to form the minds
and souls of our youth before they set out into
the practical and often utilitarian universe of
professional life.
Jacqueline de Romilly, a great French Hellenist and member of the Académie Française,
once said, “It is a mistake to imagine that the
more important thing to think about is career
opportunities, without necessarily considering
what will be truly useful for the formation of
the youth..”1

INTERVIEW

And no one can deny that history, philosophy, and literature are excellent means for
uplifting minds.
Furthermore, they truly deserve to be known
as Humanities, not in the pagan sense of an elevation of a man without original sin or grace,
but in the classical sense of the Humaniores Litterae, the formation of the highest human faculties through the study of literary subjects; these
studies ennoble the loftiest part of man: his
intelligence, his will, his memory, his sensitivity.
“Indeed,” wrote Monsignor Dupanloup,
“when we say a child is doing his Humanities
or that he has to do his Humanities, it is a very
commonplace expression, but it has a very
profound meaning and expresses something
admirable. What does it mean? That he has to
become a man… Where do a nation’s schools
get their dignity and sovereign importance?
From the fact that they are where the Humanities are studied, where men are made…
Who preserved European society from barbarianism in the Middle Ages? The popes,
Charlemagne, the bishops and monks, by
means of the Humanities.
Who raised modern Europe up to be the
greatest civilization? Who made the 16th century in Italy and Spain? Who made the 17th
century in France and Europe? Again, it was
the Church, the teaching religious congregations and the Catholic universities, by means of
the strongest, most brilliant and most religious
Humanities ever.” 2
“They are not only a country’s inner need,”
added Guizot, minister to the French king Louis-Philippe in the 19th century, “they are its dignity, its credit in the world. Without the cultivation of greatness of mind, there can be no
lasting depth, and minds only become great
by being formed in classic masterworks from
childhood so that they can glean the treasures
of the past.”3
The same spirit is expressed in Archbishop
Lefebvre’s charter for the schools of the Society
of St. Pius X: “These schools… respect the hierarchy of the sciences, attributing the priority to
realist philosophy, the Humanities and history,
in order to form an upright judgment with a
classical formation of the mind” (§5).
More precisely, these subject matters accomplish the cultura animi (culture of the mind) spoken of by Cicero. They form both its contents
and its form.

First of all, they nourish the mind by transmitting to it the best and most profound part
of what the past has bequeathed to us. Entering into history, literature or philosophy means
coming into contact with the great men of the
past and their heritage.
The study of these monuments of the past
offers a true school of truth, goodness, and
beauty, and the teachings of the past shed light
on the present.
When Tocqueville wrote about American
democracy, he developed an extremely subtle analysis that enlightens us as to the current
development of the Western countries.
When one opens Plato’s dialogues that relate
Socrates’ debates with the Sophists, one sees
how infected our society is with the gangrene
of their same intellectual diseases.
As for literature, it plunges one into the heart
of the timeless man, it gives an understanding of
human psychology and its intricacies, allowing
for exceptionally lofty perspective.
These subject matters also refine the moral
sense. Forming a conscience is a long, delicate,
and difficult undertaking. It requires intelligence, moral virtue, and sensitivity, all qualities that are excellently formed by the Humanities. Mathematics enrich the mind, but not the
heart, and certainly not moral virtue, which is
completely foreign to mathematics.
“I have seen classes laugh at Socratic irony,”
remarks Jacqueline de Romilly. “They were for
Socrates and against his ignorant or conceited

Fr. François-Marie Chautard.
57

INTERVIEW

adversary. That means that they were for the
desire for truth, for intelligence, for patience,
for courtesy… Perhaps only for as long as it
took to read the passage; but in a young person, that spontaneously builds a lasting taste for
truth, intelligence, patience, courtesy. Do you
not desire that for your children?” “I have also
seen classes moved at Socrates’ death—filled
with admiration, indignation, wonder. For a
moment, these classes were possessed by a horror for injustice, in love with strength of soul,
tempted to share a certain faith in the afterlife.
Do not worry, it was not about teaching them to
die well. But a certain taste for ideals can also
help in living life; and through those ancient
arguments, that taste passed through them and
left its mark.”4
In a word, what the Humanities progressively develop is wisdom, a wisdom that leads
straight to God.
For how can one reflect upon the causes of
historical events or the causes of realities without going back to the first cause? How can one
scrutinize the human heart and the boundary
between good and evil that runs through it
without thinking of the Sovereign Good, the
source of all good and without reflecting upon
the mystery of iniquity? How can one search for
the truth in all things without recognizing the
Truth? The heights of knowledge are like mountain trails: they all lead to the same summit.
When the Faith is there, too, to shed light
on the human heart with the concepts of grace
and original sin, on the world with the idea of
creation and on history with the sense of the
Cross, then the intelligence attains unsuspected heights and depths. We must not forget that
the worst enemies of the Humanities are often
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God’s worst enemies! “I do not like books,”
Rousseau used to say.
As for the form, these subject matters teach
students to read, think, speak, and write.
To read, for they teach the art of reading a
text in depth. When a student studies a historical document, he learns to place the extract in
its context, to see what is left unsaid; he has to
draw from it the essential and the major points
of the argument, all qualities that avoid the all
too common and modern tendency to superficial reading.
To think, for they cultivate a spirit of precision and subtlety. Philosophy expresses itself
with arguments and distinctions, that is to say,
with logic and nuances, the sovereign virtues
of the intellect.
To speak, for the Institut requires regular
oral exercises. For the past six years, we have
been organizing for the feast of St. Thomas a
disputatio between two teams of students who
debate in front of their classmates and a jury
of professors on a chosen question. This year
they had to decide which of the two subjects
was better, history or literature. Naturally, this
helps them practice the art of public speaking.
To write, for all these subjects require essays,
commentaries, and short theses that offer the
student the opportunity to develop his personal
reflection and work on his style. Naturally, literature students have the advantage of studying
the great literary authors.

Could you briefly present
these three majors?

Our Humanities degree has two options:
Classical Literature, and Literature, Culture
and Heritage. The first offers courses in French
language and literature, Greek and Latin, along
with courses on cultural history, etc.
The second is an advanced option, including
philosophy and art history or geography courses along with the Classical Literature courses.
Our History degree offers courses on the
four major historical periods (ancient, medieval,
modern and contemporary). This degree offers
four options: art history, philosophy, geography
and political sciences.
Our Philosophy degree forms students in
the different philosophy subjects according to
St. Thomas Aquinas (logic, metaphysics, moral
philosophy and political philosophy, etc.) along

INTERVIEW

with courses on the history of philosophy and
the great philosophers.
The Teaching Formation involves four
class hours a week for two years, and aims to
give future elementary or high school teachers a
theoretical and practical knowledge of teaching.

What benefits does the
IUSPX offer in this work of
forming Catholic youth?
The IUSPX offers truly Catholic teaching,
free from liberal or progressivist spirit. As its
charter declares, the IUSPX particularly decries
the modern errors of naturalism, secularism,
and liberalism, and defends the Church’s past
as well as her beneficial action on society.
The IUSPX recalls that the keystone to all
knowledge and to all things is God, the first
cause, Jesus Christ. A teaching that concretely
ignores Jesus Christ and His doctrine in history,
philosophy, or the study of literature is a mutilated teaching that tends to disperse knowledge
due to the lack of a principle of unity.
Every year, students who have spent a year
or two at other universities are delighted and
astonished at the depth and quality of the courses delivered by the Institut. Two former students
wrote to me that “what undeniably constitutes
the superiority of the Institut… is the possibility
of taking courses in Thomistic philosophy no
matter what your major, as a minor, or just to
sit in on the class. It is the only university where
the teaching is entirely and uncompromisingly Thomistic… What we learn at the Institut
through philosophy are strong and immutable
principles that are worth far more than a degree
or the official prestige of a renowned school.”

all progress in the Christian life. Every year we
see young men and women mature, progress,
and blossom in their studies and in the Catholic
atmosphere of the IUSPX.
On the human level, the Christian spirit,
the common principles, a human-sized structure, and a personal accompaniment for each
student create a familial, convivial, and Christian atmosphere, as can be seen from the solid
friendships formed, the meals shared, the outings together to museums or trips to Pontmain,
Venice or Rome.
Studying at the Institut also means having
Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet nearby, 15 minutes from the IUSPX, with its youth groups,
spiritual assistance, and all the Traditional
youth among whom one can find good friends
and mutual assistance. A student at the IUSPX,
even an American student, is not alone—far
from it!

What are the professional prospects
coming out of the IUSPX?
Horace said, “Primum vivere, deinde philosophari.” This is true, but we prefer the Gospel’s
“Seek first the kingdom of God and the rest will
be given to you.”
It is exactly the same for our students. Their
apparently useless studies actually open up
innumerable opportunities for them. In France,
with a “licence” degree, a student can go on to

Could you describe the
atmosphere in your Institut?
This is a very relevant question, for it is not
enough to nourish the mind; the entire man
needs to be formed. And a student should certainly not become a walking encyclopedia!
As I often tell the students, their three years
at the Institut should be an intellectual ascent,
yes, but also a spiritual and human one.
On the supernatural level, a truly Catholic
atmosphere, a realistic and Catholic college formation, contact with other young people who
share the same essential ideas and the same way
of life, and the presence of priests are powerful
means of protection, perseverance, and above

Colloquium of April 6 and 7, 2019.

Father Thierry Gaudray, SSPX, giving a conference.
59

INTERVIEW

many different professional Masters degrees,
or enter business schools or many other grad
schools. There is a very wide variety of choices, including teaching, journalism, communications, human resources, marketing, management, finance, or publishing.
In management, for example, there are hard
skills and soft skills, and the most important
are the latter.
Someone who knows how to analyze a situation, put things into perspective, summarize
an issue, coherently present a project, find the
right words in a tense situation, and be subtle,
has major assets for success. And these are qualities developed by these literary majors.
What is more, these virtues enable a Catholic
to have an impact on society, as Pius XII said,
“The students of a Catholic institution should
never consider their future career as a simple
social function, necessary for themselves and for
those around them, but without any immediate
relation to their condition as baptized souls.
Let them rather always consider it as a responsibility in the work of saving the world through
which, by committing themselves seriously as
Christians on the temporal level, they realize
their highest spiritual destiny.”5

Does your Institut offer
other activities?
Yes, there are conferences on Monday evenings, an annual congress, and evening classes
(Biblical exegesis, Hebrew).

Why would an American student
be interested in the IUSPX?
First of all, for the quality of our teaching
and our professors, the specificity of our teachings, the attention given to our students, and
the great variety of professional opportunities
that are offered.
60

The Angelus u July - August 2022

When it comes to intellectual formation, it is
important to go with the surest option. In order
to be real and fruitful, intellectual freedom has
to be grounded in a rich and solid formation.
And that is precisely the role of the formation
we give: to provide indispensable knowledge
and form a grounded judgment. What is more,
ever since 2001, the Institut offers both its own
diplomas and State diplomas for its History and
Humanities degrees, and possibly for its Philosophy degrees as well beginning in 2023.
For an American, a Catholic and intellectual formation in Europe is a unique experience.
It is a discovery of the best of what old Europe
has to offer. And the IUSPX is delighted to have
students from the New World!

How to enroll?
An American has to apply to the IUSPX and
go through Campus France. The process must
be started the year before entering the IUSPX.
The IUSPX does not have student lodging,
but it does have a network that often helps to
find a place to live. We currently have three
Americans at the IUSPX. So it is possible!

A word to conclude?
Youth is a unique and extraordinary period
in life that determines so many things; it is so
important for our natural and supernatural life
to aim for the best. Why wait until the end of
life to strive for wisdom? “Quæ in juventute tua
non congregasti, quomodo in senectute tua invenies? ”
“The things that thou hast not gathered in thy
youth, how shalt thou find them in thy old age?”
(Ecclus. 25:5)

Endnotes
1

Jacqueline de Romilly, Lettre aux parents sur les choix scolaires,
Editions de Fallois, 1994, p. 14.

2

Dupanloup, De la haute éducation intellectuelle, p. 10-12.

3

Guizot quoted by Dupanloup, p. 12-13.

4

Jacqueline de Romilly, Lettre aux parents sur les choix scolaires,
Editions de Fallois, 1994, p. 108.

5

Pius XII, Speech to the members of Catholic Teaching, Sept.
14, 1958. Les enseignements pontificaux, Consignes aux militants, Desclée, 1958, p. 303.

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

The Priest
and Catholic
Education
Fr. John M. McFarland, SSPX

C

atholic education is a work of the
Catholic priesthood. In the order
established by God, priests are not
only the instruments of Jesus Christ
in administering the sacraments, but also in
imparting knowledge of the truth to all Catholics. They have a special duty to watch over the
formation of the young. Deliberate separation
of the intellectual and moral formation of children and adolescents from the influence of the
priests of Jesus Christ can severely handicap or
even entirely vitiate that formation. It is certainly true that special circumstances exist, particularly during the present crisis in the Church.
Nevertheless, as a general principle, the fundamental connection between the priesthood and
Catholic education cannot be denied.
“The priest is another Christ.” This aphorism is commonplace in nearly every serious
Catholic milieu, and traditional Catholics are
especially fond of the saying. They believe
wholeheartedly that the priestly character is
necessary for a man to act in persona Christi

and so to be able to offer the holy Sacrifice
of the Mass and to absolve sins in the sacrament of penance. Likewise, they know that it
is only the priest who distributes communion,
anoints the dying, officiates at marriages, blesses their rosaries, and confers countless other
blessings and graces coming from Our Lord
Jesus Christ. Further, they acknowledge that
this claim of being another Christ means that
the priest must be held to a higher standard than
the laity; it imposes upon him the duty of striving for Christ-like holiness. On the other hand,
one almost never hears the maxim applied to
the priest’s position of teacher.
Surely the faithful expect to hear the teaching of the Church from the priest’s mouth in
the Sunday sermon. But is this the extent of his
teaching power? True, the Church often names
the priest’s act of teaching “preaching.” However, it would be a serious error to imagine this
role as being confined to the pulpit. Bishop John
Cuthbert Hedley (d. 1915), writing about St.
Gregory, tells us that the holy doctor’s word of
61

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

choice in speaking of a pastor’s duty to impart
the faith was not praedicare (to preach) but docere
(to teach).1 Sermons are an important part of the
teaching of the priest, but fifteen minutes once
a week hardly suffices for an office of such paramount importance.
Already in the Old Testament, the Aaronic
priesthood was a divinely instituted teaching
authority. “For the lips of the priest shall keep
knowledge, and they shall seek the law at his
mouth: because he is the angel of the Lord of
hosts.” 2 The New Testament priesthood, that
which makes a man share in the power of Jesus
Christ, far surpasses its Old Testament counterpart. We cannot insist too much: it is this character of the priesthood that imposes the role of
teacher upon the Catholic priest. During His
three years of public ministry, Our Lord Jesus
Christ gave Himself principally to teaching.
Even the miracles He worked were intended,
more than anything else, to confirm the truth
of what He taught. 3 Our Lord taught in synagogues; He taught in the courtyards of the Temple; He taught in the open air. He preached
sermons to large crowds; He gave intimate discourses to His chosen Apostles; He held conversations with and answered questions from individuals or small groups. Our Lord bequeathed
this teaching ministry to His Church in the person of the Apostles, already ordained priests,
when He commanded them on the day of His
Ascension, “teach ye all nations; baptizing them
in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and
of the Holy Ghost.”4 Thus, the priest is teacher
by the explicit command of the Savior Himself.
Moreover, the teaching office is evident
in the very nature of the priesthood. As mentioned, the priest acts in the person of Christ
in the confecting of the sacraments. It stands
to reason that he would be the one to speak in
Christ’s name in the instruction of the faithful.
Further, the duty of administering the sacraments brings with it the duty to prepare the
faithful to receive these sacraments. This preparation consists principally in the instruction
required for the recipients to understand the
nature of the sacraments and to order their lives
so that the sacraments will be fruitful for their
souls. Finally, the priest is a teacher because
he is a father. Indeed, it is by this very name
that the faithful address him, and this reality,
more than a mere title, gives him the power of
teaching. Speaking to a congress of high school
teachers, Pope Pius XII said, “Now the father,
62

The Angelus u July - August 2022

by the very fact of his fatherhood, is a teacher,
since, as the Angelic Doctor explains so clearly, ‘the primordial right to teach is based on no
other title than that of paternity.’ ”5
That education is tightly bound to the priestly office has been the constant teaching of the
Church. The Apostles were the principal teachers of the early Church. St. Paul went so far as
to write to the Corinthians, “Christ sent me not
to baptize, but to preach the gospel.”6 His teaching office took precedence even over administering the sacrament of baptism. The reason is
obvious. Without a thorough understanding of
the doctrines of Jesus Christ and the principles
of Christian living, baptism would avail nothing. St. Gregory the Great wrote a book called
Regula Pastoralis (Pastoral Rule), addressed to
priests about how to fulfill their pastoral duties.
Bishop Hedley says of this work, “The whole
treatise… has for its purpose to make a pastor
speak effectively to his flock.”7 It is, therefore,
a work addressed to the priest as educator. And
this tradition has continued down to modern
times. Brother Philip, a superior general of the
Brothers of the Christian Schools in the 19th
century, wrote of the Church, “Wherever she
erects a church, there too, at the same time,
she builds a school,”8 indicating how closely the
ministry of education is tied to the ministry of
the altar. And in the address already mentioned,
Pius XII said, “…in great part, the office of the
priest consists in teaching and educating.”9
If then, the priest is an educator by divine
command, by the nature of his office, and by
the constant will of the Church, what is he to
teach? Firstly and obviously, he must teach
the dogmas of the Catholic faith. No Catholic
would dispute that it is the priest’s role to preach
the Gospel, imparting knowledge of the truths
necessary for salvation from the pulpit and in
the catechism class. At the same time, Catholics
generally recognize that the priest must teach
the principles of Catholic morality to turn the
faithful away from vice and encourage them to
the accomplishment of good works.
However, it is not the mind of Our Lord Jesus
Christ and His Church that priestly teaching
should occupy itself with abstract truths to be
granted purely intellectual assent. The Christian life is just that, a life, and the priest is the
instructor in Christian living. It is not enough
to know the truth, but the faithful must put that
knowledge into daily practice. Consequently,
the priest is obliged to spell out the profound

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

significance of Catholic dogmas for everyday life and to apply the principles of Catholic morality to the real conditions and circumstances of his faithful. As already pointed out,
this duty is especially important in regard to
the young. “A young man according to his way,
even when he is old, he will not depart from it.”10
The young must form habits, and those habits
will be either helpful or detrimental to living
as Catholics and attaining eternal life. Brother
Philip has rightly asserted that, “A good education is a fund of riches to which no created good
is comparable.”11 No education can be called
good which does not equip a child to attain the
goal of his existence, and no one can reach his
eternal objective outside the influence of Jesus
Christ’s priesthood.
The Church has spent incalculable energy
and resources on founding and running schools
for just this reason. Catholic school is not just
secular school with the addition of a religion
class and the subtraction of noxious influences. Rather, the Catholic school exists to be an
educational environment saturated with the
influence of Jesus Christ Himself. The priest is
the principal minister of this divine influence.
Brother Philip was keenly aware of this when
he exhorted his fellow religious to inspire their
students “with love, respect, and confidence
towards priests, by whom, above all, they can
be preserved in good.”12
Furthermore, all branches of instruction
should come under the influence of the Church
and her priests, even if these subject matters do
not deal directly with the faith. Much damage
has been done to education by confining the
Catholic faith to the chapel and the religion
class. Can history be taught accurately without
reference to God’s action in the world or to the
most important events: Original Sin, the Incarnation, the Redemption, the founding of the
Church? Can a purely mechanistic conception
of the universe that disregards the Creator be
taught in the empirical sciences without distorting reality and promoting unbelief? Can literature be taught indiscriminately, without reference to its moral value? Can godless teachers,
even those who may be experts in their fields,
be permitted to form the minds of Catholic children? The priest has the competence to exercise
the necessary vigilance in these and other matters. Yet his influence is not purely negative. He
is meant to move among students and teachers
as another Christ, teaching classes, yes, but also

correcting, encouraging, and exhorting in sermons, conferences, private conversations, and
giving clear practical examples in the conduct
of his own life. Further, his mission includes
imparting to all those charged with the education of Catholic youth a truly supernatural
vision that sees the working of Divine Providence in every academic discipline and prioritizes the supernatural destiny of the students.
Consequently, other Catholic teachers,
including religious belonging to congregations
explicitly dedicated to education, are the auxiliaries of priests in the formation of the young.
This is not to say that they are not critically
important and often strictly necessary. Pius XII
speaks of lay teachers as “direct collaborators in
this work of God and of the Church.”13 Brother
Philip says of religious teachers that God “has
established us as cooperators with the Church
in the care she gives to infancy and youth,” but
he adds significantly, “as precursors of her pastors, charging us to prepare the way for them.”14
Any autonomy from the priesthood in matters
of education must arise from force of circumstances and never be freely chosen. Unfortunately, such situations arise far too frequently
today, as the fewness of priests and the doctrinal corruption rampant among many of them
pushes numerous parents and educators to a
state of abnormal independence. Such situations must be regretted and never imagined to
be the ideal. Voluntary separation of education
from the priestly ministry severs the work from
the life-giving sources of grace. Such education
ceases to be truly Catholic, rejecting as it does
the divinely established order. Where the priest
has been cast out, or relegated to the position
of merely dispensing sacraments, one cannot
expect the benedictions of the divine Master.
Thus far, nothing has been said about the
role of the family in Catholic education. It is
beyond the scope of the present article to treat
such a vast subject in any detail. However, we
can point out that, in the divine plan, there is
never any opposition between the true educational rights of the family and those of the
Church. On the contrary, God intends these
two authorities to work in perfect harmony.
The teaching of priests is required to elevate
and perfect the teaching given by parents, but
this priestly ministry usually avails little if the
ground has not been well-prepared by the education given in a profoundly Catholic home.
63

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

At the present time, the priest’s role in education has been almost eclipsed. Fundamentally, the blame lies at the feet of the priests and
bishops themselves; many have neglected, abandoned, or perverted their divinely established
teaching power. Independent schools, homeschooling, laymen with theology degrees, and
similar phenomena have arisen to fill the void.
Nevertheless, the divine commission remains,
“Going therefore, teach ye all nations.” For the
good of souls, priests must reclaim their mission. In turn, the faithful must love and respect
this priestly office and cooperate in promoting
it everywhere to the greatest extent possible.
TITLE IMAGE: St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle (1651-1719), founder
of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christians Schools, educational reformer, and father of modern pedagogy.

Endnotes
1

John Cuthbert Hedley, Lex Levitarum (New York, 1905) p. 119.

2

Malachias 2:7.

3

Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III. Q.43, a.3.

4

Matthew 28:19.

5

Pius XII, “Address to the Italian Catholic Union of Secondary School Teachers,” in Yzermans, Vincent A. Pope Pius XII
and Catholic Education (St. Meinrad: Indiana, 1957), p. 28.

6

I Corinthians 1:17.

7

Hedley, op. cit.

8

Brother Philip, Considerations for Catholic Teachers (1921), p. 3.

9

Pius XII, op. cit.

10

Proverbs 22:6.

11

Br. Philip, op. cit., p. 23.

12

Ibid., p. 53.

13

Pius XII, op. cit.

14

Brother Philip, op cit. p. 2.

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The
L ast Word
Fr. David Sherry
District Superior of Canada

Dear Reader,
It was not unknown at our school that, when
I was within earshot, a boy would try to get
a reaction. “This school sucks,” he would say,
or “we’re living in a prison” and sometimes,
strangely, “smartphones are the devil.” The first
two were easily explained: to certain boys, anywhere you have discipline “sucks”; any place
that has rules is a prison; but the smartphone?
I had a theory on that one. The devil not
only tries to get you to sin by saying that bad
things are good; he also tempts by saying good
things are bad. For example, “revenge is sweet”
is a fairly straightforward instance of the first
kind; “marriage is bad” is an example of the second. The devilish thinking is that if something
good or at least obviously indifferent is said by
authority to be bad, then the would-be sinner
has a good excuse to ignore rules on that thing
and then throw out all the other rules of authority as unreasonable. “My parents or school have
rules about smartphones because they say that
they are evil. That is clearly untrue, therefore I
don’t need to listen to them about anything.” As
such, if I acknowledged “smartphones are the
devil” as true, he has caught me out in untruth
and can ignore me. So, dutifully and invariably, I would say “smartphones are indifferent;
it’s their use that makes them good or bad, etc.”
You get the picture.

Now it is unlikely (I blush to admit) that any
of my former students read The Angelus. It is
even less likely that one has persevered until
this final page. Therefore, gentle reader, I will
now tell you what I never told them.
In the end, all smartphones show a cloven
hoof. The teenager with his own smartphone
has got a limitless supply of high-quality drugs
which he can and will imbibe daily. For boys,
it is a grave occasion of sin against purity (even
if the phone has a filter) and try as he might,
he cannot resist the temptation to use it as a
timewasting toy. For girls it is a grave temptation to vanity: who’s noticing my selfies, calling, texting, liking me? And if they’re not, why
do they hate me? And for all, it is vanity and
distraction and worldliness at a time that forms
habits for life.
The solution—damn all smartphones to hell?
A Puritan would love nothing better. But then,
so would the devil. If the thing is a necessity,
explain to your teenager that just as he is not
allowed to drive until he is old enough to bear
the responsibility, so neither should he have a
smartphone. Then, perhaps, at age 17 or 18,
train him how to use a smartphone—with a filter, and as a tool. And with fear and trembling.
Fr. David Sherry

The Society of Saint Pius X is an international priestly society of almost 700 priests. Its main purpose is
the formation and support of priests.
The goal of the Society of Saint Pius X is to preserve the Catholic Faith in its fullness and purity, not
changing, adding to or subtracting from the truth that the Church has always taught, and to diffuse its virtues,
especially through the Roman Catholic priesthood. Authentic spiritual life, the sacraments, and the traditional
liturgy are its primary means to foster virtue and sanctity and to bring the divine life of grace to souls.

The Mission of Angelus Press
Angelus Press, in helping the whole man, tries to be an outlet for the work of the Society, helping them
reach souls. We aspire to help deepen your spiritual life, nourish your studies, understand the history of Christendom, and restore the reign of Christ the King in Christian culture in every aspect.

Available Soon from A ngelus Press
Ava
ila
soo ble
n!

The Courage to Be Afraid
Fr. Marie-Dominique Molinié, O.P.

Translation by Fr. Alexander Wiseman, SSPX

The Courage to Be Afraid is remarkably different from other spiritual books. It is a tour
de force that examines many aspects of the Christian life, yet always returning to a
simple, powerful theme: we have to let God act. Fr. Molinié addresses himself to us,
children of the modern world, in order to recall us forcefully to what never changes, no
matter the state of things: the divine life is in us, and will transform us if we surrender
to it. “God’s love is a consuming fire…”
“Fr. Molinié brings us back to the essentials of the Gospel: the
simplicity of following Christ and the grandeur of God’s plan for
us. Every Catholic will find in this book clarity, rejuvenation, and
wisdom.”
—Fr. Alexander Wiseman, SSPX
Some of the themes included in this book:
• Nature and grace
• Combat between pride and humility
• Development and stages of the spiritual life
• Suffering and the Mystery of God

Ava
ila
soo ble
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236 pp. Color softcover, STK# 8797 $21.95

The Story of Fr. George Kathrein, C.Ss.R.
Fr. Alphonsus Maria Krutsinger, C.Ss.R.
Foreword by Bishop Bernard Fellay

The life of Fr. Kathrein is a reminder to all readers, especially newer generations who are
too young to have experienced the spiritual abandonment that traditionalist Catholics
went through during the years after Vatican II. It also serves as a reminder that the fight
itself has not changed, even if the tactics have mutated with time and circumstances:
our goal is to eradicate the neo-Modernist errors from the Catholic Church, and to
restore the Church’s own unchanging and infallible Tradition to the hierarchy and to
the faithful, who have been left spiritually poor and abandoned due to the erroneous
teachings, poor catechesis, and liturgical anarchy of the past 60 years. Only Catholic
Tradition can efficaciously give the life of God to souls for His glory and for their
salvation and sanctification.

Fr. Alphonsus Maria
Krutsinger, C.Ss.R., made
his religious profession in
1994 and was ordained by
Bishop Fellay in 2000. Since
2005, he has been preaching
parish missions and retreats
throughout the Englishspeaking world.

“You will find here an uncommon life of a Redemptorist in the
middle of the torment of Vatican II, the catastrophe of the 20th
century. The damage it caused worldwide to souls, first the Catholic
souls, then any soul ... is beyond any imagination .… Suddenly, the
normal actions, the normal life turns into heroism. This example
should give us joy and courage for our times.”
—Bishop Bernard Fellay
283 pages. Color softcover. STK# 8823 $16.95

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