Some Aspects of Catholic Education

We hold as Catholics that the truths of our faith should be the basis and life-giving principle of our ideas and judgements and actions in every department of our lives, and that nothing should be excluded from the all-inclusive influence of that principle. I had not been teaching very long before I began to be conscious that, as in the life of ordinary Catholics in the world, so in school life, there were often two distinct areas. One area was an explicitly Catholic area, in which Christian standards were fully realized and fully applied; but there was another area, and in school this was chiefly covered by what are termed the secular studies, where Christian standards were not indeed denied, but either not applied at all or only applied occasionally at certain isolated points where their non-application would have been glaringly apparent. At other less prominent points our standards of judgment were not really Christian at all, but those of the world around us. In other words, we were not living the Christian life integrally; the principles of the faith were not penetrating into and informing every idea and judgement in every department of our lives; and in consequence we were producing characters, forming personalities, that were all-unconsciously divided in allegiance, in the service of two masters, ruled in part by Christian principles, but in part either without definite standards of any kind or ruled by standards that were not Christ's and that in the last analysis were quite irreconciliable with Christ's law

Political science · Philosophy · Religious Education and Schools