St. Mary's & the Restoration of Catholic Education

by James Taylor

continued from last month

What about Christian education and St. Mary's Academy? It doesn't appear as if I have said much about it—philosophies, good texts, good teachers, the religion classes, the school in a traditional Catholic liturgy atmosphere—and that is because what is under discussion now is prior to all this. A full Catholic education, as said before, is not possible in our days, because the complete experience of such an education requires a cultural sympathy with such principles. The reason there is so much talk and argument about education these days, in public as well as private and Catholic schools, is that no one really knows what it is anymore; that is, not enough people, not even it seems, a determinate number seem to know what Christian education is. Thus, all the talk and debate. That being said, even accepted as being possibly true, I hasten to add that conditions do not have to remain this dismal. If we are willing to be few in number but large in purpose, if we are willing to not allow human respect to distract us from the depth of the crisis and its immediate and remote needs, if secondary differences can be set aside allowing those with their particular talents to step forward, then we can begin to get started.

In the early middle ages, even up to the nineteenth century, there were at least some fundamentals of education that were agreed upon—not just in those subjects to be taught—but in the manner, the spirit, in which they were to be learned. More or less, these fundamentals included that the good teacher was not only well-trained, but also possessed the gift of teaching, a love for the material and a sympathy for the learner; that the student was someone who presented himself to the teacher as an apprentice to the master; that there was truth, objective, outside the teacher and the learner, and it could be known; and that, in spite of the realities of learning something in school that would be beneficial for earning a living, an education was something that primarily delivered a person from different forms of rudeness and sheer practical concerns, to a gentler yet stronger view of life that urged the student to lift his gaze, actually, with his eyes, and inwardly with his heart, toward the heavens. Even the pagan teachers and students knew this well. And we, as a nation, as a world, no longer have time to take one stroll with old Socrates to ask the first questions about life and death; and worse, as a world, we no longer walk with the God-Man of Nazareth to hear the answers of life and death—if we would, He would tell us clearly what Socrates and the good pagans only dreamed about, the most amazing thing possible: that death can be life, the greatest life ever, for which this earthly existence, is a grand and mysterious preparation. And we can teach this superbly at St. Mary's, because we have the true Mass, the supreme emblem of how this life, though terribly difficult at times, is meant to be not just a journey but a preparation for even more life, abundant life, as Our Lord called it. If there is a great principle of Catholic education, there it is: the action of Christ in each Mass reminds us that death is life. Each child should have this supernatural truth sown deep in the garden of his heart, cultivated by as many happy memories as possible. Why not? If we are made for happiness, and we are, we are to see something of it now. The art of teaching arithmetic, laboratory sciences, literature and languages, can be mastered by men of good will, whether they are Catholic or not. But only Catholic education with the Mass as its heart can say, in a variety of ways, that God is the Center of all arithmetic and science, because His name is Truth; at the center of literature and language, because His name is Beauty, and that all these things are good in themselves for that very reason, and all of them, in their way, help us to realize our creaturehood so that we may do what needs to be done each day on the way to our death, our life.

This is why St. Mary's Academy really exists, to teach us how to live so that we may die, so that we may live. It cannot be stated that way, abruptly, to the little children or even the youth, exactly; though they are soon to hear this truth in some way. Little ones and youth, as we older ones know, really believe that they will live forever—and, in a sense, they are right—they just don't know in which way they are right. Especially in our time, we risk unnecessary gloom and doom in our young people, discouragement and confusion about life's purpose. And here we must add, Christian education should not only teach that joy is always to be preferred over sorrow (there are, after all, more joyful and glorious mysteries of the Rosary), but even humor is to be learned as necessary for the Kingdom for, as my teacher said, "Life may not be fun, but it is certainly funny at times." We must sing. And singing is a form of laughter—even the old blues songs of the American South were sung precisely because they made the singer feel better. But, sooner or later, our children will learn that there is an actual physical experience called death and they too will share it someday along with every other creature in the world. At that point, they need to have on their lips or in their hearts: Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. But they also need a vision of the fullness of life that awaits them, not totally separate from a life we must prepare for them here, to understand that all the fine things of the home and of creation, especially among their friends and family, that true life after death will be a glorious and perfected continuation of those good, true and beautiful things they have already known, rather than an unknown darkness with the possibility of endless strife and loneliness, which is closer to the reality of hell than of heaven. For those good and true memories to be there in that great moment, a few things, but the right ones, need to be done now, and for those children that come to St. Mary's Academy the most true, good and beautiful of these is, of course, the Mass. Properly understood, all education flows from this action of Christ that joins the spaces of earth and heaven. This understanding is not contained in any teacher training course, or book, or plan or system—it is not even contained in experience, because good experience can be completely lost on a teacher or a student who is not first listening to the Voice of that Sacrifice of Love, the Voice of the Mass, the old Mass, the old Roman Latin Mass. It is the ceremony of life, death and eternal life—it is the deepest thing a person could ever know, if the summa of Christian education and it is here every day, even several times a day. It is beautiful, throughout. That's the first thing that can be said about the Mass. Even little children sense there is something good about the Mass. In time, with grace, we begin to learn how true it really is.

And certainly St. Mary's has more teachers who have heard that Voice's call and have followed it here—parents have responded to that Voice and have sent us their children—whole families, listening, struggling with great decisions have suddenly uprooted themselves and moved here. And here we all are, a rag-tag army of saints and sinners (mostly sinners) doing remarkably well, actually, considering a lack of unity in our wounded Church and in our wounded lives. We manage to be born, baptized, married and buried here in the arms of the Sacraments and liturgy—we have a school that, in spite of all its growing pains—is entering its tenth year!

To gather some of this together then: one of our first duties as Christian Catholics is to honestly assess the condition of the world toward the purpose of life which, for us, is to live forever. Granting that there will always be a tension between the ways of the world, its morbid concerns with money, youth and endless pleasure; there are still certain ages that are clearly better than others in being more sympathetic to the goal of the heavenly kingdom toward which we are to aspire. We should examine closely what those better times did and did not do to make the world an easier place for Our Lord and His work. Our age has embraced a corpse and, I fear, the corpse is about to lift its arms and return the embrace with a last death grip. That's the truth of it and we are all touched in some way by it—be it Modernism or all the other "isms." But we do not stop there: to stop is to put on one or more of the many faces of despair, and discouragement often seems to be in the very air we breathe. There is not much in between: we either rejoice, seeing the truth of Christianity being persecuted, rejoice in sharing this with Him, in His Body, this great persecution of goodness, the madness of persecuting divine life; or, neglecting the only vision of hope, we attempt to find relief from despair in the foolishness of political and economic optimism, in anger and violence, in witch hunts, or in the comfortable unreality of television, non-stop pleasure, gadgets, booze, drugs...

Christian education, like a wise old doctor, has to deal with every one of these wounds, but the wounds being so numerous, the weapons ever more clever, education is driven back to the first remedies, not only in the so-called "back to basics" movement in arithmetic, reading, and so on, but the realization in the spiritual order that we are forever going back to basics, a kind of herbology for the soul. We are at the beginning again, having, it would seem, to do everything over. And we are not sure where to begin, it well may be that as parents and teachers, as priests and religious, we must do our childhood over in some way so as to rediscover in us what we desire to see in our children and our students. For example, how many of us not only could stand the refreshment of going over the good sense and nonsense of nursery rhymes and the easy, restful wisdom of the great children's' stories and songs? Further, how the child in us needs to wonder and be assured again by that first music of the catechism: that our grand purpose is to know, love and serve God, now and forever. Why not? It will be this child, and only this child, that enters heaven.

St. Mary's Academy alone cannot make a child a saint—God alone makes saints, not teachers or high levels of education. Nor can St. Mary's Academy make good vocations to the priesthood, religious life or married life—this is God's work. But then, why is it true that good marriages, vocations, even saints already, have come from this school? Because it is surrounded with the first things: it has the sympathy of God Himself like a beautiful wall around the little garden of this school—just as His caring eye and hand came to help our first parents with the promise of a new mother and a new man in that first garden, we now have that high and lovely wall of protection and consolation—the Mass, the Blessed Sacrament—embracing us. And dwelling within, enclosed with us, is the mother of God, this being her special place, dedicated to her. From the first day of operation here the Mass was established, and that is charity, that is well-directed love, and our God is with us and has care for us, even as we fall, doubt, deny Him, curse and provoke and do evil towards ourselves and one another—we did the first thing right, with Him. We must not presume then that He will not expect us to do better, and soon. We must not presume that all here could not be lost, all could cave in by our cooperation with the efforts of the devil and his active gang. But this is the Christian life, and our education is to be prepared for it as best as we can by learning in the sad days why we should rejoice; in these impious days, why we should be reverent toward God and His creatures; in these moody days why to laugh; in these days of death why to live. The how of all of these will follow when we learn the why of the Sacrifice of the Mass.

Here then, is a final picture of the ideal of education at St. Mary's: at the top of the stairs of Bellarmine Hall, the first building to be used as a school here in 1979, stands a statue of St. Clare, holding the monstrance of the Blessed Sacrament, the fruit of that Sacrifice of Love. Her eyes are turned slightly upward toward heaven. We remember that the statue shows Clare at the moment of imminent peril, of certain death. And yet she did not die. With all the other saints of heaven, she waits to repeat with the voice of the Church in her Mass to the children of St. Mary's, to the children of the true Catholic schools that are to follow from our efforts here, saying: Thou hast loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows... they shall be brought with gladness and rejoicing: they shall be brought into the temple of the King.