The Educational Emergency

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - January 25, 2008

Over the course of his 80 years, Pope Benedict has justly earned the reputation as a theological genius and master pedagogue, but few would characterize him as particularly adept in public relations. He rarely speaks in sound bites and seldom reiterates key themes.

That is what makes his recent headline-grabbing comments on the "educational emergency" our society is facing all the more noteworthy.

The pope believes that there is a crisis in the education of young people in the west and he has been almost "stumping" on the point in order to drive it home. He made it the central theme of an address to the political leaders of central Italy on January 11. He stressed it to pilgrims from throughout the world in a December 31 ceremony to inaugurate the new year. He has repeated it, on numerous other occasions, to groups of teachers, families, diplomats, bishops and people of all categories. For a man not prone to repetition or hyperbole to return to the alarming expression "educational emergency" so many times in such short order demonstrates both how urgent and how worrisome he thinks the crisis is.

Pope Benedict's most extensive treatment of this educational-911 came last June in an address to teachers from his own Diocese of Rome. His comments describe in detail the challenges faced by today's parents and teachers, and therefore show, as we begin Catholic Schools Week on Sunday, why good Catholic schools are more important now than ever.

"Daily experience tells us," the Pope begins, "that precisely in our day educating in the faith is no easy undertaking. Today, in fact, every educational task seems more and more arduous and precarious. Consequently, there is talk of a great 'educational emergency,' of the increasing difficulty encountered in transmitting the basic values of life and correct behavior to the new generations, a difficulty that involves both schools and families and, one might say, any other body with educational aims.

"We may add that this is an inevitable emergency in a society, in a culture, that all too often make relativism its creed. Relativism has become a sort of dogma. In such a society the light of truth is missing; indeed, it is considered dangerous and 'authoritarian' to speak of truth, and the end result is doubt about the goodness of life … and the validity of the relationships and commitments in which it consists.

"For this reason, education tends to be broadly reduced to the transmission of specific abilities or capacities for doing, while people endeavor to satisfy the desire for happiness of the new generations by showering them with consumer goods and transitory gratification. Thus, both parents and teachers are easily tempted to abdicate their educational duties and even no longer to understand what their role, or rather, the mission entrusted to them, is.

In this way we are not offering to young people … what it is our duty to pass on to them, … the true values which give life a foundation. This situation … ignores the essential aim of education, which is the formation of a person to enable him or her to live to the full and to make his or her own contribution to the common good."

The purpose of education, in other words, is far more than teaching kids how to read, write, add and use Microsoft office. It goes beyond training them in technical skills necessary for a particular profession. It is to pass on to them the "basic values of life and correct behavior" we need to live well. Not only are these values and training no longer being communicated in most secular educational establishments, Benedict stresses, but false principles and injurious types of behavior are being transmitted in their place. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the realm of human sexuality, marriage and the family, where our children are being taught values "inspired by a mindset and culture marked by relativism, consumerism and a false and destructive exaltation, or rather, profanation, of the body and of sexuality." At the moral level, many children in the west are not only not being taught that two-plus-two-equals-four — which is enough of a handicap already — but are being instructed that two-plus-two-equals-five. That leaves the young at a terrible disadvantage with regard to many of the most important issues of human life and happiness; it also leaves society, which depends on the strength of marriage and the family for its well-being, seriously endangered.

Catholic schools light the way in the midst of this moral fog. "The Church's commitment to providing education in the faith, in discipleship and in witnessing to the Lord Jesus," the Pope affirms, "is more than ever acquiring the value of a contribution to extracting the society in which we live from the educational crisis that afflicts it." It does this fundamentally by opposing relativist epistemologies and moral systems while opening children up to the liberating reality of the truth. Young people today, Benedict continues, are "constantly exposed to, and often confused by, the multiplicity of information, and by the contrasting ideas and interpretations presented to them, [but] nevertheless still have a great inner need for truth… It is up to us to seek to respond to the question of truth, fearlessly juxtaposing the proposal of faith with the reason of our time. In this way we will help young people to broaden the horizons of their intelligence, to open themselves to the mystery of God, in whom is found life's meaning and direction, and to overcome the conditioning of a rationality which trusts only what can be the object of experiment and calculation."

Benedict calls this service to young people and to society's future "the pastoral care of intelligence." This pastoral care involves, first, getting the young to believe in truth and to recognize that it extends beyond what we can learn from empirical science. Its ultimate objective, however, is to help them to discover that the truth has a name — Jesus Christ — and enter into a personal friendship with him. This is the "crucial challenge" and "essential priority of our pastoral work: to bring close to Christ and to the Father the new generation that lives in a world largely distant from God."

In the face of today's educational emergency, in a commonwealth with militantly relativist public educational emphases, Catholic schools in our diocese are responding well to this crucial challenge. They need the support not only of the particular parishes to which they belong and the families of those who attend, but of all Catholics. The future not just of the Church, but of society, depends on it.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.