Education

Education and Our Witness to Christ is the title of a post by Charles J. Chaput (the archbishop of Denver) at the First Things blog. (It was adapted from the homily that he have at the inauguration Mass for Wyoming Catholic College.)

Chaput first affirms a realist position in considering why very smart people do evil things:

I think we can find the answer to that question in another of my favorite thoughts from Chesterton. He said that when a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing; he believes in anything. Events have proved him right. The historian and poet Robert Conquest wrote that a central flaw of the twentieth century was the addiction of educated men and women to “big ideas” divorced from reality and results. In a healthy mind, big ideas get tested against reality. If they don’t work, they get dumped. But the lunatic mind breaks and reshapes reality to fit the big idea.

He then goes on to describe the most important attributes of education:

It’s the content, the purpose, and the result of an education that count. And that’s why a truly Catholic education is so crucial. The doctrines and structures of our Catholic faith are there for very good reasons. They’re vitally important because they form us and sustain us as a believing community. ... But the heart of being a Catholic is not a set of ideas. It’s a person—the person of Jesus Christ. The goal of a Catholic life is meeting, loving, and following Jesus Christ.

The last part of his post discusses what a real relationship with God looks like, and how it we prove it by our actions, by keeping His commandments. And education is important to that:

The vocation of every Christian life is to change the world: to open the eyes of the world and to bring the world to Jesus Christ. And the role of Catholic education is to give students the zeal, the faith, and the intellectual depth to do that.