What is the purpose of ‘A Catholic Education’? by Blandine Delplanque
O
n 23rd June 2021 I was unexpectedly moved by the sad news of the closure of the only free newspaper in Hong Kong, published by a Catholic. That makes it more important than ever that Catholics have an obligation to put oil in their lamps and keep them shining. There is no doubt that in today’s Orwellian world, characterised by the semblance of peace, the semblance of truth and the semblance of wisdom, Catholic education is a path to freedom. As always, it is the Cross which can act as guide in an education claiming to be Catholic, with a tension both vertical and horizontal. These are two tensions which symbolize the human aspiration for the divine, fulfilled in human history, with Mary, who is never far away, pictured by artists of every age
at the foot of the Cross of her Son, who at his last breath turns his face towards her. This Cross, majestic and simple, hangs over your valley of Ampleforth. How should Catholic education given to our children be characterised, what does it bring over and above the fine education offered also by other schools ? It gives an orientation, and that is its value in a world which has increasingly gone mad, and in which education depends more and more on the school. Father and mother are the first educators in a child’s life. The work begun in the mystery of conception is completed by the parents in daily life and always continues in the divine presence. ‘There is only one way of attaining the true
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altruism that makes a person free, by the patience acquired by small acts of generosity day after day,’ explains the Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, ‘by the daily attitude of self-denial, which suffices to show to what extent a person is slave to his or her ego. Only by this attitude are human eyes slowly opened.’ What a sublimation of the daily task, whatever it may be ! The education which we parents do our best to give to our children is prolonged in the school. In any logic a Catholic education is best developed in a Catholic school. In France teaching Congregations were obliged to disappear or go into exile under the yoke of atheism incarnated in the French Revolution and fully developed in the following centuries more or less forcibly, as the Benedictines of Ampleforth well know. A fiercely combative laicisation became the norm
