Mar 31, 2022
New Vatican Instruction: Identity of Catholic Schools to be Respected by Teachers, Students by Hannah Brockhaus at Catholic News Agency. The Vatican’s education congregation on Tuesday published a document responding to conflicts over the interpretation of the concept of “Catholic identity” in Catholic school settings. The 20-page instruction affirmed the importance of a Catholic educational project with an evangelical goal and explained the role that teachers and administrators play in its achievement.“The whole school community is responsible for implementing the school’s Catholic educational project as an expression of its ecclesiality and its being a part of the community of the Church,” the document from the Congregation for Catholic Education said. Read When Wokesim is Changing Your Child’s School by Ida Gazzola at The B.C. Catholic. How radically different my childhood was compared to today’s, when words like colonialism, patriarchy, transgenderism, critical (race) theory, intersectionality, white privilege, and social justice are seeping into my home and into society’s everyday vocabulary. Along with these ideas come a climate of anger and division. Ironically, all facets of woke ideology instill a victim mentality which ultimately disempowers its adherents. Hence the anger. Read Distributist Principles and the Redistribution of Catechetical Formation by Brad Bursa, Ph.D. at The Catholic World Report. People who are serious about handing on the faith to the next generation, whether they are in Catholic parishes or schools, have been frustrated by the same problem: the widening gap between faith and the daily lives of their students. To be sure, this is no novel issue. Back in the 1950s, Joseph Ratzinger diagnosed it as a new paganism lurking beneath the Catholicism of the time. He says, rather frankly, “she is no longer, as she once was, a Church composed of pagans who have become Christians, but a Church of pagans, who still call themselves Christians, but actually have become pagans.” Read Pro-Lifers Outraged Boston Catholic School Is Honoring Pro-Abortion Biden Cabinet Member by Matthew McDonald at National Catholic Register. Pro-lifers are criticizing the decision by a Catholic school in Boston to give an award to the city’s former mayor, who supports legal and publicly funded abortion. Marty Walsh, the current U.S. secretary of labor in the Biden administration, is scheduled to receive the award Friday from Catholic Memorial, a selective Grade 7-12 school for boys run by the Christian Brothers. Read Most Democratic Voters in Florida Support the Sex-Ed BillDemocratic Leaders Unanimously Call 'Bigoted' by Timothy P. Carney at Washington Examiner. The three leading Democratic candidates for governor in Florida are tripping over themselves to see who most hates the bill that Democrats and the media absurdly call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Yet most Democratic primary voters, by a large margin, support the aims of the bill all three of their candidates call bigoted. When asked whether "students in Kindergarten through 3rd grade be taught about sexual orientation in the classroom by their teachers," 52% of Democratic primary voters said no, while 36% said yes. The most common response, with 36%, was “definitely no.” Read
Throwback Article
What a Student Owes His Teacher by James V. Schall, S.J., in chapter 3 of Another Sort of Learning, published by Ignatius Press in 1988, republished by Catholic Education Resource Center. Thus, the student owes the teacher trust, docility, effort, thinking. And what is it the teacher can expect of his students? Augustine said it well. The students actually learn, when they actively think the thoughts of mankind, when the "inner truths" of things themselves actually make themselves known to them, in their own minds. Read