When the Catholic Voice asked me to write an article setting out my vision for Catholic Education in our archdiocese, my first thought was “Well, it won’t be MY vision; it will be OUR vision.” For a vision to become reality requires that it is developed in collaboration with the people who will be responsible for making it happen.

So my top priority as the incoming Executive Director of Catholic Education will be to visit every principal in their school and to listen very carefully to what they have to say. They combine vision and action. In the opening words of Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, “Gaudium et Spes”, I want to hear about their “joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties” in relation to carrying on the mission of bringing the Good News of Jesus to the world through our schools.

This commitment to consultation and collaboration is aligned with Pope Francis’ hope – reiterated by Pope Leo – that our church be characterised by “synodality”. But synodality is not the same as our secular concept of democracy – “majority vote”. In his accompanying note to the final document of the Synod on Synodality, released last year and subtitled “Communion, Participation, Mission”, Pope Francis described synodality as “the appropriate interpretive framework for understanding hierarchical ministry.”

Our hierarchical church has previously articulated its vision for Catholic Education in numerous documents. For example, Pope Francis has stated that,

Our world does not need automatons that simply repeat what has already been said and done. It needs new choreographers, new interpreters of our rich human resources, new social poets. Educational models that aim merely to produce “results” are useless in the absence of a cultural vision capable of forming persons prepared to help the world change gears by eliminating inequality, endemic poverty and exclusion.

And Pope Leo has diagnosed the causes of the sense of isolation and exclusion many young people experience, especially in the affluent West:

Think of the isolation caused by rampant relational models increasingly marked by superficiality, individualism, and emotional instability; the spread of patterns of thought weakened by relativism; and the prevalence of rhythms and lifestyles in which there is not enough room for listening, reflection, and dialogue, at school, in the family, and sometimes among peers themselves, with consequent loneliness. 

So our schools must be places where the primary mission is to offer a “cultural vision” of hope, meaning and purpose through faith in Christ. Our schools must evangelise through education, and educate through evangelisation.

This means that we should not be entertaining a false dichotomy between faith formation on the one hand and academic excellence on the other. The code of Canon Law states that “Directors of Catholic schools are to take care under the watchfulness of the local [bishop] that the instruction which is given in them is at least as academically distinguished as that in the other schools of the area.” It also states that in partnership with parents, in Catholic schools “children and youth are to be nurtured in such a way that they are able to develop their physical, moral, and intellectual talents harmoniously, acquire a more perfect sense of responsibility and right use of freedom, and are formed to participate actively in social life.”

So faith-based education and academic excellence are not in conflict. They are not somehow at opposite ends of some continuum like freezing water and boiling water that somehow have to “balanced” to in order to be “just right”. Faith-based education and academic excellence actually go hand-in-hand and reinforce one another.

In fact I would go further and say it is not possible to have a true understanding of the world and of ourselves – which is what academic excellence is aiming for – without seeing that world through the eyes of faith, as created by God, and redeemed by God, out of love and for love.
In Catholic schools, faith and reason work together, not in conflict, to present the world as it really is. As Saint John Paul II said, faith and reason are the two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of the truth.

But if you have a narrow definition of faith-based education as time spent in Religion class, and an equally narrow definition of academic excellence as high scores on standardised tests, then I can see how you could see these things as in competition. But they are not.

The religious dimension of education in Catholic schools is much more than Religion lessons. A faith-based vision of reality should infuse the teaching and learning of all subjects, which after all are just the way we humans have divided up reality to make it easier to comprehend.

A key challenge for us is to ensure that our schools remain accessible to all families, especially the most disadvantaged families in our community. Catholic social teaching calls on us to have a preferential option for the poor, but to enable this requires a fair and reasonable system of government funding. Catholic schools have never been just for the wealthy. Our history shows the opposite. But changes in government funding over the next few years will put pressure on our capacity to share the gift of Catholic education with everyone. The opportunity I see for Catholic education is to build on the great reputation we have for academic excellence and be bold when it comes to our evangelising mission, because more than ever our society is in need of its message of love. The secular view of the world as essentially meaningless has led to a culture of self-centredness which fails to deliver on its promise of happiness. The Christian vision of life is other-centred, and it offers salvation from meaninglessness, through encounter with Christ. This is the primary purpose of Catholic schools, and we should be bold in pursuing that purpose.