A ‘Second Spring’ of Catholic Education
A ‘Second Spring’ of Catholic Education
St. John Henry Newman trusted Providence. “I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling,” he wrote.
We, too, should have the same confidence. Today, we can see the amazing ways God has blessed faithful Newman Guide Recommended education, and it gives us hope! The Holy Spirit is accomplishing extraordinary things through the work of devoted parents, staff, teachers, and leaders.
Yet the renewal we are seeing unfold today, I believe, is something even more exceptional than the Providence that blesses our everyday labors. We are witnessing the kind of miracle that Newman called a “second spring.”
Today’s Newman Guide movement marks a momentous shift for Catholic education and Catholic life in America! We’ve endured a devastating two-thirds decline of Catholic school enrollment in 60 years. Many colleges abandoned their distinctive Catholic mission and today face obscurity and closure. Catholic fidelity, moral virtue, and basic rationality have declined precipitously… and yet, even so, renewal has taken hold in faithful Newman Guide institutions, and they are enjoying the riches of grace.
We’re witnessing a “Newman moment,” fulfilling the vision for Catholic education that our holy patron gave us 170 years ago. Only now is it coming to fruition in the Newman Guide institutions.
But this sort of renewal — a reversal against the strongest tide of secularism and hostility to Christianity this nation has ever seen — couldn’t come about simply by human effort.
Catholic education was headed rapidly toward oblivion in the United States, only decades after its glorious rise in cities and missions from the Atlantic to the Pacific, forming millions of Catholics in knowledge, moral virtue, prayer, and sacrament. Now, in faithful Newman Guide education, the light of Catholic education shines ever more brightly in a broken society that yearns for truth and hope.
A miraculous springtime
To understand this change — this “second spring” — we turn again to our holy patron and his famous sermon, delivered in 19th-century Victorian England.
For three centuries, the Catholic Church had been suppressed in England. Catholic churches and monasteries were seized, clergy and religious were expelled, and many were martyred across the British Isles. Children had to be sent abroad for Catholic education.
But in 1850, just five years after St. John Henry Newman’s conversion, the Church was finally permitted to restore the English hierarchy. It was at the first new synod of English bishops in 1852 that Newman preached his “Second Spring” sermon.
It begins with an obvious but beautiful analogy between the Church’s rebirth in England and the glories of springtime. Nature, he says, enjoys a cycle of life, death, then rebirth. Yet the human experience — what we think, do, and make — is much different. Both our morality and our works ultimately tend toward dissolution, and even our greatest achievements cannot persist.
It is interesting here to note that this was the same year Newman published Idea of University. It was a very unhappy time, because his great vision for Catholic education had come to naught in the Dublin university he was asked to establish, only to be thwarted by shortsighted bishops. He knew all too well the fragility of human works and the permanence found only in God.
So how, then, asks Newman, can we explain the sudden return of the Church in England after more than 300 years of desolation? The only explanation, he says, is a miracle of God: “a different sort of wonder, for it is in the order of grace,—and who can hope for miracles, and such a miracle as this?”
It is a “second spring” of the sort that could not happen naturally in human affairs. The faithful should respond, then, not with a sense of triumph but with enormous humility, gratitude to God, and renewed devotion to the work that God has clearly blessed.
The coming storm
I firmly believe that what we are experiencing today in the renewal of faithful Catholic education is such a “second spring.” The seeds are just sprouting, but already it is a miraculous intervention of which you and I are blessed to be a part.
The renewal of Catholic education is perhaps the best news in the Church today. Once-stagnant schools and colleges are being reformed and renewed. New, vibrantly faithful schools and colleges are opening. Faithful Catholic homeschooling and hybrid options are booming. And Catholic families around the country are once again embracing Catholic formation.
And how is all of this coming about? Like a “second spring,” by the clear hand of God.
Our holy patron, however, ends his sermon with a warning. Spring brings not just flowers but also storms — sometimes violent storms. Even amid the renewal in England, Newman tells the bishops to expect further persecution and even martyrdom, and he counsels them to welcome it and be grateful, as difficult as it may be.
We can certainly see the storms gathering against Catholic education today. The last many years of fighting for religious freedom may be only skirmishes before the federal government, every state, every accrediting agency, every athletic association, employers, and even our fellow Catholics turn against teachers who uphold the truth of the Catholic faith. The light that faithful graduates bring to a darkened world will be hated by many and perhaps even attacked by some.
What can we do? Trust, says our great saint. God will bring about His miracle, if He wills it. We can place great hope in the blooming of Newman’s vision today, more than a century after his death. And we can unite for both spiritual and material support, strengthening each other and fortifying Newman Guide education against the storms that blow.
Newman concludes his sermon with the assurance “that according to our need, so will be our strength.” He is certain that “the more the enemy rages against us, so much the more will the Saints in Heaven plead for us,” as well as Mother Mary and Angel Guardians. We need only plead with them in prayer.
Saint John Henry Newman, ora pro nobis.