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Does “Catholic education” begin in Catholic schools—or is there something more foundational?

Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas, has an intriguing answer.

Last week, in his St. Hildegard Lecture at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota, Bishop Flores argued that there are “habits of the soul” that, when developed “prior to formal education,” help students become more aware of the relationships among physical and abstract realities and God.

This, he says, prepares a student to study disciplines as varied as “grammar, rhetoric, music, biology, medicine, morality and mystical contemplation.”

I spoke with Bishop Flores following the lecture to discuss the implications for Catholic families and teachers.

Back to the Garden

By encouraging formation that occurs “prior to formal education,” Bishop Flores does not propose some sort of Catholic preschool, although developing good habits in the home and parish at a young age is important.

Instead, by “prior” he means fundamental, a prerequisite for a good education at any age.

In his lecture at the University of Mary, he noted that St. Hildegard of Bingen and other great saints exhibited a “synthetic impulse, by which I mean a purposeful concern for the deeper connections that bind all that exists.” They grasped how things and ideas relate to other parts of reality, the “kinship” and order in God’s creation.

This, argued Bishop Flores, was partly a result of their upbringing within a Catholic culture and worldview.

For St. Hildegard, the synthetic impulse was “fertile ground” to produce impressive writings, musical compositions, poetry, moral teaching and scientific studies without ever having the sort of formal schooling that is common to most great thinkers. She had a mind “like Jacob’s ladder,” said Bishop Flores, that ascended to the sublime and descended into practical concerns without difficulty.

This sense of both divine purpose and the relatedness of all reality is valuable to learning, Bishop Flores argued. The synthetic impulse enables the student to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for the world around us.

It is “somewhat natural to human beings” and therefore available to non-Catholics, but for a faithful Catholic, the synthetic impulse:

…becomes robust and fruitful with baptism into the faith; it comes with looking at life and reality from the gut awareness that the source of all that is, is the Good God; this good God loves immensely, and was interested in a garden at creation, not a wild and chaotic forest of beings related only by a competitive need to survive.

He recommended that Catholics spend more time with other people who appreciate the connectedness of all things, especially how humans relate to each other. He mentioned several categories of good company: children, whose thoughts naturally tend to both realism and imagination; the poor, whose dependency makes them appreciate the “reciprocity of human relations;” poets, writers and other artists, whose work is “reflecting the creative act of the WORD;” farmers, who are attuned to the “natural rhythms of nature;” and the saints, because charity is “the gift of knowing how to relate.”

The confidence of Catholics

I explored these themes further with Bishop Flores after the lecture. If the synthetic impulse is foundational to a good education, I wondered, does it suggest particular methods and practices in formal Catholic education, or is it cultivated entirely outside of our schools?

Bishop Flores believes that Catholic educators certainly can help nurture students’ synthetic impulse—“if you don’t have it, you have to develop it,” he said. But the point of his lecture was to suggest that Catholics, because of their faith, culture and worldview, tend to come to school already confident in the relatedness of things, making them well-prepared for learning and discernment.

Catholic educators should ask, he said, “How well habituated is the student body to seeing things as interrelated? How well have they maintained a traditional Catholic sense of the connectedness of reality?”

Where the synthetic impulse is noticeably lacking, a Catholic school can help.

“But it works much better if there is already a foundation in the home,” Bishop Flores said.

I asked whether he thinks that, given the very secular culture in which most Catholic families live today, many homes still provide this foundation for young Catholics?

He acknowledged the “very steep undertow” in our culture, which is highly individualistic. But he said there remain “expressions of very deep Catholic life” in prayer, spirituality, music and the arts. This sets many young people “on the road” to perceiving truth and the relations of things.

As for Catholic schools and colleges, it’s clear that many today have drifted away from the integrated learning and strong core curricula that helped reinforce the synthetic impulse for previous generations of Catholics. In his lecture, Bishop Flores lamented the “intellectual culture of endless disciplines and sub-disciplines happily unconcerned with what a colleague across the campus may be doing or thinking.”

What has been lost, he said, “is the sheer human joy of pursuing the signs of relationality we know are present in things that may at times appear disparate and unrelated.” Young people should wonder about the unity of creation, but academia wants them to analyze facts in isolation.

Still, that’s not the case throughout Catholic education. Bishop Flores said he is “impressed” by some Catholic schools. It “can be a blessing” that smaller schools have limited resources, he said, because teachers and parents have to work together, increasing the cohesiveness of the community.

He experienced that cohesiveness himself when studying at the University of Dallas, a faithful Catholic college. He was also “very impressed” by what he saw last week at the University of Mary.

Bottom line: there’s much to be restored in education, but “Catholic institutions are in the best position to do it.”

Flesh and blood

Earlier I mentioned Bishop Flores’ recommendation that Catholics spend more time with people in whom the synthetic impulse is especially strong. I asked him to relate this to Catholic education—can schools help provide this for students and faculty?

Obviously schools offer the opportunity for adults to engage with children, one of the groups he mentioned. It’s the encounter with children that draws grade school teachers to the profession. But Bishop Flores suggested that college professors are often too isolated in their disciplines and even socially.

“Many theology and philosophy professors, to put it bluntly, need to get out more,” he said.

We discussed the value of older students mixing with younger ones, an aspect of homeschooling that I’ve found particularly healthy for my own kids. Bishop Flores said he encourages high school students to mentor younger ones and develop an ethos of “looking out for each other.”

Catholic education can also introduce students to the poor. But the encounter should be more than “social justice” activities and providing material aid, Bishop Flores suggested. It should help students relate humanly to the people they help by getting to know them.

“The poor are not a category,” he said. “We’ve eclipsed the personal encounter, because we’ve categorized people.”

With regard to experiencing the arts, we talked especially about the Hispanic Catholic culture prevalent in his Brownsville Diocese, with its “very tactile” feasts, processions and devotions. Bishop Flores said these are reminders of early European expressions of Catholic life, like the ornate Polish churches he explored as a youth, which can be “extremely powerful” in transmitting the faith and encouraging wonder.

“The Church needs to recapture some of the ethnic beauty of the Church,” he said.

And students should be introduced to the saints, especially by the display of relics. Bishop Flores finds that young people “are the most responsive” to such tangible displays of both divine and material reality.

“Christianity becomes an idea until you put some flesh and blood on it,” he said.

True Catholic education

After our conversation, it occurred to me that Bishop Flores’ contemplation of the synthetic impulse is helpful to developing a proper sense of Catholic education.

Instilling good “habits of the soul” in young people prepares them for formal schooling, but it is already part of Catholic education in its own right. Catholic education is not an institution with the label “Catholic.” It is the project of forming young people in the faith for fully human living and to gain the inheritance promised by Christ.

So when Catholic parents and parishes nurture the synthetic impulse by teaching the faith and living Catholic culture, it is as much an exercise of Catholic education as teaching theology in a classroom.

Blessed John Henry Newman said Catholic education should integrate religion and science so as “to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God, and have been put asunder by man.” By appreciating “the grandly expressive relation between all things that are,” Bishop Flores added, “a Christian is called by grace to be the mediator of a related world that struggles to live up to its relations.”

Now that sounds like a Catholic education that lives up to its name.

This article first appeared at The National Catholic Register.

When President Donald Trump said he would nominate a Supreme Court justice in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died one year ago on Feb. 13, everyone knew that meant someone who shares Scalia’s originalist philosophy of constitutional law.

But who expected that the appointee, Neil Gorsuch, would be another Georgetown graduate? And one who apparently once shared the late Catholic jurist’s disapproval of “liberal” trends in Catholic education?

To be precise, Scalia graduated from the Jesuits’ Georgetown University in 1957, and Gorsuch graduated from Georgetown Preparatory School in 1985. But years earlier, both institutions sprang from the same Georgetown College that Father John Carroll (the future archbishop of Baltimore) founded in 1789. In fact, there was little distinction between the secondary school and the college for nearly a century. The Preparatory School finally separated and moved from Washington, D.C., to its present location in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1919.

‘Not Catholic Anymore’

When Father Carroll founded Georgetown, it was with great hope that the school would help firmly establish the Catholic Faith in America.

“The object nearest my heart now, and the only one that can give consistency to our religious views in this country, is the establishment of a school, and afterwards a Seminary for young clergymen,” he wrote in 1785 to Father Charles Plowden in England.

A historian at Georgetown Prep, Steve Ochs, has written that the College once embraced the traditional view of Catholic education—that its aim is to form young people in Christ and for Christ: “Most importantly, the Jesuits of Georgetown regarded the Christian formation of students as their primary mission. Knowledge and skills, although important, were approached as a means to an end: the knowledge and love of God.”

The University today, sadly, no longer has this view of education. This is most apparent in the dossier on Georgetown scandals that accompanied the late William Peter Blatty’s petition to the Vatican.

In 2014, Justice Scalia famously declared that “Georgetown University is not Catholic anymore.” In his days at Georgetown, Scalia said, “they rolled you out of bed to attend Mass. Not anymore.”

According to The Remnant:

One little vignette still fondly remembered by the Justice harks back to what Georgetown was.

At his final oral exam prior to receiving his degree (History), Scalia was breezing along when Dr. Wilkinson, the chairman of the department who presided over the three professor panel, asked this question: What was the most important event in the history of the world?

The confident candidate thought, “I have done very well up to here and there is no wrong answer to this one,” but as he responded Prof. Wilkinson continued to shake his head signaling that the student had it all wrong. Was it the Battle of Waterloo, or the Greek valor at Thermopylae? The panel member remained unimpressed with the candidate’s answers.

Finally, Dr. Wilkinson replied: “Mr. Scalia it was the Incarnation, when Christ became a man that is the correct answer.” One seriously doubts that Dr. Wilkinson’s question is ever asked at Georgetown examinations today, and if it were, clearly his response would no longer be considered correct. Despite his answer, Antonin Scalia graduated from Georgetown U. summa cum laude, no mean feat in those days in which grades were not “curved,” and no one had ever heard of “grade inflation.”

The prior year, Scalia addressed Catholic students at the University of Virginia and also criticized Georgetown University:

“When I was at Georgetown, it was a very Catholic place. It’s not anymore—and that’s too bad,” Scalia said. “What has happened to Catholic universities, that they would lose their reason for being?”

He said the Catholic Church as a whole “has been in trouble for a while,” having lost some of its zeal for evangelization, for which Catholic education is the Church’s primary tool.

Need for Moral Formation

Justice Scalia didn’t come to that view toward the end of his life; he had deep concern for Georgetown and Catholic education generally for many years. In 1997, Scalia addressed The Cardinal Newman Society’s national conference in Washington, D.C., and he urged Catholic colleges to hold on to their Catholic beliefs:

The American landscape is strewn with colleges and universities, many of them the finest academically in the land, that were once denominational, but in principle or practice no longer are. With foolish sectarian pride I thought that could never happen to Catholic institutions. Of course I was wrong. We started later, but we are on the same road.

Scalia believed strongly in the continued need for Catholic education in today’s society, “because of the moral environment in which its work is conducted—an environment that sternly disapproves what the Church teaches, and in most cases what traditional Christianity has always taught, to be sinful.”

For that reason, the Catholic college must not shy away from “moral formation,” he said. “Catholic universities cannot avoid that task, and indeed betray the expectations of tuition-paying Catholic parents if they shirk it,” he argued.

Again in 2011, in a speech given at Duquesne University School of Law, Scalia adviocated moral formation:

Our educational establishment these days, while so tolerant of and even insistent on diversity in all other aspects of life, seems bent on eliminating the diversity of moral judgment, particularly moral judgment based on religious views. I hope this place will not yield, as some Catholic institutions have, to this politically correct insistence upon suppressing moral judgment, to this distorted view of what diversity in America means.

Scalia told the audience that moral formation “has nothing to do with making students better lawyers, but everything to do with making them better men and women. … Moral formation is a respectable goal for any educational institution, even a law school.”

He added, “A Catholic law school should be a place where it is clear, though perhaps unspoken, that the here-and-now is less important, when all is said and done, than the hereafter.”

An Episcopalian Conservative

Scalia’s high school experience, like his experience of 1950s Georgetown, was very good. He said that he became a “serious Catholic” at the Jesuit Xavier High School in New York, because of the “thoroughly religious atmosphere of the school.”

Gorsuch also attended a Jesuit high school, and like Scalia, he was a successful student. Scalia graduated in 1953 as valedictorian and first in his class at Xavier. Three decades later, Gorsuch was a top debater and was elected student body president at Georgetown Prep.

Both were fiercely conservative even as young men. “This kid was a conservative when he was 17 years old,” said Scalia’s classmate and future New York State official William Stern. “An archconservative Catholic. He could have been a member of the Curia. He was the top student in the class. He was brilliant, way above everybody else.”

Gorsuch, too, was openly conservative, but he found himself in a different environment than the “thoroughly religious” Xavier that Scalia attended. According to the Jesuit America magazine, Gorsuch sparred with both political and theological liberals at Georgetown Prep, even though he was an Episcopalian:

As a student at the tony, Jesuit-run Georgetown Preparatory School, Neil Gorsuch, the son of a Reagan administration official, was known as something of a conservative firebrand among the mostly center-left student body and faculty.

In the 1980s, students at the D.C.-area boarding school spent the minutes before student government meetings hashing out the political debates of the day.

Mr. Gorsuch, who was nominated on Jan. 31 to the Supreme Court by President Donald J. Trump, participated in the informal debates, where he was routinely teased, accused of being “a conservative fascist.” No shrinking violet, he would shoot back, taking on the liberal ethos of the school and even arguing with religion teachers about the liberal theological trends in vogue at the time.

Nevertheless, America reports, Gorsuch was popular and appears to have had a sense of humor, which was the cause of a recent flurry of news reports claiming that President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee had founded and led a “Fascism Forever” club in high school.

Ochs, the historian who teaches at Georgetown Prep and remembers Gorsuch from years ago, explained to America that the club was “a total joke.” Among the activities that Gorsuch listed in his high school yearbook, he identified himself as “Founder and President” of the “Fascism Forever Club.” (He also claimed to be a “Lousy Spanish Student” and president of the “Committee to reform The Beast.”)

“There was no club at a Jesuit school about young fascists,” Ochs told America. “The students would create fictitious clubs; they would have fictitious activities. They were all inside jokes on their senior pages.”

But it was not all fun at the liberal Jesuit school, apparently.

“There were some teachers who were ultra-liberal, and he would spar with them in class, like in religion class specifically, I remember, but always in good nature,” Ochs told America.

Distinguished Alumni

There’s been no sparring with Georgetown Prep this year over its graduate’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

“We are proud to have a son of Georgetown Preparatory School, a Catholic, Jesuit school founded the same year the United States Supreme Court was established, nominated to the nation’s highest court,” said Father Scott R. Pilarz, S.J., the school’s president, in a public statement. “All of us at Prep send our prayers and best wishes.”

America also reports that 70 of Gorsuch’s 90 classmates wrote a letter to Senators urging his confirmation.

If their wish is granted, Gorsuch is widely expected to be a strong advocate on the Court for religious freedom and the protection of human life from abortion and physician-assisted suicide.

When accepting his nomination, Crux reports that Gorsuch thanked his “friends, family and faith” for keeping his feet on the ground.

This article first appeared at The National Catholic Register.

Father Michael Scanlan, T.O.R., who died Saturday, reformed Franciscan University of Steubenville and built it into one of America’s most faithful and vibrant centers of Catholic learning. He is rightly acknowledged as a foremost leader in the renewal of Catholic higher education.

More than that, I think it is fitting that he be remembered as America’s devoted pastor of Catholic higher education in the 20th century.

Why do I call him pastor, and not first president or leader or reformer? Because what I hear most from nearly everyone who knew him, is that he touched them personally and cared deeply for the souls he encountered, bringing them closer to Christ. That seems to be the heart of his success and his motivation.

Thousands of his students, faculty, staff, trustees and others who knew him would doubtless agree.

Also, by his priestly witness Father Scanlan was in effect a shepherd to all Catholic colleges and universities, helping launch the renewal of faithful higher education and setting an important example for other college leaders to follow.

He was, of course, not the only major figure in Catholic higher education in the last century or president of the largest Catholic university. But Father Scanlan deserves the accolade nonetheless—surely more than his early contemporary Father Theodore Hesburgh, who accumulated popularity, prestige and influence but led the University of Notre Dame (and probably many individual Catholics) down a path that ends tragically in relativism and secularism.

When Father Scanlan became Franciscan University’s president in 1974, most American colleges founded by Catholic religious orders were rapidly shedding their distinctive identity. Faithful laymen responded by founding Thomas Aquinas College, Magdalen College, Christendom College and Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. But there was something unique happening at Franciscan University: a saintly Franciscan friar was again answering God’s call to “rebuild my Church.”

By the influence of Franciscan’s graduates, Father Scanlan continues to do just that. And the Church should be very grateful.

University reformer

I have long admired Father Scanlan and met him on several occasions. But after his death, dwelling upon his life and impact, I was eager to know more about those first exciting years when he began to transform what was then called the College of Steubenville.

So I spoke by phone with Dr. Alan Schreck, chairman of Franciscan University’s theology department for about 14 years under Father Scanlan. He gave a moving account of the incredible work and vision of this giant of Catholic education.

While still a student in college, Dr. Schreck first met Father Scanlan shortly after he was asked by the college’s trustees to consider putting his name in for the presidency. Father asked the young theology student for prayers that he make the right decision. That greatly impressed Schreck, as did Father’s vision.

“I will be president only if they allow me to make Jesus Christ lord of every aspect of the college,” Dr. Schreck remembers him saying.

At the time, Father Scanlan was rector of the Franciscan seminary in Loretto, Penn., and a well-known figure in the Catholic charismatic renewal. He had a worldwide following. My father-in-law, who lived in the Philippines until the 1980s and was very active in charismatic prayer groups and conferences, impressed me with his memories and great fondness for Father Scanlan.

I have often wondered how difficult it must have been for Father Scanlan to pull back from his charismatic ministry to take up a college presidency. But Dr. Schreck says that’s not what happened: Father had an “incredible capacity for work” and served on the Catholic renewal’s national committee and as pastor for a local parish established for charismatic Catholics, even while serving as college president.

Today the charismatic influence of Father Scanlan is still apparent at Franciscan University, although it has never been an official characteristic of the institution. It certainly contributed to the college’s reform and growth, attracting Catholics who are on fire with love for Christ. For Father Scanlan, it was “just a dimension of being Catholic,” Dr. Schreck explains. Father’s primary concern for the college and its faculty members was that they be faithful to the Magisterium, which is why he required the oath of fidelity for professors.

While the changes drove away some administrators and teachers, they also attracted a variety of notable scholars. They were attracted to Father Scanlan’s “integrated vision,” says Dr. Schreck. This called for 1) “dynamic orthodoxy,” ensuring that faculty are “loyally Catholic” while “teaching in such a way that theology is alive and life-giving;” 2) student life “where students could grow humanly as well as academically;” and 3) stronger academic quality.

I think that Father Scanlan’s academic priorities are largely overlooked today, given his reputation as a spiritual guide and preacher. But Dr. Schreck says Father immediately insisted on hiring Ph.D.’s, a step above many other Catholic colleges that, in those days, frequently hired master’s level professors.

With the conviction that theology is “queen of the sciences,” Father insisted that Franciscan have a full department of theology. The College of Steubenville had only a few core theology courses in 1974, but no major. Dr. Schreck later worked with Father to hire stars like Dr. Scott Hahn, Father Francis Martin and Dr. Regis Martin, as well as philosopher Dr. John Crosby.

With regard to student life, Father Scanlan wanted to ensure full integration between the students’ studies, especially in theology, and their campus experience. He instituted “households,” small communities of students who pray together and support each other in their daily lives. Noticing that students tended to go to Mass on Saturday evening before partying, Father preached at Sunday Mass and gradually drew students in. Campus ministry was fully devoted to “preaching of the Gospel.”

All of this made Franciscan University the shining model on a hill that it is today. Other Catholic colleges have followed the example, each in their own way, once again building up faithful Catholic education in many states across the country.

Extraordinary leader

Brian Scarnecchia, who taught legal studies at Franciscan University for 20 years and is now an associate professor at Ave Maria School of Law, also has known Father Scanlan since the 1970s. He tells an amazing story of Father Scanlan before he became president—in the 1960s, when Father was a theology professor and honors dean at the college.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed in Memphis in the summer of 1968, and Steubenville was on the verge of a race riot. Because of the city’s great respect for Father Scanlan, the mayor took the extraordinary step of turning the city government over to him. Father’s tactic of placing one black and one white police officer in every police cruiser helped avoid a riot and likely saved the city from burning.

Scarnecchia also recalls when Father and Bishop Albert Ottenweller of Steubenville were arrested outside a Youngstown, Ohio, abortion clinic in 1989. Scarnecchia helped spring them and the other “Youngstown 47” from imprisonment at the National Guard Armory.

In court, the judge asked Father if he is familiar with the Bible passage, “Let every person be subordinate to the higher authorities” (Rom. 13:1). Father Scanlan asked whether the judge had heard the passage, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).

That’s not your typical college president.

I heard another tale straight from Father Scanlan a few years ago that, for me, exemplifies Father’s inventiveness, leadership and trust in God that brought him so much success. Unfortunately, I’ve not found a single person who confirms the story, so it will have to be categorized somewhere in the realm of legend.

Here’s what I recall: Father told me that when he became president of the College of Steubenville, the campus was a sore sight. One thing that particularly irked him was the lack of a proper lawn.

“There was no grass,” he said. That might have been a bit of exaggeration, but the college had no money for groundskeeping, and students had trampled much of the grass bare.

With no money, most college leaders would have turned to other problems with apparent solutions. Instead, Father prayed. And the answer he received meant fertilizing the lawn by a creative method that somehow involved the local sanitation authority. (Here’s where I’d love to get some confirmation—today there are all kinds of laws that keep garbage, or sewage, or whatever it was off private property—but that’s how I remember the story.)

In those days, a struggling Ohio college didn’t have central air conditioning. All summer, Father said, faculty and staff were faced with the terrible options of sweltering in hot buildings or opening up the windows. He said the smell was so bad, they chose to swelter.

Then, with that Irish twinkle in his eye, Father said, “But sure enough, we had grass by the time the students arrived in the fall. And we’ve had grass ever since!”

There are, no doubt, many anecdotes revealing Father Scanlan’s great capacity for looking above his challenges to the God Who makes all things right. No doubt this strength came from prayer.

Dr. Schreck recalls that Father would sometimes not get to his office until 11 a.m., because he spent his mornings in prayer.

“I don’t know how to turn this university around,” Father Scanlan admitted. “Only God can do that.”

Leader of the renewal

I asked Dr. Schreck whether Father had ever indicated any angst about leading the reform in Catholic higher education. His work was counter-cultural, and he bucked the secularizing trend among most Catholic colleges. Surely this didn’t please his peers at most other Catholic colleges.

On the other hand, Father Scanlan must have felt the responsibility of setting an example for other college leaders. He must have known that he was being watched, and thankfully he lived to see some of the enormous impact his example had—especially at the growing number of faithful Catholic colleges.

Didn’t the pressure of leading such important reform in the Church ever get to him?

Dr. Schreck doesn’t think so. In fact, he says that Father Scanlan stayed focused on the tasks that God set before him, and he didn’t seem to worry much about the bigger picture.

“If we do well what we’re doing, we will make an impact,” was Father’s outlook.

Father Scanlan did have the conviction that his vision for Franciscan University “was the future of Catholic institutions as they should be,” says Dr. Schreck, and that vision had real influence. He recalls a symposium some years ago following Father’s retirement, when leaders of several Catholic universities came to Franciscan to discuss the mission of Catholic higher education—a sign of their respect for Franciscan’s stature as a leading example of faithful education.

“He really wanted to do God’s will,” says Dr. Schreck. “If that happened, it was the grace of God” that would bring about other changes elsewhere, “as long as we remained faithful to the vision.”

Today Franciscan is pushing forward into online education, an opportunity and challenge that Father Scanlan never faced himself. But Dr. Schreck says the vision remains the same: to find ways to educate well, and to keep it Catholic.

That surely sounds like good counsel for any venture in Catholic education today. It would have met with much skepticism in the 1970s, when the very possibility of a Catholic college was being questioned. Today, we know for certain that Catholic education can be done well—and can be thoroughly Catholic—because of Father Scanlan’s extraordinary example.

He did what he set out to do: he made Jesus Christ lord of every aspect of his college, and of his life.

May God have mercy on Father Michael Scanlan’s soul and take him into His loving arms.

This article was originally published by National Catholic Register.