Toward a More Perfect Union: Catholic Education and American Citizenship
Pope Leo XIII, in his 1887 letter approving The Catholic University of America, predicted that Catholic colleges would “give to the Republic her best citizens.” They would produce a certain kind of citizen formed in faith, virtue, and wisdom. Such a rigorous Catholic education would not only serve the Church by producing faithful Catholics, but it would also produce citizens with moral character and religious depth who could lead the Nation.
Almost 140 years later, how does Leo’s prediction hold up? Have our Catholic colleges produced this kind of Catholic and this kind of citizen?
Forming the best Americans
In defense of Leo, there are objective metrics which answer the question in the affirmative. Graduates of Catholic colleges are 20% more likely to volunteer for charitable activities than their secular peers; they are 17% “happier” in terms of mental health; and they are more than 10% more likely to vote. Catholics educated at Catholic colleges also tend to make more money, own more homes, and tend to have more stable and slightly bigger families. As Pope St. John Paul II famously taught, “as the family goes, so goes the nation.” So if we make the strongest families, perhaps that’s the best metric of all that Leo was right: Catholic colleges give the Republic her best citizens.
Intuitively, however, we know this question is not so easily answered by these material metrics. Most of the nearly 200 Catholic colleges in America have drifted so far away from the Leonine vision that it can seem like the main thing they produce are liberal citizens who leave their faith behind. The Land O’Lakes watershed event of 1969 marked a turning point for many of our largest Catholic schools, which joined Fr. Theodore Hesburgh in declaring “independence” from the Church. Strangely, this departure from the Leonine vision was defended on almost Leonine terms, but with the faulty presupposition that America’s best citizens must have greater fealty to an ascendent post-war Liberalism than to either the Church or the Nation. Our largest Catholic universities chased their secular betters, thinking they could win at their game. They became more adept at teaching the pseudo-religion of DEI than they did at teaching students to sing the Agnus Dei.
We can now see why the work of The Cardinal Newman Society matters so much today. We could ask the question anew: Have our Newman Guide Recommended Catholic colleges produced America’s best citizens? Here it is much easier to simply say, Yes! While Liberal Catholic higher education has only ever reliably produced fewer faithful Catholics while graduating citizens who believe more in the “warmth of collectivism” than in the providential gift of our homeland, Newman Guide schools do give America her best citizens.
As the liberal order collapses — something which we can see happening all around the world — it will only become more evident that colleges which have a more classical, traditional, and Catholic approach to Catholic social teaching are the way forward for forming faithful citizens. After all, they teach what Pope Leo XIII had in mind for our students’ learning, namely that the distinctively American common good flows from God. Our Newman Guide colleges are far more likely to warn against what Pope Leo called “indifferentism” to the one true faith and instead argue that Christianity is as necessary to western civilization as grace is to nature.
A return to Leonine Christianity
In his recent book, His Reign Shall Have No End: Catholic Social Teaching for the Lionhearted (2025), Peter Kwasniewski offers a refreshing alternative to the standard liberal Catholic approaches we see on campus. He puts Catholic social teaching back onto its proper footing. Instead of either an individualistic or collectivist approach, he understands that the Catholic mission is just as much about nations becoming disciples of Jesus Christ as it is about families and souls being transformed. He helps to see that Catholics have a completely integrated vision of Christianity as essential to the soul of public life — and we shouldn’t leave that vision behind in order to fit in. Our families, our schools, our economy, our civic rituals and laws all need to be brought into contact with Christ the King. This is no longer simply the claim of Catholic traditionalists but has gone mainstream. I am now as likely to hear the words “Christ is King” on X, or in the White House, or from my Zoomer students. How ironic that Protestants are now more likely than Liberal Catholics to proclaim “Christ is King.”
Perhaps our time has come — or rather, perhaps we can say that Leonine Christianity is back. “Christ is King” is exactly what Pope Leo XIII expected students at The Catholic University of America would learn when he approved her founding in 1887.
It’s also what he expects of us today: Catholics who learn to say with their chest that Christ is King will give America her best citizens, her best families, her best businesses, her best vision of law, her best vision of civilization. Anything less falls short of the Leonine vision. Does it matter that there are too few of us?
Consider the fact that, while America understood itself as “Christian” in the 19th century, only a small minority of Americans were Catholic. Leo was not deterred in the least by the fact that Catholics represented only a small percentage of the population. Indeed, he seemed to have the deepest confidence that we would become America’s ruling elites!
In his 1895 letter, Longinqua Oceani (1895), Pope Leo XIII especially praised the bustling vitality of Catholicism in the New World, and he reiterated his confidence that Catholics would not only help make America great but would also lead America in her search for “a more perfect union.”
Even today, can we not count Catholics among the most principled jurists on our Supreme Court? Though Catholics may be a much greater percentage of the population today, it remains true that faithful, orthodox Catholics are a much smaller number. Yet despite our small number, we can now hear a Catholic Secretary of State proclaim the Nicene Creed at public events, and our Vice President can advocate for Christian faith being central to the American way of life. These are not insignificant developments that favor Leonine confidence. We can lay claim to being “the creative minority” who not only preserve the American way of life but also purify it and perfect it by way of Christ the King.
Toward a bright future
In conclusion, there is one more 19th century prediction that I think should give us confidence that now is the time for a revival of traditional Catholic social teaching in our Catholic colleges:
In his 1830 work Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Catholicism had tremendous vitality, despite small numbers. He marveled at how strong Catholicism was — almost unaffected by what he called “the democratic religious fervor.” The Catholics were not “tossed about” on the waves of change but were rooted in the perennial Christian order of things.
As a result, Tocqueville predicted that, given enough time, Protestants would eventually cease to exist in America — eventually becoming either Catholic or pantheistic liberals. Now this prediction has not yet become true, but it looks more plausible than ever before. Mainline Protestantism has died — much of it has been emptied out into the pantheistic arms of gay race communism — but also many Protestants are either becoming Catholic or are much more willing to lock arms with Catholics in a fight to save our country. The fact that Protestants and Catholics can lock arms under “Christ the King” suggests that, eventually, Tocqueville’s prediction will come true as well.
If I’m right about the predictions of both Leo and Tocqueville, I suspect that, in the long run, the only Catholic colleges left will be ones that belong on the Newman Guide list. They’ll be the ones with the Leonine vision, and they’ll give America the citizens she needs to form “a more perfect union.”
Dr. C.C. Pecknold is a professor of theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.