No Excuses: Catholic Schools Must Evangelize
by GLENN B. SINISCALCHI
One of the most important documents for understanding the role of Catholic education in the modern world is Vatican II’s Declaration on Christian Education. This document explains and defends the various ways in which students should be formed in Catholic schools, seminaries, colleges, and universities.
The Declaration affirms that Catholic colleges are an extension of the Church’s mission to evangelize the world. “Evangelization” is not relegated to colleges where a majority of the students are practicing Catholics. The Gospel is meant for everyone.
Consequently, a teacher’s love for his students will prompt him to propose and defend the Gospel in the classroom. Love speaks the truth to the beloved. Schools that wish to highlight a “student centered education” should ensure that every student has the opportunity to understand the rationale for Catholic teaching. As Pope Benedict XVI declared in his 2008 address to educators at Catholic University of America: “The profound responsibility to lead the young to truth is nothing less than an act of love.”
Catholic Education and Religious Pluralism
One of the most important documents for understanding the role of Catholic education in the modern world is Vatican II’s Declaration on Christian Education. This document explains and defends the various ways in which students should be formed in Catholic schools, seminaries, colleges, and universities.
The Declaration affirms that Catholic colleges are an extension of the Church’s mission to evangelize the world. “Evangelization” is not relegated to colleges where a majority of the students are practicing Catholics. The Gospel is meant for everyone.
Consequently, a teacher’s love for his students will prompt him to propose and defend the Gospel in the classroom. Love speaks the truth to the beloved. Schools that wish to highlight a “student centered education” should ensure that every student has the opportunity to understand the rationale for Catholic teaching. As Pope Benedict XVI declared in his 2008 address to educators at Catholic University of America: “The profound responsibility to lead the young to truth is nothing less than an act of love.”
Catholic Education and Religious Pluralism
Now, as a significant percentage of students are not Catholic, there is an ongoing concern about how Church teaching can be presented without excluding, marginalizing or offending anyone’s beliefs. Undoubtedly there are many students at Catholic colleges who are not Catholic or even Christian.
Be that as it may, these circumstances should not become an excuse for educators to merely teach about Catholicism and other religions. Rather, given these pluralistic circumstances, educators need to take the New Evangelization even more seriously.
In these circumstances, professors should at least try to foster a mindset in students that becomes open to the possibility of evangelization. Courses that center on the theme of “pre-evangelization” need to be seriously considered. As the Congregation for Catholic Education observed:
We have already referred to the fact that, in many parts of the world, the student body in a Catholic school includes increasing numbers of young people from different faiths and different ideological backgrounds…. In these situations, however, evangelization is not easy—it may not even be possible. We should look to preevangelization: to the development of a religious sense of life…. It is fertile ground which may, at some future time, be able to bear fruit.
Notice that the presence of other religions and secular outlooks on campus is not supposed to brush the school’s evangelical concerns to the side. Although educators should highlight commonalities between Catholicism and other religions, such a concern should not override an evangelical presentation and defense of the faith.
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