Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Earlier today, I was reading through the transcripts and summaries of B16’s locutions during his pilgrimage to the US which ended today. I had seen it earlier in the week, but I again happened upon the summary of his talk to Catholic educators at CUA. In that talk, B16 comments on the question as to why people are reluctant to entrust themselves to God. According to the Zenit summary, the Pope says:

“It is a complex phenomenon and one which I ponder continually,” the Pope confessed. “While we have sought diligently to engage the intellect of our young, perhaps we have neglected the will. Subsequently we observe, with distress, the notion of freedom being distorted.

“Freedom is not an opting out. It is an opting in — a participation in Being itself. Hence authentic freedom can never be attained by turning away from God. Such a choice would ultimately disregard the very truth we need in order to understand ourselves.”

In these words, Benedict summarizes a fundamental problem in modern education. In modern education, we seem to have forgotten that education is not simply the imparting of knowledge. Rather, it is the cultivation of an intellect; indeed, the cultivation of a whole person. While it is a fundamental part of education then, inculcating knowledge is simply one component of it together with forming intellectual skills and the training of the will.  There are several implications arising from this authentic meaning of education.

First, children need to be taught the skills of thinking, including the ability to critically consider the messages of the culture in which they are raised. Secondly, children must be taught not only what truth is but they must be challenged continually to live in accord with this truth. Not only must a child’s education be cognitive but it must be formative and transformative of his entire person. Thus, education must include the formation of his character.

This means then, that education thus must be a cooperative effort between a child’s first educators, his parents, and those who have been charged with assisting them. That is, today’s professional educators. If this education is to be effective, it must be an education in the whole person in which parents and schools support and reinforce each other.

Unfortunately, in our society the tendency is to leave all education to the professionals in public education. Furthermore, the difficulties of pluralism in belief has prompted public education (at least in theory if not in practice) to take the easy way out and eliminate from curriculum and classroom any mention of God, morals, virtue, or right character. In practice however, children get formed in immorality veiled as tolerance, pluralism, social justice, civil rights, etc.

Even with Catholic schools, the emphasis is on imparting knowledge because they are so wedded to the pedagogical tools and theories of public education. Thus, knowledge is imparted but too often little attention is paid to character formation. Likewise, while parents of Catholic school children tend to be somewhat more involved in their children’s education there is still the tendency of parents to leave aside concerns for the cultivation of the whole child–intellectual knowledge, thinking skills, character development, and especially, spiritual maturation (i.e. development in holiness).

No wonder then, even children raised in Catholic homes where church attendance is faithful, the children often tend to stray from the faith. When B16 refers to the lack attention to formation of the will, it is character formation and spiritual maturation that he has in mind. When he refers to the mistaken view of freedom, he is referring to the lack of formation in a proper view of the moral life. He takes up this point again in his talk at Dunwoodie (a.k.a. St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers).

B16 links freedom to Being itself. Fr. John Richard Neuhaus, in his commentary during EWTN coverage at St. John’s explicates this link between freedom and God’s own Being in term of “freedom for excellence” and its antithesis, “freedom of indifference.” I mentioned this distinction some time ago in a post discussing the late Fr. Servais Pinckaers, O.P. and his coining of those terms.

Children need to be taught to overcome the legalistic thinking of our age which results in almost an allergic reaction to any demands of personal restraint. They need to be taught that authentic freedom cannot be the libertine view of freedom our culture feeds us. If it were, it would be a vacuous concept.  We know this because we can see that by simply exercising this “freedom” we lose it. Anyone who has become enslaved to his choices, like hitting the alarm continually in the morning instead of getting up and going to the gym, or like immoderate indulgence in food or drink, or like any other bad habit which can even become addictions.

We can verify from our own experiences that for freedom to be preserved one must first recognize and then obey an order to the cosmos that preexists our arbitrary choices. Neither is that cosmic order arbitrary. It arises from the “Order” of Being itself and so brings with it a structure for action that corresponds with the meaning of the human person.  Subordination to this order brings with the fruit of joy and its disregard brings eventual interior discord and, if the disregard is sufficiently grave and prolonged, moral collapse.

This is what the Holy Father has often pondered. Why have we, especially in Catholic education and Catholic homes, failed to attend sufficiently to educating/forming our children’s will’s in addition to our concern for development of their intellects (or more precisely, to development of the cognitive content of their intellects)?

Perhaps we might pray that Catholic educators and Catholic parents will appreciate, appropriate, his words and also ponder with the Holy Father, what might be done in Catholic education that will again avail itself of the great patrimony of the Catholic Church.  This is the only way that Catholic children will not only learn not to fear giving themselves over to God, but will also allow them to be powerful witnesses of courage in surrender to God for the world.