Authentic Catholic Education & The Search For Truth

We ought to discern the truth about our modern schools, remove our children from their ravages, and turn to the building of homeschooling communities and to involvement in classical charter schools. It is the only reasonable response to our modern schools, which have become unreasonable and morally irresponsible. - Steven Rummelsburg

This conversation between Steven Rummelsburg and Katherine Bennet is well worth a listen. It is very brave of Katherine, a Catholic School Teacher here in the UK, to be prepared to enter into an open dialogue about the problems we are facing in Catholic education today.

Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg holds a degree in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara. A school teacher, he is also a writer and speaker on matters of faith, culture, and education. Mr. Rummelsburg is a member of the Teacher Advisory Board and writer of curriculum at the Sophia Institute for Teachers, a contributor to the Integrated Catholic Life, Crisis Magazine, The Civilized Reader, The Standard Bearers, Catholic Exchange, and a founding member of the Brinklings Literary Club.

He often appears on Matt Fradd's channel Pints with Aquinas, so do try and check him out there if you enjoy what he has to say here!

I found this discussion to be absolute dynamite. As a father and former foundation governor I have long been frustrated with the very open and obvious abuse of Catholic Schools. That's not to say for a second there are not very committed and brave Catholic educators out there, but that the majority I have experience of have a very poor understanding of what Catholic education is about and this is coupled with a completely useless oversight from the Catholic dioceses. I have long said that this great treasure is being usurped and misused and it is frankly criminal. In the first instance, the evidence can be seen at your local parish every Sunday. Is it packed with a thousand teenagers? If not, what is going on at your local Catholic Secondary School, who's very raison d'être is to be a point of evangelisation? 

The discussion here made me smile as asked what Catholic schools are for, Steven states baldly that Catholic education's purpose is to colonize heaven. This is in stark contrast to the former Director of Education for Brentwood Diocese, Mgsr George Stokes, who once exclaimed after an interview with a very holy and enthusiastic Catholic applicant for Head of RE who held this opinion "that's all very well but there is the matter of exams we need to attend to". This almost drew bloodshed from me and I did give him chapter and verse on the bishops directive when the hierarchy was re-established in England and in 1850, the bishops directed that we should build schools, not churches, because they understood that schools and education were the very spear tip of evangelisation.

Steve explains that Catholic schools have to be spiritual, unfortunately Catholic schools seem to spend increasing amounts of time and energy competing with secular schools today. This failure to recognise our USP will render us obsolete eventually and is certainly what is driving the rush towards ever increasing secularisation in an attempt to "keep up". We should be fostering a different approach.

Similarly, we see modern ideologies increasingly creeping into Catholic schools and even staff in Catholic schools have been led down the path of deceit until they are promoting evil things as goods.

Katherine explains that in the UK certainly you can easily be labelled as a "bigot" as a teacher in Catholic education if you try to be faithful. I have heard this so often from faithful Catholic teachers. They enter Catholic education with an idea that being Catholic and faithful would be the norm, only to find the culture couldn't be further from that reality. I would even go so far as to say the faith is often ridiculed in Catholic schools in a way you would never find in a secular school. Just look at the blasphemies at Saint John Fisher and Saint Thomas More Schools earlier this year!

Katherine refers to the recent incident at Saint John Fisher's School and you can see how shocked Steve is at this. In fact, we all should be shocked that this happened at a Catholic School and that the staff are so mislead that they are now striking against the Archdiocese!

Steve explains that the first thing that's happened in education is the removal of philosophy. Let's just call it logic or logical thinking. All teachers should be teaching students how to think, not what to think. How strange that we no longer do this?

Katherine explains how everything we teach here in the UK revolves around exams and the anecdotes she gives are familiar to me from my own education back in the 1980's.

There is a great discussion about the fact that some educators don't even understand the terms of reference. When we talk about Catholic educational principles, we often can't even have a discussion, because Catholic educational institutions have rejected the basic parameters to the point where you can't even have a discussion.

Another point is that teachers agreeing to support a Catholic ethos is meaningless if teachers don't even know what that ethos actually means.

The discussion turns to the way in which schools currently seemed to be concerned with actually dividing the child from its parent. The increasing emphasis on "being nice" to the extent where you will be cancelled and excoriated if you fail to be "nice" as these people in power define it. This is pure Communist tactics which sees the purpose of education as raising good, compliant citizens.

Katherine notes that this is clear in the Saint John Fisher story, where she has spoken to some of the teachers there and discovered that those with outspoken views who are seeking to push the smutty, blasphemous writings of  the author/ groomer Simon James Green on other people's children are often young, progressive and without children of their own. 

Obviously this is done in the name of acceptance and tolerance, but the issue at heart is surely that we want to edify and inspire our children. Personally I find it difficult to understand how we do that with trashy smut like the rubbish written by Green.

Such poor judgement and poor choices demonstrate that such people have a questionable vocation to education, especially in a Catholic school. Of course you tend to find these people are on a mission to re-educate Catholics and explain how they are doing it all wrong. Katherine herself tells us that she was very much on this page at one time. What is it about education that it seems to draw people who seem devoted to a neo-Marxist pedagogy? The clearest thing about such people is that they never know what the Catholic faith actually is or teaches and when they are exposed to Catholic ideas, their eyes are opened. Catholic education is far more valuable and rewarding.

Katherine points out the ridiculous circular reasoning that infects our society. The example she gives is misogyny and abuse of women, which society's prescriptive cure is more sexualisation without addressing the causes of the problem and round and round we go. The solution increases the problem and is utterly incoherent, it is Luciferian at its roots.

I wonder if Katherine (who reads my blog I am pleased to say) knows about Fit For Mission Schools?

The former bishop of Lancaster, Patrick O'Donoghue released a teaching document on Catholic education called Fit for Mission? – Schools. Hailed in the Catholic press as 'groundbreaking' and 'courageous', it was also praised by the Holy See. The Congregation for Clergy said it... 'hopes it will become an example for other Dioceses in the country in their implementation of the General Directory for Catechesis and the Catechism of the Catholic Church', and the Congregation for Catholic Education wrote, "it will undoubtedly be a reliable resource for renewing the vitality of Catholic Education in today's society."

O'Donoghue was an opponent of attempts to secularise the culture of Catholic schools in the Diocese of Lancaster. For instance, he gave instructions to the schools to halt promotion of contraceptives, remove "anti-Catholic" books from their libraries and prevent the presentation of ideas contrary to the Catholic Church's official teaching. Some secularist critics, such as Barry Sheerman, a Labour MP and Steve Sinnott of the National Union of Teachers attacked him for his views on education in Catholic schools. 

Clearly, O'Donoghue bravely recognised the problems and had the courage to speak out against the CBEW policies that have, and indeed continue to accelerate the decline of the faith in England. The reports also proposed a series of radical recommendations for recovery. Those documents were warmly welcomed in Rome. O’Donoghue was received in personal audience by the Pope and received commendations from three curial congregations and two pontifical councils. But the reaction to these reports in England was the complete opposite. Instead of forming the blueprint for diocesan policies throughout England and Wales, they were ignored, and some bishops even actively spoke against them.

In an interview with Oremus, the Westminster Cathedral magazine in 2015, Bishop O’Donoghue said:

“I was disappointed that none of my bishops publicly defended me … I’m still baffled as to why my brother bishops didn’t support me."

This is the reality Catholic education faces. The bishops lack the intelligence or the will to act, even when they have the problem and the solution spelled out to them a la Bishop O'Donoghue. The dreadful Catholic Education Service is in lock-step with the secularists and doesn't appear to have any Catholicity in it whatsoever. Thank God that some, like Katherine are still prepared to fight for it, it certainly gives me some small measure of hope! 

In the mean time, it is also interesting to note the discussion covered the direction of travel if schools continue to indoctrinate children and divide them from their faith and their parents: we will simply take our children out of schools and stop trusting them. I see this spoken of more and more and not just among Catholics. The more that neo-Marxist pedagogy takes hold, and schools see themselves are superior to parents, the closer they get to making themselves redundant.

Please do take some time to watch the discussion and like and subscribe to the channel: