Educating to be a Catholic in Contemporary Society.

Back in May I was part of a weekend seminar for educators and governors held at the Christian Heritage Centre at Stoneyhurst College.

The venue really is outstanding and we had a particularly excellent collection of speakers delivering superb material. One of the speakers I was particularly excited to hear was the Rev Dr Stephen Morgan, Rector of  the University of St Joseph in Macao, who delivered a superb talk entitled Educating to be a Catholic in Contemporary Society. You can see us giggling at the back of the photo at the start of this blog.

You might be interested in the text (although it lacks Stephen's witty ad libs and insights. I am happy to reproduce the full talk here with his permission.

In the 1955 musical Oklahoma!, Gordon McCrae, playing the charcter Curly, sang a number entitled “All er nuthin’.” It contained this line repeatedly, “With me it’s all er nuthin’; it’s all er nuthin’ with me.” It’s a song sung by a man who objects to his girlfriend flirting. It’s a jolly song, with a catchy tune, in the way that musicals of the 1950s were. It wasn’t making a controversial point; it wasn’t advancing an agenda; it was simply saying what almost all of its audience would have taken as normality: that “relationships” are ordered to life-long, exclusive fidelity, to marriage. So far, so terribly out-dated! But I’m not referring to the song to make a point about marriage, or relationships and sex education. I’m referring to it in strict conformity with the title of my talk, “Educating to be a Catholic in Contemporary Society”. You see, however uncomfortable it might be to hear it, Curly’s words are the words of the Lord to each of us. Each one of us marked with the sacramental seal of baptism are called to be all or nuthin’ Christians, all or nuthin’ Catholics. And those of us entrusted with the education of others, whether parents or those whose role is to assist parents, had better understand from the start that that is the project in which we are engaged. Your job as Christian educators, my job as a Christian educator, is to form and equip those in our care (at least insofar as they are Catholics) to be all or nuthin’ Catholics, and (insofar as they are not Catholics) to show them that the route to lasting happiness is to become all or nuthin’ Catholics too.

            Make no mistake: this is a deeply unpopular opinion. But it is, more importantly, profoundly true. If you have governors, supervisors, parish clergy, diocesan officials or bishops who all recognise that truth, you are both very blessed and your circumstances are as rare as hen’s teeth. That Catholic schools, Catholic academies, Catholic universities should be educating our students to be all or nuthin’ Catholics is not only the only thing we should be concerned about if we take our vocation as Catholic educators seriously, it is quite simply the best thing we can do for our students – the disapproval of others notwithstanding. I would, in fact, go further. I would say that if we are not prepared to do this, we betray our very baptismal identity as Christians, we draw our salaries as teachers under false-pretences, and we imperil our own souls and those of our students. In this talk, I’m going set out why I know that that is so and what I think we can do about it.

            In doing that, I am going to speak in an explicitly theological register. I’m a theology professor: it’s what I do. More than that, however, I hope that I am also going to be able to speak from the practical perspective of someone who has overseen schools and academies in various roles for nearly 20 years and, for the last five years, led a university in a context that differs in so many ways from your own here in the UK. Different though that context is, there are in fact similarities. I run a university in the Macao Special Administrative Region of China. It is the only Catholic University in China. It is an overwhelming non-Catholic environment, where students from committed Catholic families make up a vanishingly small proportion of the whole, and one where the state and its functionaries have little or no understanding, scant sympathy and often outright hostility to what we believe to be our God-given mission as Catholic educators.

 

II.

            In the last 2000 years, the Church has faced various major epochal challenges: who is God, who was Jesus, what is the Church and now, what is man? By the way, I hope you don’t mind me using “man” to mean “human beings”, you see, I’m afraid, I don’t think that doing violence to the cadences of English will do a single thing to undo injustices against women now and in the past, nor do I think it will advance the cause of a proper complementarity of the sexes (yes, there are two, only two) in the present and the future.

            Excuse the digression but such is the madness of modern discourse that these things needs must be said. To repeat, in the last 2000 years, the Church has faced various major epochal challenges: who is God, who was Jesus, what is the Church and now, what is man? The theological, Christological and ecclesiological challenges have been, more or less, met and answered with the definitive judgement of the Church, to which God Himself in Jesus Christ promised indefectibility through the agency of the Holy Spirit. These have given us the dogmatic structure of the Faith, which we confess in the Creeds. The anthropological challenge – the anthropological heresy if you will – has not yet met with final dogmatic judgement, even if the Christian anthropology of Pope St John Paul II sets out a synthesis which is of great magisterial authority. Just as it was very uncomfortable to be a Catholic Christian in those earlier crises of faith, so it is now. We look to those from whom we expect clear voices, to our shepherds, for clear answers and yet we don’t always receive from them teaching that is clear, or – and this seems to me to be both more common and more dangerous – actions that are at variance with what is settled in the Church’s teaching. To give but one example: I have been living in China for five years now and the Covid-19 pandemic meant that for nearly three of those years, I was unable to get back to Britain. No matter how hard one tries to keep up with developments at home, details slip past and so it has been with the response of the Church to the assault upon reality that is gender theory. In preparation for this conference, I came across the guidance from the Catholic Education Service on materials to be used in Relationships and Sex Education. To say that I was scandalized isn’t the half of it. My ears rang with the Lord’s words, “If you permit any one of these little ones to stumble, a millstone will be tied around your neck and thrown in to the sea. Indeed, better you had not been born at all.” In the words of the title of an article written by Edmund Adamus and Edmund Matyjaszek, in the Catholic Herald a month ago, it was clear that “Stonewall has infiltrated our schools.”

            I could give example after example but that would only serve to depress and hardly goes to deliver on the theme of my talk. So, keeping in mind just the one example, but in the sure and certain knowledge that we could all cite many more, I will move on to the first point that needs to be made: that educating to be a Catholic in contemporary society inevitably means educating our students to not fit in. That is to say that if we do it right, our students will end up as misfits in contemporary society, whether that be China, Britain or wherever. This is so because the truth in which we will seek to form them looks like foolishness or even blasphemy to contemporary society. It was ever thus though: Christ and Him crucified [1 Cor 2:2] – and that is the whole of the content of Divine revelation summed up in four words –  was foolishness to the Greeks and blasphemy to the Jews, as St Paul helpfully reminds us. [1 Cor 1:23]

            I have to confess that this educating our students, our children to be misfits is an issue that has unsettled me for years. I am the father of three adults. Peter is 30, Sophia is 29 and Hugo 26. From the first I determined that they would receive formation in the faith that pulled no punches, that made no accommodation with the world, the flesh and the devil. The result was years and years and years of grief at the hands of those who I foolishly thought would see things the same way as me: from head teachers of Catholic maintained schools, from parish priests, from university chaplains and from bishops. “Could we not be a little less extreme?”, we were repeatedly asked. Our extreme views included such zingers as insisting that our children were taught that any and all sexual activity outside of marriage or not ordered towards procreation was always gravely wrong and could not, in any circumstances be condoned; that teaching our children about deviant sexual behaviour was something we would not permit our children to be exposed to; that abortion and euthanasia were again always and, in all cases, morally wrong. And lest you think it was all about the usual hot-button issues, I was branded a zealot for insisting that it was improper for a Catholic school to employ people at below the living wage and that such a living wage in a Catholic context meant sufficient for a family to live off a single income. We were also (perhaps a more trivial matter: perhaps not) scolded that we were extremists for insisting that offering meat in the school canteen on a Friday was a temptation to sin. The result was that my children often found themselves marginalized and even now have values and beliefs that their friends often find weird.

            In my present context, where promoting the view that each and every person is possessed of an inalienable and God-given dignity, which must at all times be respected, and seeking to run the university accordingly, means that our graduates and many of our younger academics are ill-fitted to live and succeed in the Confucian culture that is China even today. I often wonder whether I am not doing our students and our young Chinese academics a huge disservice by educating them, forming them, managing them firmly in the Catholic intellectual tradition. Many of those from Mainland China say quite openly to me that they think that having had that experience, they may no longer be able to function well and thrive back in their home culture, where deference to hierarchy, a strongly authoritarian state, an overarching concern for societal harmony and human value delineated in terms of familial relationships, all trump freedom of enquiry, the primacy of truth and the sacredness of the human person. That is, perhaps, to overstate the case. China is a far too large, diverse and complex place for such a simplistic analysis to hold. Their point has, however, more than a little validity.

 

III.

            So why do I do it? Why do any of us do it?

            The answer is to be found in the place that Christians should always find answers: in the person of Jesus Christ. Not in the picture book “gentle Jesus meek and mild” of so much contemporary catechetical material, nor yet in the imaginary friend who seems (strangely enough) to closely echo most of our own opinions, nor even in the Jesus of nice, tolerant, inclusive, environmentally friendly politics, the Jesus who seems to dominate much of the European, indeed the ecclesial, discourse and the feedback around the Synod on Synodality. None of these figments of our imagination are truly capable of providing a justification for the great project of educating to be a Catholic in contemporary society, whether that society is dominated by the dictatorship of secular relativism or the voice of Xi Jinping thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for the New Era. The only possible justification for the project to which our efforts as educators (and, I might say, as parents) are devoted, is Jesus Christ, God made man for our salvation and that of the whole of creation.

                Given the claims He made for Himself, especially as we have them carried down to us in St John’s Gospel, Jesus was (in the words of C.S.Lewis’s so-called “trilemma” and the title of the late Fr John Redford’s 2004 book) either “Mad, bad or God”.( John Redford, Bad, Mad or God?: Proving the Divinity of Christ from St John’s Gospel, Reprinted (London: St. Pauls, 2005). This Palestinian rabbi claimed a cosmic overlordship, in which he presumed to lay down universal laws as if He were God. He repeatedly made claims for His identity, which His audiences would have instantly recognized as a claim to be the same God who appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush – nobody spoke in terms of “I am the way, the truth and the life”, no Jew could speak of Himself as “I am the Bread of Life”, without the audience understanding that this was a claim to be the Living God. These claims were tantamount to blasphemous. No rabbi would presume to say “Unless you eat My flesh and drink my blood, you will have no life in you.” That was blasphemous and the Jews all knew it.  And yet these are the words of Jesus. No man could claim not just an equivalence with but an identity with God, I am who am. It wasn't just a blasphemy; it was a logical nonsense and the Greeks all knew it.

            An aside. Many clever people – some far cleverer than I – will tell you that these words are post-resurrection interpolations made by the community of disciples, trying to make sense of that resurrection, particularly after the disaster of the Tiberian sack of Jerusalem, and all wrapped in the cloak of the name of one of the Apostles. For two thousand years, they will assure you, Christians were too credulous to see through all this but we’re brighter than all that. Thanks to modern scholarship, they claim, we can uncover the original, historical Jesus by stripping away all that supernaturalised theological speculation and in so doing uncovering – oh guess what? –a Jesus who seems to share our own modern attitudes to life, the world and everything. It is, of course, nonsense. It is, however, a way around the particularity of the incarnation – the inescapable truth that, by His Divine Providence, God chose to become Man for our salvation in a particular place, at a particular time, and into a particular religion and culture, not by accident but because He had prepared it thus as the very best context in to and out of which to bring us the truth that saves.

            So, blasphemy to the Jews and folly to the Greeks it is, not only for St Paul (1 Cor.1:23) but for us too because, folly or blasphemy, it is true: He is God made man for our salvation. We are fools and blasphemers to our fellow citizens if we are true to Christ, and if that isn’t how they see us, then we aren’t being true to Christ.

 

IV.

            This is a profoundly counter-intuitive thing for Christians in the UK to recognise. For all those who would commit themselves (and educate others to commit themselves) to Christ in the all or “nuthin’” manner He demands, it is uncomfortable because we often see ourselves living in a country that was once Christian and retains still remnants of that faith. It feels as if we shouldn’t be so unacceptable. As an aside, it should be somewhat easier for Catholics to accept this marginalisation, because, as a result of our consciousness of having inherited the recusant tradition from penal times, we are used to being thought of by others, to use the modern euphemism, as “unacceptable,” as not quite fully British, Cardinal Nicholls's role at the recent Coronation notwithstanding.

            What is more disconcerting it that this marginalisation is also a problem in the life of the Church. After such a long time of believing that the world outside the community of the baptized was lost, that it was the realm of the world, the flesh and the devil, in the last sixty years, the Church has tried to adopt a rather less hostile stance towards the world – although how you find a via media between God on the one hand and the world, the flesh and the devil on the other, is a logical problem to say the least. It is an experiment in the history of the Church. Previously, the Church had seen its faithfulness (or, more accurately, the faithfulness of its members) as inevitably resulting initially in persecution by hostile regimes which, by grace and the witness of her martyrs (the word means “witnesses”), would eventually collapse and be replaced by Christian ones, Kings who could be held to account for their behaviour: the default progression was from martyrdom to Christendom. In the face of the great secularizing trends since the French Revolution, and the reality of the experience of the twentieth century, the Council fathers at Vatican II proposed another approach.  Gone was the condemnatory tone, replaced with engagement, accompaniment, accommodation. It seemed to be motivated by a genuine desire to heed St Francis de Sales words that more flies are caught by a teaspoon of honey than a barrel full of vinegar.

            So far, so good. The problem is that was and is all based on a premise that is by no means obviously true: that our interlocutors – whether they be Soviet or Chinese Communists, Western Secular Humanists or Christianity-lite relativists – are engaging with us in good faith, that they want from dialogue not only what they say they want but what we want too. This nearly sixty-year experiment seems to me to have produced little good fruit and much that tastes distinctly sour. There is a jolly good reason for that, a theological reason: that there really is no mid-point between good and evil, and nor can there be. It should be entirely obvious, even if only from a logical position, that evil is never a good-faith actor, that there is no such a thing as moral neutrality, at least not if you believe that God is God. You really are either with Him or you are against Him.

            This novel approach, this super-dogma called “dialogue” means that “all or nuttin’” Catholics are often seen as an embarrassment to the pastors to whom they should be able to look for guidance and protection. That one should be at best an inconvenience or at worst a criminal to a non-Catholic regime, and so have to suffer the consequences, is at least predictable. To find that standing up for an authentically Catholic education only to incur ecclesiastical displeasure, even censure, is disheartening and disorienting. It is, however, our lot, at least until those have passed from the scene whose entire ecclesiastical career is invested in the engagement, accompaniment and accommodation of the last couple of generations, and who, “the King is in the altogether”, are unwilling or unable to face up to the fact that it has almost always and almost everywhere failed utterly.

 

V.

            Our baptism, our parenthood, our vocation as educators imposes on us a solemn duty: to form those whose education is entrusted to us according to the mind and pattern of Christ, notwithstanding the all-too-fallible prudential judgements of others, even occasionally our proper pastors and even bishops. Those we teach who are baptized have the right to be given the mental and moral equipment to properly cooperate with the sanctifying grace imparted by that baptism such that they can become altera Christi, other Christs. Ah but what about those who are not baptized in our schools, those of other religions and none? Let me be absolutely clear: we have the duty, the solemn obligation, and they have the right, the God-given right to have Jesus Christ, God become Man for our salvation, proposed to them as the Way the Truth and the Life, the only way to the Father, and so to true, lasting human happiness.

            Our job, then, as those educating to be a Catholic in contemporary society is simply to propose Christ to those who are the subjects of our work: to propose Christ who claims cosmic overlordship, Him through whom all things were made that were made. You see everything else flows from that. If Christ is true, if His identity as the incarnate Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity is true, the whole Catholic package follows as night follows day. All the neuralgic issues of modern morality then find their answer in the perennial teaching of the Church. The proper attitude to the virtue of religion, to our religious cult, to our worship in Church and out of it, becomes simply obvious. How to behave and what to believe in order to be saved – and, lest that sounds just a little selfish, how the world, the entire Cosmos will be saved – falls into place.

            This then demands that we keep in our tool kits as teachers a ruler, a pattern against which we can test everything, an ever-present question: does what I am teaching conform to the truth of “Christ who came in the flesh”, to use St Augustine’s test of orthodoxy. Anything that cannot stand against that rule, that doesn't match that pattern has no part in our work – whether that involves syncretistic or indifferentist approaches to false religions, accepting as normal the morally abnormal, denying in any respect the given inalienable sacred dignity of ourselves and others, whether unborn, inconvenient, despised or misunderstood. These things are not “pastoral realities”, or “the messiness of modern life”, or “not ideal but”: they are incompatible with Christ; they are evil and our Christ-shaped pattern should mean that you and I can recognise that and ensure that it is expunged from what we teach or how we teach.

            As the image of the Father, Christ is the image of the one, true, good and beautiful: of the sublime simplicity of God and, so, it is to that that I finally wish to turn.

VI.

            If you and I are in the business of educating our students to be Catholics in contemporary society, it is not enough to teach them what evil is, how to recognise it and how to avoid it.  In fact, not only is it “not enough”, alone it is almost as bad as leaving them creatures of ignorance. They are entitled to Christ; they are entitled to the whole Christ; they are entitled to God; they are entitled to the one, good, true and beautiful and it is this that we have a duty to propose to them. I want to suggest to you that we have often sought to do that in a manner that people find very hard to hear. For a variety of reasons which we don’t have time to examine now, the words of traditional moral and doctrinal truth have a hard time getting through to those we teach. However, the sublime unity of the goodness and truth of God, of Christ and the Catholic faith are more easily apprehended when our intellects are moved towards them by our appetites, even damaged as they are by sin. I don’t mean to suggest that our will governs our intellect or that it ever should – I am no voluntarist – but what I am saying is that our appetites can often be the place where first we detect the presence of God, even if at first, we do not recognise Him. Because we are an imago Dei, that is we are made in His image and likeness, because we are capable of God (capax Dei), His goodness, truth and beauty, united as they are in His Divine simplicity (simplicitas Dei), each evokes in us the other. This is not to ignore the damage sin does to us. Through our susceptibility to an excessive sensuousness beauty is capable of leading us astray, but in hearts perfected by grace, it can and does lead us to truth and goodness too.

            It is possible to think of contemporary society with its plenty, its panoply of choices as something demanding from Christians a jeremiad against its excesses. In a world where our senses are overloaded with stimuli, good and bad, an almost Manichaean or Puritan response is entirely understandable but I think that that is to miss the open goal that the world the flesh and the Devil have given us. There is no evil, no depravity except despair, out of which God cannot bring good. There is no wickedness to which the saving truth of Christ does not speak and speak convincingly. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it does not usually do so in contemporary society in the language of philosophical coherence, moral uprightness or dogmatic wholeness: it doesn’t speak the language of one, good and true. It does seem, however to speak (at least in my experience) the language of the beautiful. No matter how damaged by sin our appetites might be, they were all made for the beautiful and it, beauty, exercises a power over those appetites that they find very difficult, indeed almost impossible to resist.

            There isn't time here to explore what constitutes beauty and I am aware that expressions such as “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” tend to dominate conventional beliefs about aesthetics, whether we are talking about art, music, architecture or the human form. It is a profoundly relativistic notion and one which derives from a misreading of classical western philosophy. The eighteenth-century Scottish empiricist philosopher gives perhaps the classical (and most pernicious) account when he says,

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (‘Of the Standard of Taste’, in Essays Moral and Political [1757] (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1894), 136)

Suffice it for the present purposes to say that I profoundly disagree and to note that, although expressed in radically different cultural settings, the aesthetical principles of Aristotle systematised by St Thomas Aquinas – that beauty consists in integrity or perfection, consonance or proportion and brightness or form – find loud echo in the ideas of beauty dominant in South, South East and East Asia. This commonality seems to me to argue that whilst, as even Aquinas himself said “beautiful things are those which please, or evoke pleasure, when they are seen,” (Summa Theologiae Ia, 5, 4 ad 1) or indeed heard or touched or tasted, there are objective criteria for beauty which, like truth and goodness, derive from its Divine origin.

            So there it is: in my view the key to educating our students to be Catholics in contemporary society – whether that be rural Lancashire, inner-city Birmingham, the Chinese megalopolis of the Greater Bay Area of Guangdong or the Chin mountains of Western Myanmar where, in the face of the helicopter gunships of the military, my former student, the Dominican Fr Abraham Ning Ki Gei OP has his little flock singing Gregorian Chant at daily Mass whilst hiding out in the jungle – the key to educating our students to be Catholics in contemporary society is educating by introducing our students to beauty, knowing always that they are made for it and that, because it is one of the transcendental properties of God, in educating them to recognise, know and love beauty, we are educating them to recognise, know and love God. What their appetites recognise as beautiful, their wills, consciences and intellects soon come to recognise as true, good and one. In other words, educating our students for beauty is, I think, simply the best way to begin the presentation of God to them, one that cuts through the dull rationalism, the debased sensuality, the moral indifference and the anti-intellectual dictatorship of relativism. It is an oblique stroke, rather than a head on confrontation, but we are called to be not only as innocent as doves but as shrewd as serpents. (Mt 10:16) It is is a strategy that I believe can and does work. It is, I think, precisely why the late Pope Benedict XVI spoke so much about beauty and presented to us a model of the proposition of Christ, of evangelisation that works, as he put it, “by attraction, just as Christ draws all to Himself.” (Homily, 13th May 2007).