Introduction
The Second Vatican Council was characterized by a vision of a theologically educated and Spirit-empowered laity. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the Council was its stress on the fact that the Church was not just the hierarchy but the entire people of God, and that every layperson should be as holy, as well-formed, and as missionary-driven as clergy and religious.
While some valuable developments have occurred in this department, it would be obstinate, given the overall levels of Mass attendance and Biblical and theological knowledge among Catholics, to deny this vision has largely remained a dream.
Something went wrong, or at least was not executed as well as it could have been, at the Second Vatican Council. This was the fact that the Council said almost nothing to teachers in Catholic school about how to form the laity into the fiery Christians and evangelists the Church was calling them to become. There was a Declaration on Education, but Joseph Ratzinger was not wrong when he called it “a rather weak document.”
The Council produced an incredible theological basis for a transformation of the world by the people of God. But, as subsequent Vatican documents recognized, the bridge between the ivory tower (or ivory steeple?) and the people in the pews had to be Catholic schools, which are by far the best mechanism for shaping Catholics in the mind and mission of the Church. The Council inexplicably failed to recognize that fact, and today we see the results. If we want to undo those results, we need to undo that mistake.
Vatican II’s Vision of the Laity
The Council is well known for promulgating the universal call to holiness, a call with a corresponding mandate for all Catholics to be witness to the world. This missionary activity does not always take the form of explicit preaching. It also means working within the systems of the world and in a sense baptizing them by bringing them into harmony with the mind of Christ.
Paragraph 22 of Lumen Gentium explains that “the laity, by their very vocation, seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of God,” and, in so doing, “work[ing] for the sanctification of the world from within as a leaven.” This image is taken from Matthew 13:33 and Luke 13:20–21, where Jesus describes the kingdom of God as being like yeast which is mixed into flour and eventually works its way through all the dough. This is the laity’s role: To be “mixed” with the world until their influence has spread into every aspect of it and raised it up to Heaven.
In paragraph 36, the laity are exhorted to “vigorously contribute their effort, so that created goods may be perfected by human labor, technical skill and civic culture for the benefit of all men according to the design of the Creator and the light of His Word.” “In this way,” it explains, “the world may be permeated by the spirit of Christ.”
It is important to note that there is no “neutral activity” in the vision of Lumen Gentium. “In every temporal affair [the laity] must be guided by a Christian conscience, since,” it emphasizes, “even in secular business there is no human activity which can be withdrawn from God’s dominion.” Everything can, and should, be interpreted and carried out in light of the Christian faith.
Theology has implications for philosophy, which has implications for everything else. In working through the implications of the Incarnation, the Church has defined humans as being image-bearers of God with inherent dignity whose ultimate happiness is found in forgiveness of sins and communion with God in Heaven. In working out the implications of Jesus’ moral teaching and apocalyptic preaching, she has come to recognize that there is a preferential option for the poor and that nations are judged by how they treat the least among them. In working through the implications of the sacraments that Jesus instituted, she has come to recognize that grace can work through anything in creation. These all inform the Catholic conscience and have implications for how secular work is to be carried out–if that conscience is well-formed in these doctrines.
This does not mean theology takes the place of secular disciplines. It means that the laity should have “competence in secular training,” but that this competence should also be “elevated from within by the grace of Christ.” Through a Christian interpretation of their professional work (grace building on nature), the laity are to sanctify the world.
What are some concrete instances of this process of sanctification? One is that “the goods of this world [should] be more equitably distributed among all men…[L]et the laity also by their combined efforts remedy the customs and conditions of the world…so that they all may be conformed to the norms of justice and may favor the practice of virtue.”
The laity are therefore called to sanctify economics, politics, and culture in the light of Christianity. We can see efforts in this direction in the work of Jacques Maritain’s integral humanist political philosophy, in the sacramental imagination of the Catholic literary tradition, and in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement. Even though each of these could be appreciated by non-Catholics, there was an unmistakable Catholic ethos pervading each of them.
Another way of putting this is that the laity are called to generate a Catholic culture in the richest sense of that term. As the subsequent CDF document Catholic Culture for True Humanism put it, “culture” is the “mentality, institutions, forms of existence and work, customs, inventions and creative genius” of a people as well as “a collective system” (or “scale of values”) “for evaluating ideas, actions, events.” A “Catholic culture” flows from Catholics who are so grounded in Christ that they assess everything through Him and individually and collectively act through Him, and Vatican II envisioned this culture serving as a leaven within and a witness to the world.
Catholic Culture and Catholic Schools
How, then, were the laity to be prepared for this work? This was elucidated in chapter six of the Council’s Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem, published November 18, 1965. Titled “Formation for the Apostolate,” this chapter makes clear that the laity should have a solid formation in the realms of both nature and of grace.
On the one hand, laypeople should be “well-informed about the modern world,” grounded in “general culture along with practical and technical formation,” and well-adjusted to the secular communities in which they belong. However, they should also be formed in “being sensitive to the movement of the Holy Spirit” and provided with “a solid doctrinal instruction in theology, ethics, and philosophy.”
Where does this formation occur? The Decree suggests that this is nearly synonymous with the process of Christian education. It begins in the family and extends to the parish community and to the pastoral work of clergy.
But one has to wonder: What about Catholic parents who may be devout, but are not experts in theology, ethics, and philosophy? And isn’t the influence of the parish–and specifically of the priest–rather limited in today’s busy and disparate lifestyle? For most people today, the place where their thinking and expertise are being formed–and where they are spending most of their waking hours–is the school.
Indeed, as the 1977 document The Catholic School explains, it is in Catholic schools where we see “a synthesis of culture and faith, and a synthesis of faith and life: the first is reached by integrating all the different aspects of human knowledge through the subjects taught, in the light of the Gospel; the second in the growth of the virtues characteristic of the Christian.”
It is there, as Pope Pius XI noted in the 1929 encyclical Divini Illius Magistri, that students are not only taught to think about the world, but to think about them in the light of what God has revealed. That encyclical states in paragraph 80 that “every…subject taught [should] be permeated with Christian piety.” The permeation of the world that Lumen Gentium envisions would be achieved by the initial permeation of Catholic schools.
The problem faced in this area by the pre-Vatican II church was that the laity, however pious they may have been, did not necessarily have the “solid doctrinal instruction in theology, ethics, and philosophy” they needed to effectively implement permeation (or, as it’s sometimes called today, integration) in Catholic education.
An instructive case study here can be found in Nicholas Tkach’s book Alberta Catholic Schools: A Social History. Tkach documents how the Alberta government introduced a curriculum in 1936 based on John Dewey’s pedagogical principles. The Catholic elite in Alberta rejected Deweyan progressivism as being incompatible with Catholic theology. Like Rousseau, his educational philosophy was based on a faulty anthropology. The goal of education for Dewey was to grant the student as much freedom from constraint (including tradition and authority) as possible so that their natural goodness could spontaneously develop. This was understood to contradict the Church’s teaching on fallenness, sin, and the need for revelation, grace, and asceticism.
However, Tkach admits, “it cannot be concluded that their views were shared by the general Catholic community.” One likely reason for this, Tkach muses, is that “[w]hen a new philosophy of education is introduced, few individuals have the expertise to assess its implications.” It was easy for Catholic teachers to embrace a pedagogy that proudly proclaimed itself to be child-centered; “[m]uch more difficult was the task of examining the metaphysical assumptions underlying the philosophy of education.”
In other words, lay Catholics lacked the doctrinal formation necessary to assess whether a style of pedagogy was advancing the cause of a faith-permeated education. If Catholic schools were to be an effective mechanism of producing a well-formed, evangelistic laity, Vatican II would need to give strong, clear directions on Catholic education and on the formation of teachers.
Did it?
Apostolicam Actuositatem obligingly devotes a paragraph to the importance of Catholic schools, teachers, and universities. Schools have a duty to provide this formation; teachers are obliged to have the skills to implement it. Where teachers are to receive these skills is not indicated. This is all that is said on the matter.
Of course, less than a month earlier, on October 28, 1965, the Council had already devoted an entire document to the topic of education, the Declaration on Education or Gravissimum Educationis. Unfortunately, its background reveals a shocking lack of appreciation of the importance of Catholic schools for the mission of Vatican II on the part of the Council fathers.
The Botching of Gravissimum Educationis
In A Concise Guide to the Documents of Vatican II, Edward P. Hahnenberg records: “When asked prior to the Council what topics Vatican II should consider, many bishops identified Catholic schools as a top priority.” Despite this, they were not a top priority during the discussions. The topic of education did not come up until the third session.
By that point, the draft document on the topic of Catholic schools had undergone multiple edits and then finally been scrapped altogether. In its place, a new schema was produced—one that dealt, not with Catholic schools or even with Catholic education, but of education generally. To quote one of the most stunning sentences in Volume IV of the History of Vatican II: “This was done, according to the commission in charge, because the subject was a crucial one for the modern world, a problem more vast and urgent than the particular problem of Catholic schools.”
One can muse endlessly about why education was seen as a more urgent topic than Catholic schools in particular. Perhaps the commission took for granted that solid Catholic schools staffed with well-formed priests and nuns already existed and would continue to exist, and did not foresee any need for development on that front.
The second chapter of what would become Gravissimum Educationis summarizes the concept of Christian education; it consists of a single paragraph. However, as the History also recounts: “On the second section, the one devoted specifically to Christian education, there must have been considerable disagreements since during the following weeks [Bishop Jules] Daem himself” (who served as reporter on the schema) “criticized the text adopted by the sub-commission and even proposed an alternative draft. While the subcommissioner’s version interpreted Christian education as being a subjective right of the baptized, Daem proposed to interpret it as a duty flowing from the command of evangelization.”
Bishop Daem seems to have comprehended that Catholic schools needed to be primarily understood not in terms of rights but in terms of mission, especially in the light of the overall tenor of the Council. Unfortunately, he lost this fight, and the final text of Chapter 2 only speaks of “a right to Christian education” on the part of the baptized.
Chapter 8, on the topic of the Catholic school, does state, using the same imagery that appears in Lumen Gentium, that it “leads its students to promote efficaciously the good of the earthly city and also prepares them for service in the spread of the Kingdom of God, so that by leading an exemplary apostolic life they become, as it were, a saving leaven in the human community.” However, no space is dedicated to elucidating how this preparation takes place or how to assure the Catholic school remains true to this mandate.
Why this brevity? One reason is that the Council fathers simply ran out of time (showing how, in practice, education simply had not been a high priority at the Council). Further, Ratzinger frankly suggests that, by the fourth and fifth sessions of the Council during which this document reached its final form, the conciliar bishops had simply become too tired to write another groundbreaking text.
Realizing that there would not be time (or, it seems, energy) for a more comprehensive document, the conciliar bishops mentioned at the end of the introduction of Gravissimum Educationis that “[t]hese principles will have to be developed at greater length by a special post-conciliar commission.”
The work of defining and exhorting Catholic schools was thus kicked down the road to subsequent commissions. The Council itself had little to offer Catholic schools.
Looking at this uninspiring process and the equally uninspiring document that it produced, one has to agree with Gerald Grace’s comment in Vatican II and New Thinking About Catholic Education: “From our perspective it is difficult to understand why the Council fathers did not appreciate that, in the modern age, it is largely in the contexts of Catholic education, in its schools, colleges and universities, that the future of the Catholic Church will be renewed or weakened in the next generation.”
Consequences of the Council’s Neglect
In 1967, two years after Gravissimum Educationis, Pope Paul VI instituted the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education. Prior to this, no congregation dealing with Catholic primary and secondary schools had existed in the Holy See. The Congregation now had a mandate to deal not only with higher education but with all aspects of Catholic education, including and especially the Church’s schools.
It must be said that the documents produced by the Congregation more than made up for the deficiencies of Gravissimum Educationis, starting with 1977’s The Catholic School. This text offered a scintillating vision of Catholic schools as centers of integral formation and as engines of evangelization for students and for the broader culture.
The obvious problem was that The Catholic School was issued twelve years after Gravissimum Educationis. By this point, the damage of the post-conciliar period in the Church and in Catholic schools was already well in effect.
A major problem was that the massive decline of consecrated religious was impacting the staffing of Catholic schools in a way it is fair to assume the Council fathers did not foresee.
Prior to this era, the problem may have been that most teachers in Catholic schools, being members of religious orders, would have strong religious and philosophical formation but poor pedagogical training. As teaching positions were increasingly filled by laity, this situation reversed itself, and the issue became that teachers may have been well-trained in (currently fashionable) pedagogical principles, but not in Catholic teaching. In 1983, the Congregation responded to this changing reality with Lay Catholics in Schools: Witnesses to Faith, which offered strong direction to lay teachers on their prophetic identity and work.
But, at this point, the Congregation’s work, valuable as it was, was reactive and corrective, an attempt to fight a fire that had already grown into an inferno. Thirty years after The Catholic School, the Congregation published The Catholic School on the Threshold of the Third Millennium. Faint strains of the hopeful tones of Vatican II can still be discerned here, but the overall tone of the introductory paragraphs is one of concern and sorrow over the state of education in 1997 and of the challenges that Catholic schools are facing. It recognizes the “atmosphere…of pedagogical tiredness” resulting from religious apathy which imperils the mission of Catholic schools, though it offers an inspiring call for “courageous renewal.”
Despite the excellent work of the Congregation, and the good that has no doubt resulted from it in some aspects of the life of Catholic schools, it seems fair to say, based on the evidence of the very texts that it produced, that Catholic schools did not experience a great revitalization of Spirit-driven evangelistic energy after Vatican II. Perhaps we should not wonder that the laity raised in those schools did not experience this, either.
Concluding Thoughts
There have been some encouraging developments recently. Under Pope Francis–himself a former high school teacher–the Congregation began to focus on the role of the Church’s school as being not only a center of Catholic culture, but also a site of intercultural and even interreligious dialogue. In 2013, almost eight months after his pontificate began, the Congregation published Educating to Intercultural Dialogue in Catholic Schools: Living in Harmony for a Civilization of Love. At the beginning of 2022, it issued The Identity of the Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue.
This would be the last document the Congregation would ever release. Five months later, the Holy Father would merge the Congregation for Catholic Education with the Pontifical Council for Culture, resulting in the Dicastery for Culture and Education. It seems that the Pope understands that it will be the school, even more than the parish, which produces the Catholic culture the laity need to be evangelistic leaven in the world.
Encouraging though this is, there are further developments which may give the Church’s attitude towards her schools the shot in the arm it needs to make them truly capable of achieving the cultural and evangelistic potential they are capable of.
One is that Catholics should come to appreciate the fact that there is no neutral aspect of human life or of human knowledge. The postmodernists are not wrong in asserting that all facts are interpreted facts, and therefore that all culture and all education reflects a particular worldview. Therefore, there is a uniquely Catholic (or at least Christian) way of interpreting literature, history, science, and even mathematics and geometry.
In some ways, Protestants have understood this better than Catholics. Radical Orthodox thinkers have done indispensable genealogical work in showing that the prevailing political and social scientific concepts of modern secularity are, in fact, merely artifacts of particular theological assumptions. Even more fundamentally, while there is much to critique in their thought, Neo-Calvinists like Abraham Kuyper and presuppositionalists like Cornelius Van Til have made astute observations about the fact that all information must be interpreted in the light of fundamental worldviews; Van Til specifically argued that only the Christian worldview ultimately holds together. This has obvious implications for education: All schools are tacitly religious schools, and the Catholic school evangelizes by teaching all its subjects in the light of the Catholic faith and thus letting students see its fundamental coherence and ability to make sense of the universe.
Why have Catholics often missed this? In his review of the 1999 book on university secularization and mission drift, The Dying of the Light, Larry Chapp notes that a rigidly structured nature/grace distinction can give the impression that “natural” or secular subjects of study can be understood entirely apart from theology, a mistake which leads to a de facto secularization of everything in religious schools other than theology class itself. If nature is self-contained, you should not need theology to understand the created world.
But a key insight of the resourcement was that Christ is at the center of reality and is the hermeneutical key to everything in creation. There is a difference between nature and grace, and every subject has a legitimate autonomy that must be respected (literalistic readings of Genesis are not a replacement for the work of biologists and geologists), but that is not an absolute autonomy–that mistake has not only led to secularization of education but also to the fragmentation and siloization of the disciplines, which has had disastrous results. Catholic education should re-integrate these subjects around Christ. (Newman’s Idea of a University is instructive about what this looks like.)
In so doing, and in showing that there is a Catholic way of thinking about everything from storytelling to the morality of war, Catholic schools can form the consciences of the laity such that they can go out into the wider world and sanctify it, as the Council envisioned. But, before this will happen, Catholic teachers need to be properly trained to offer that kind of theologically-informed integral formation. This needs to be a focus of the Dicastery of Culture and Education: Producing standards for the formation of Catholic teachers.
Canon law requires that all Catholic teachers be “outstanding in correct doctrine and integrity of life” (Canon 803§2). Perhaps this should be fleshed out: They should not only be outstanding in correct doctrine, but also outstanding in their ability to connect it to the content they teach–in having the skill of knowing how to integrate faith into their subject matter, or, more accurately, of integrating their subject matter into their faith.
This requires some mechanism of professional and spiritual teacher formation. Not enough work has been done on what this could and should look like, although the Congregation’s 2007 document Educating Together in Catholic Schools: A Shared Mission Between Consecrated Persons and the Lay Faithful lays some essential groundwork on this topic.
Teachers often hear that theirs is the most important profession, because it creates all the others. Catholic teachers are told something even more ennobling: Divini quotes St. John Chrysostom as saying that there is no work more important than “training the mind and forming the habits of the young.” We could therefore paraphrase the maxim as saying that God uses Catholic teachers to create all the other vocations in His Church. Perhaps, then, if we want to see the hopes of Vatican II come true, we should be putting the same amount of effort, energy, and prayer into the formation of our teachers as we do into the formation of our priests.
Graham Crackers 