Our "Catholic" Schools are in a terrible state

Our "Catholic" Schools are in a terrible state

Our so-called Catholic Schools are, for the most part, in a terrible state. I read Fr Tim Finnegan's report of the outlandish goings-on at Bonus Pastor School in London and the attacks suffered by the Clovis family, whose work and commitment to the Catholic Faith could not be doubted. (See here for a previous post.)

In twenty years of Priesthood, three spent in full-time school chaplaincy work, I have always had involvement in schools. I forebear to make any further comment, as I'm not sure I could hold myself in check.

However, on another topic completely...

I've just been re-reading Pope St Pius X's encyclical "Pascendi"attacking modernism, that synthesis of all heresies that he saw attacking the Church from without and within (which you can readhere on the Vatican website). In regard to education one quote will suffice:

43. And here we have already some of the artifices employed by Modernists to exploit their wares. What efforts they make to win new recruits! They seize upon chairs in the seminaries and universities, and gradually make of them chairs of pestilence. From these sacred chairs they scatter, though not always openly, the seeds of their doctrines; they proclaim their teachings without disguise in congresses; they introduce them and make them the vogue in social institutions.

I have also been reading a book that has been sitting on my shelf for a number of years but that I'm only now getting around to reading, Hans Urs von Balthasar's "A Short Primer for Unsettled Laymen" (from 1980 but still available from Ignatius Press.) (Balthasar was highly thought of by Pope John Paul II, who raised him to the rank of Cardinal, although he died two days before the ceremony was due to take place).

Although the tone of this and "Pascendi" are very different and speak to their times, it struck me how very similar the themes are and how both authors identify similar attacks upon the Church, going through philosophy, dogma, faith and science, Scripture and identifying what is going wrong in these areas; how they are being mis-interpreted as tools of the Faith. Both see the necessity of subjecting all things connected with our belief to the teachingoffice of the Church and to judging the what can certainly be the fruitful discernments of various disciplines by the traditional understanding of the Faith - as mediated to us by the authentic teaching Office of the Church - Peter.

Balthasar says:

One thing will never be possible: namely that some human science should lift itself above the fullness of God and sit in judgement upon it from above.

Aggiornamento does not mean assimilating oneself to the atheist Enlightenment, instead it means being abreast of the times in order to give that Enlightenment an authenticresponse.

Balthasar with Pope John Paul II