When four bishops, along with many Catholic educators and leaders across the country, gathered for the first Front Royal Education Summit, their intent was ambitious: a renewal of primary and secondary Catholic education in the United States.
To that end, they recently released “The Front Royal Statement: Seven Cardinal Principles of Catholic Primary and Secondary Education.” More than the product of a conference, Bishop James D. Conley of Lincoln writes that this statement is “an attempt to capture the essence of the renewal of Catholic education now sweeping the Church in the United States.”
A long legacy of renewal of Catholic education
In the preamble to the Statement, Bishop Thomas Daly of Spokane points out that Catholics have a long history of educational renewal in the United States. “One hundred forty-two years ago, the Bishops of the United States, meeting in the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, resolved to build Catholic schools in every parish.”
That was 142 years ago. In 1874, there were approximately 1,400 Catholic schools in the U.S. By 1960, there were 13,000.
“Today,” Bishop Daly writes, “we face a different but equally grave crisis: soaring rates of disaffiliation among young Catholics, driven by a culture of skepticism and materialism that undermines faith and the Church’s moral teachings. Declining enrollment, rising costs, a shortage of well-formed teachers and leaders, the reluctance of some pastors to maintain Catholic schools, and the inability of many families to afford a Catholic education, despite their desire for one, only make the crisis more acute.”
Seven principles of Catholic education
Statement writers see returning to these seven principles of Catholic education as a way to return to what is distinctly important about what Bishop Daly calls “the Church’s own ancient and venerable philosophy of education.”
Bishop Conley introduces the principles, writing, “The seven principles of education contained in this statement articulate and condense this great tradition of Catholic educational philosophy and practice and attempt to capture the essence of the renewal of Catholic education now sweeping the Church in the United States.”
The Statement can be found in full here, but here are just a few highlights from the seven principles:
1. The Supernatural End of Education
"Ultimately, the end of education is the Beatific Vision, man’s final destiny in the Kingdom of God: direct knowledge and love of God and fellowship with the angels and saints. All genuine learning tends toward this fulfillment and seeks to order the human person to God in charity and service."
2. The Nature and Dignity of the Human Person
"Every human life possesses inalienable dignity because each person bears the image of God. This dignity calls us to love others as ourselves regardless of origin, age, ability, or rank, especially the vulnerable and even those who wrong us."
3. What Children Deserve, the Rights of Parents, and the Duties of the State
"The state fulfills its proper role in service of the common good when it protects and advances the educational freedom of the family."
4. The Ecclesial Responsibility of Bishops and Priests
"The Church entrusts bishops with the establishment, oversight, and Catholic identity of schools, calling them to safeguard their doctrinal, moral, and spiritual integrity. Priests are thus called to foster the vocation of parents as the primary educators of their children and to ensure that the sacraments are accompanied by serious and ongoing formation in the faith."
5. The Formation and Responsibilities of Teachers and Leaders
"Teacher and leader formation must be intentionally designed to support the intellectual, spiritual, and pedagogical dimensions and should never be subordinated to purely secular licensure, certification, or accreditation frameworks."
6. The Integrity and Order of the Curriculum
"This formation, which begins most easily in childhood but continues throughout one’s education, values both faith and reason. It springs from a sacramental imagination, a faith which enables one to perceive how physical reality reveals the transcendent, spiritual reality lying beyond it, while remaining firmly grounded in a robust realism which affirms the intelligibility, goodness, and intrinsic value of created reality."
7. The Transmission of a Living Catholic Culture
"Culture is the living bond that unites a people, the sum of practices, symbols, habits, and institutions that together create a shared environment. It is not static, but a vital social inheritance, received and handed on through education, family, religious practice, institutions, and communal memory."
“We pray,” writes Bishop Conley, “that these seven principles will provide a shared foundation to unify the various streams of educational renewal now underway in Catholic schools and to inspire a supernatural vision that guides the true integral formation of the whole child.”
