In my Catholic grade school, I was the kid who was going to be a priest. I rarely got in trouble and if I did, it was for talking in class. One day when I was in the sixth grade, my mother came home from a parent-teacher conference and immediately went into the kitchen. She began opening and closing all the cupboards all the while crying out, “Oh Charles, oh Charles, where are you?”
I responded from the living room, “I’m right here!” My mother looked at me and replied, “Oh, I know where you are, Charlie, I’m looking for Charles, your perfect twin that the nuns are always talking about!”
In eighth grade, my mother came home from a parent-teacher conference and announced, “Finally those sisters at the school realize that you are not a perfect child. Sister told me that you can lose your patience in group projects. I told her that it was impossible for you to lose your patience because you can’t lose what you don’t have.”
It is said, “practice makes perfect.” I’ve been practicing being me for over 60 years and I’m more convicted than ever that I am far from perfect. As a child, I was really not all that different from today’s children. I just had a childhood during a very different time and in a very different world.
I don’t think it is just a baby boomer’s nostalgia to sigh over simpler times. There was a lesson then that is applicable for today: My parents, teachers, friends’ parents, neighbors and even local car mechanic all were conscious of how they spoke in front of children. The absence of foul language and the bashing of political, religious and corporate leaders, and a positive attitude about the future, insulated childhood and preserved a child’s world.
The fundamental neurology of a child conditions the foundational principles needed to form a conscience. In other words, children grow not just in shoe size, but also in the capacity to process the world around them. It is folly and potentially injurious to the esteem of children to crash into their relatively secure world with the complexities of adult issues, regardless of noble intent.
Creating an intentional Catholic culture which preserves a child’s world and forms children in their God-given identity are the hallmarks of a Catholic school in my day, as well as today. A Catholic school’s partnership with parents brings the dynamic of a community. Many parents of children in a Catholic school have found out that their circle of friends includes the parents of their children’s’ friends.
No school is perfect, but our Catholic schools give witness to the mercy of Jesus who reveals the God of abundant grace. God is ever willing to restore what has been lost by being the inheritors of original sin; imperfect people in an imperfect world.
In a world that tears down values and bullies the common good with individual wants, the environment of a Catholic school builds up not only the individual students, but also builds a community of families who work together through individual sacrifices for the good of the whole school.
Today, as in my day, a Catholic school provides our children the opportunity for academic excellence and effective catechetical formation in the Catholic tradition.
A Catholic school does not teach the ambiguous values of an ever-changing society. Rather, through the authentic witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ by teachers, parents and the broader community, our children know the values by which we live and look forward in hope to a life and a world that gets better with practice … the practice of our faith.
