While discussing curriculum development in a recent Leaders Initiative session, I learned about an article written by Dr. Leonard Sax, a friend of The Heights who has been featured on HeightsCast. Published on the Institute for Family Studies website, the essay argues something that raised a number of questions from the group.
Dr. Sax writes: “A school can be either an Elon Musk school or it can be a Mother Teresa school. But it can’t be both.” Elon Musk schools, he explains, are schools that focus on achievement—first collegiate, then professional. Mother Teresa schools, on the other hand, emphasize becoming a good person, by which he means becoming a person who generously serves others.
At the meeting, we all agreed that every school does, as a matter of fact, have some ultimate goal, which serves to orient all the other secondary goals it pursues; and we all agreed with Dr. Sax that schools ought to care more about who its students are becoming than what they are accomplishing—how they are serving more than how they are “succeeding.” Nevertheless, the extreme dichotomy, which he presents between forming the personal character of students and encouraging them to become professionally excellent, did prompt a worthwhile discussion.
One of the school heads at the meeting raised a point based on an observation of his own school, as well as other schools with whom he is in touch. As schools in the Catholic and Christian liberal arts tradition seek to be more intentional about integrating the Christian faith into their schools, along with the lofty transcendentals of goodness, truth, and beauty, there is a temptation to throw out the baby of striving for professional excellence with the bathwater of worldly ambition. In responding to a typical school’s hyper-focus on outcomes and achievement, it is easy, he pointed out, to overreact and see achievement and outcomes—whether going to an elite university or landing a prestigious professional position—as problematic, per se, and therefore to be avoided. In other words, it is easy to communicate to our students or families that there is something essentially dangerous (because something of it is potentially immoral) about striving to attend “elite” universities or attain prestige in one’s profession.
This raises a question: Can Catholic schools present achievement in a way that advances their primary mission of personal formation? If so, how? Here is an attempt at an answer.
Everyone is called to greatness. Speaking to a group of young people at World Youth Day in 2000, St. John Paul the Great declared:
It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.
John Paul II – Vigil of Prayer, August 19, 2000, no. 5
There is, we might say, a universal call to greatness—a call to be excellent at what we do. Greatness means not settling for mediocrity out of a false sense of humility, a false humility that really is a mask over the vice of cowardice and falsely makes a virtue of lukewarm laziness. Even more, for a Christian who looks to Mary as the example par excellence of greatness, greatness in the end serves to magnify the Lord: Magnificat anima mea Dominum; non nobis, Domine, non nobis sed nomini tuo da gloriam.
To become great in a Christian way means to become as holy as God wants one to become. To attain holiness, each person must faithfully follow the specific path God has ordained for him. Every wayfarer follows his own way, St. Josemaría used to say; diverse voices make sweet harmonies, poetically wrote Dante. For some, their specific path to holiness leads them out of the busyness of this world and into the quiet and calm of the monastery. For those called to pursue holiness in this way, to follow one’s vocation necessitates living a particular sort of contemptus mundi—a hatred of this world. St. Clare of Assisi’s way of life, for example, is a path to sanctity that leads one to leave behind the ordinary workaday world—to “die” to this world by entering the cloister. Indeed, laudatory hymns written in honor of St. Clare even compare her entrance into the cloister to an entrance into a tomb: she has spiritually died to the world by perpetually retreating from it.
A path like St. Clare’s, however, is not the path for most Christians, who are called to remain in the world. In a special way, the laity, who are called to love God in and from the ordinary circumstances of their lives, are not called to hate the world but to passionately love it, as St. Josemaría eloquently put it in a homily at the University of Navarre in 1967. By remaining in the world, loving it, they witness to the original goodness of creation, a goodness that remains the deepest reality of the world, even a world marred by sin.
St. Thomas More, who was a loving husband, devoted father, wise and witty lawyer, and the servant of the king (as Lord High Chancellor, More was, for a time, the second most powerful man in England), is an example of a man whose sanctity was the fruit of fulfilling his domestic, professional, and civic duties with love and, because of this love, with competence. Yet for More, to love God was not in any way incompatible with loving the world. He died the king’s good servant and God’s first, as he put it before being put to death by the very one he served. Serving the king was a tangible way by which he could serve God, and serving God first and foremost was, in the end, the best way he could serve the king.
Two others who exemplify the path to heaven that can be found in and through the ordinary, earthly realities of this world are Tomás and Paquita Alvira. The two were a married couple who knew St. Josemaría and whose cause for canonization is now open. For this holy couple, to fall more deeply in love with God meant falling more deeply in love with each other. As Tomás himself told one of his daughters: “One has always to be on the frontline of love! That is what I have always tried to do—always be on the lookout for ways to surprise your mother and love her more every day.” Indeed, it would have been a false spiritualism were one of them to say, “I must love you less to love God more.” Rather, by loving each other more, while still loving God most, an increase in their love for others was a path to an increase in love for God—and, of course, the reverse is true as well: loving God most would overflow into loving each other more. As St. Josemaría used to tell married couples, their paths to heaven had very particular names. For Tomás, his path’s name was Paquita; for Paquita, her path’s name was Tomás.
Theologians refer to this vision of remaining in the world, loving it, and pursuing God through it as secularity, which is radically opposed to secularism: the view of reality that, lacking any sense of the transcendent, sees the material face of things as the only real dimension. St. Paul VI called secularity the “specific characteristic” of the laity, by which he meant that it is precisely secularity that makes the lay path distinct from other vocations. Rather than being an off-shoot of religious and clerical life, the life of piety and apostolic activity of the laity have their own intrinsic raison d’ être. The spirituality of the lay person, in other words, is not a watered down religious life, but is a way of life that has a dignity of its own. Lumen gentium emphasizes this point:
What specifically characterizes the laity is their secular nature…. 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. They live in the world, that is, in each and in all of the secular professions and occupations. They live in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life, from which the very web of their existence is woven. They are called there by God that by exercising their proper function and led by the spirit of the Gospel they may work for the sanctification of the world from within as a leaven. In this way they may make Christ known to others, especially by the testimony of a life resplendent in faith, hope, and charity. Therefore, since they are tightly bound up in all types of temporal affairs, it is their special task to order and to throw light upon these affairs in such a way that they may come into being and then continually increase according to Christ to the praise of the Creator and the Redeemer.
Lumen gentium, 31
Earthly realities for the layperson are not a distraction from his path to heaven; they are the path itself. Professional work for the layperson is not a distraction from his supernatural calling; it is a privileged means of living it out.
Rather than seeing a split between personal life and professional life, it is more truthful to see all of our life as personal life—it all involves and shapes us as persons—and our professional life as a part of it. The goal is not to balance opposing poles vying for attention but to integrate compatible dimensions into a single unified life. One’s professional vocation is the human face of his divine vocation.
In addition to being a way of earning a living, professional work has two interrelated personal dimensions. One is inward facing; the other is outward facing. Work is a “gym for virtues”—it shapes who we are—and a “means of service”—it shapes the world and impacts those around us. Given that most of our waking hours are spent working in some way, whether in family life or in one of the professions (many of which ultimately serve to support family life), either we become virtuous men and women in and through our work or we do not become virtuous at all. Seen in this way, professional work presents us with a buffet of opportunities for personal formation: each moment of work is a chance to grow in some virtue and serve some person. By doing our work excellently, putting love into the details of it, we not only help shape the world into a more beautiful place, we also shape ourselves and those we serve into more beautiful persons. The manner of working makes the man; for, as John Paul II put it, work is made for man, it is a gift to man whereby he may grow in virtue and love in a tangible way.
A side effect of working in this way will likely be good outcomes—academic and professional prestige—even if that is not the ultimate goal nor the primary focus. In connection to this idea, it is worthwhile meditating on St. Josemaría’s words:
As our sanctity hinges on our work, we will need to achieve prestige in our profession, and each will attain, in their own job and social sphere, the dignity and good name they have won by their merits, gained in honest competition with their professional colleagues. Our humility doesn’t entail being timid and shy, or lacking in daring in the noble field of human endeavor. With a supernatural spirit and a desire to serve—with a Christian spirit of service—we must strive to be among the first among our peers. Some people without a genuine lay outlook on life understand humility as a lack of confidence, a kind of indecision that impedes action, a waiving of rights (sometimes even the rights of truth and justice) in order to avoid friction and disagreements and to be nice to everyone. Thus there will be some who won’t understand our way of living a deep—and genuine—humility; they may even call it pride. The Christian concept of this virtue has been much deformed, possibly because of attempting to live it within secular society in ways more suited to convents than to Christians called to be at the crossroads of the world. (St. Josemaría, Letter, May 6, 1945, nos. 30-31)
What does this vision of professional work mean for Catholic schools? How can a Catholic or Christian school strive to be secular without falling into secularism?
In the first place, a spirit of secularity implies that schools are better understood as extensions of families—the domestic churches—than outgrowths of the clerical hierarchy. Schools exist in the Church thanks to the great vocation of marriage, one of the essential aims of which is the begetting and educating of children. As happens not infrequently, new schools form as families come together in the joint venture of educating their children according to the ideals that animate the cultures of their homes; institutional schools are, at their best, something akin to large, robust homeschooling co-ops that only require more administration to organize and amplify the work being done.
Secondly, if a school sees its most important reunion as the reunion in heaven, and if most of its students will likely be called to pursue this aim through a lay vocation, then it needs to teach its students the value and meaning of work, both on a human and supernatural level. To communicate a culture of professionalism to their students, teachers need to be diligent professionals in their own work. The professional work students see most frequently in their formative years is teaching. How teachers prepare classes, how they offer feedback, how they deliver content, the attitude with which they approach their work is all teaching their students something about the meaning and value of work. Moreover, all of this does much to teach them of God, though indirectly: “The performance of a duty,” wrote C. S. Lewis in a letter, “will probably teach you quite as much about God as academic Theology would do.”
Secularity in schools can be lived out in the classroom by not superficially bringing “religion” into it. Just as Flannery O’Conner did not wish to write “Catholic stories,” but rather to be a Catholic writing good stories, so too should teachers seek to teach each discipline well—according to the principles that are intrinsic to it—rather than to teach it in a “religious” way. To respect the natural principles of a discipline, without jumping over them to a false sense of the supernatural, is to love that discipline fully—something which gives glory to the Creator. An empirical science class, for example, should not simply become an excuse for doing theology without doing science well.
Lastly, rather than stifling ambitious students from seeking success in this world, schools could help them understand the deeper calling latent in their desire for being great. Rather than shielding their graduates from the world, they can help students rectify their intentions and see that, yes, the world is good, but that it is not all good (because of sin) nor all of the good (because it was created). Schools can help students to discover that their mission in the world is to serve by using the gifts they have been given; that aiming for Harvard (or the athletic or artistic equivalent) is actually too low of a bar; and that real success does not consist in attaining prestige itself but in using that prestige as a means to serve more souls.
St. Josemaría puts it better and more succinctly than I could: “You too have a professional vocation which ‘spurs’ you on. Well, that ‘spur’ is the hook to fish for men. Rectify your intention, then, and be sure you acquire all the professional prestige you can for the service of God and of souls. The Lord counts on this too.” (St. Josemaría, Furrow, no. 491).