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Take Back the House
The following essay is based on a lecture I gave to parents on October 3, 2026. If you are interested in listening to the lecture, you can find it here.
In an article published on the Institute for Family Studies website, Dr. Leonard Sax argues that “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, as he explains, focus on achievement; Mother Teresa schools emphasize becoming a good person, someone who serves others.
This stark dichotomy rests on a view of the world in which professional success (and the ambition for it) stands opposed to service and virtue. I want to propose a somewhat different view. Achievement, professional prestige, even worldly success are not opposed to loving service. Rightly understood, they offer a well-intentioned man the opportunity to grow in virtue and to serve others. If that is true, we should not artificially limit the ambitions of our sons and students. We should encourage those ambitions and guide them, helping our boys see them in their proper context.
In other words, we should want our sons to go into the very heart of the world, into every corner of it, to transform it from within—and to be transformed themselves by that loving effort. And, if capable and called, they should not shy away from leadership positions with great influence.
The Three Most Important Historical Events
By “the world,” I mean the whole universe and everything in it—inanimate objects, plants, animals, and man himself. To understand the present state of our world, it helps to consider what I take to be the three most important events in its history.
The first of these events is creation itself. The world was created good. To call something good is to say that it fulfills its purpose, the way a pass in soccer is good when it reaches its man. God made the world for a purpose, and it reflected that purpose perfectly. He also made it as a gift. God did not need the universe. He made it for Adam and Eve, and through them for us: to understand, to explore, to care for, and to love, from the nearest planet to the farthest galaxy some distant generation may one day discover.
To love the world in this way meant living in a triple harmony. Adam and Eve were in harmony with nature: they understood what each plant and creature was for, and they knew how to care for nature as stewards. They were in harmony with each other: each understood the other completely, more fully than even the happiest spouses do on their best days. And they were in harmony with God, who, Genesis tells us, walked with Adam in the garden.
In caring for this gift, our first parents were practicing for heaven. Heaven is a life of pure love, and we prepare for it by learning to love on earth. God gave Adam and Eve each other and an entire universe on which to practice.
The second is original sin—which damaged not only mankind but the whole of creation. Theologians explain this in different ways. I find it helpful to think of a friend who, years ago, bought a used Ford Mustang. He was proud of it, but it was a lemon. He spent more time driving it to the shop than anywhere else, and no mechanic could find the problem. At last one put it on a lift and discovered why: the front half of the car came from one model year and the back half from another. Two wrecked cars had been cut apart and welded together. The body fit, but everything rattled. The car would never run well, because it was no longer what it had been designed to be.
Something like this happened to the world. Everything is still there—the galaxies, the oceans, the forests—but everything rattles. Hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires are not the Designer’s flaws. They are the result of a cosmic car crash.
Thus, the triple harmony became a triple disharmony. We no longer understand nature as Adam did; we must labor through physics, chemistry, and biology to recover a fraction of what he simply knew. We no longer understand one another, and we grow angry over trivial things. And though God still wishes to walk with us, we scarcely notice him. Adam never tired of those walks. We tire quickly, and often we do not set out at all.
The third is the redemption: Christ’s becoming man, his death on the cross, his Resurrection and Ascension. Here an important parallel emerges. Creation was perfect, but it was not finished. God did not hand Adam the world under glass. He entrusted it to him as something still developing, gave him a mind to understand it and a heart to love it, and asked him to help it grow according to the divine plan.
The redemption follows the same pattern. Christ opened the gates of heaven, but he did not close the gates of hell. Evil remains in the world, and men remain free to sin. What Christ accomplished was not a finished repair but the possibility of one. He gave us the grace and the power to put the world back together, with him.
When Good Abandons the Ship
Imagine being given a mansion: some 250 rooms on a thousand acres with gardens and fountains. Now imagine that, over time, parts of it fall into disrepair. Some rooms are nearly condemned, the fountains no longer run, and squatters have moved in and made a mess of things. Call that the evil in the world.
The owner has two choices. He can decide the squatters are too frightening, pitch a tent in a remote corner of the grounds, and live there in safety. Or he can walk back into the house and reclaim it. It belongs to him, not to them. Why should he be the one to retreat when he has been charged with the care of the house and, after the redemption, given the power to restore it?
The Dutch soccer player Johan Cruyff offers another way of seeing the same truth. As a coach at Barcelona, Cruyff developed the possession-based system that Spain’s national team later made famous and that most teams now use in some form. It rests on a single idea: there is only one ball, so if you have it, they don’t. You must train players skilled enough to keep the ball moving, composed enough to escape when surrounded by opponents, and united enough to support one another so they are rarely trapped. And when you lose the ball, you press immediately to win it back.
Possessing the ball is good; not having the ball is evil. The more good we do, the less room there is for evil. The squatters did not drive the owner out of the mansion; they moved in after he left. Evil is not more powerful than good. Evil resides where good leaves.
This is why we need one another. No player can keep the ball alone against eleven opponents. We need communities that support us materially, emotionally, and above all through prayer. And when we lose the ball, as every one of us does, we must win it back quickly. That is what the sacrament of confession is for.
Grace does the decisive work, but God works through us. He is the coach; we are the players. And the one thing a coach does not do is take the field himself. Some men are called to restore the house through the priesthood or consecrated life, a calling that is beautiful and necessary for all of us. Most, however, will reclaim it through their families and their professional work. At my school, this is how we hope our boys will come to see their work: as an instrument in God’s hands for taking back the house.
The Good of Worldly Professions
The Church’s thinking about the world has developed over time. The first Christians understood their mission as the transformation of society from within. The second-century Letter to Diognetus describes them this way:
For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. … But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities … and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life.
The early Christians looked like everyone else. What set them apart was the way they lived: their joy, their attention to others, perhaps the way they worked. They were like the colleague whose competence, cheerfulness, and kindness make others think, I want whatever he has.
In later centuries the emphasis shifted toward wariness of the world. St. Gregory the Great, in a homily on the Gospels, observes that Peter returned to fishing after his conversion, but Matthew never returned to collecting taxes:
There are many occupations which we cannot practice either partially or completely without sin. No one is allowed to take up again after his conversion those that are involved with sin.
Fishing and farming were honest work. Finance was suspect, no place for a serious Christian.
In the twentieth century, St. Josemaría Escrivá, who founded Opus Dei in 1928, recovered the earlier vision. God creates every soul for heaven—not merely to slip through its gates but to become a saint. And since most people are not called to the priesthood, there must be a way to be a spouse, a parent, a professional, and a canonizable saint at once. We need more Thomas Mores: more engineers, lawyers, bankers, and pharmacists whose great-grandchildren might one day pray in churches that bear their names. In The Way of the Cross, St. Josemaría writes that the cross belongs not only atop mountains and cathedral spires but “in the very heart of the world”—in factories and libraries, in city streets and quiet fields, in families and stadiums, wherever a Christian strives to live an honorable life.
The Second Vatican Council made this the teaching of the universal Church. Gaudium et Spes puts it plainly:
The expectation of a new earth must not weaken but rather stimulate our concern for cultivating this one. … To the extent that [earthly progress] can contribute to the better ordering of human society, it is of vital concern to the Kingdom of God.
We are not on earth merely to endure it while we wait for heaven. We are here to learn to love by ordering the earth, and that love is what prepares us for heaven. None of this happens automatically. God holds a reservoir of grace, and we are its conduits; our task is to stay connected to it and to widen the pipe as far as we can.
Which professions, then, should our sons pursue? When St. Josemaría was asked which profession matters most, he answered that it does not matter. Whether a man is a taxi driver or a head of state, what matters is how the work is done: with competence, with virtue, and with the right intention.
Work as Co-Redemption
Why do we work, and how ambitious are we? I do not think our culture suffers from too much ambition. It suffers from too little. Many people want only wealth or a comfortable life of their own design. Measured against the vision of the Church, that is a very small aim. The purpose of our work is not only to provide a good life for our families but to share in the redemption of the world. That is ambition for the good.
The particular profession matters less than how your son approaches it. But if work is a means of restoring the world, then one question deserves a place in his discernment: Where can I do the most good? If the task is to restore the mansion, can I restore four rooms? Three fountains? An entire floor? A man who has the ability and the opportunity to do more, yet holds back out of laziness or fear, has refused part of his vocation. If he could influence a hundred thousand people, he should not settle for fifty thousand. Your son should seek the widest platform he can find for the good of the world.
The Limits of Good Work
There are limits, of course, because evil is real. A job is ruled out when it is not merely difficult but incompatible with the triple harmony.
The first limit is harmony with God. Some work is intrinsically immoral, and no amount of influence redeems it. A man might wield great power in organized crime, but that is not the platform we have in mind.
The second is the limit of a man’s own gifts and opportunities. A man may be doing the very best he can and still have little visible influence. That is enough; it is all God asks. Some time ago I agreed to teach a class on leadership to a group of university honors students. By the time I taught it, I had come to doubt the wisdom of encouraging everyone to be a leader. If everyone must be a leader, the result is anarchy. A healthy society needs a few leaders and a great many excellent followers, and the work we call ordinary is essential to the whole. When your son reaches the limit of his competence or his opportunities, he is exactly where he ought to be.
The third limit, and the one most parents feel acutely, is harmony with others—above all, with a man’s own family. An opportunity may be good professionally, but is it good for his wife and children? Nearly every professionally ambitious man faces this question, often more than once.
Importantly, the question of balancing professional advancement with the well-being of his family is not a matter of limiting one’s ambition but of properly ordering it. As St. Teresa of Calcutta said in her 1979 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, faith leads to love, and love naturally moves us to act: “first in our own home,” then for our neighbor, our country, and the whole world. The family is first, but the good of the family naturally expands into the wider community of which it is a part.
This idea is relatively clear in principle, though difficult in practice. Time at home is the most visible measure, and a man who is almost never home has a problem. But what of working until eight or nine most evenings, going into the office on Saturdays, or traveling for weeks at a time? There is no formula. It is a matter of prudence, worked out between husband and wife.
Nor is physical presence the only measure. Every working parent knows the experience of being home without really being home, still turning over the problem from the office. Part of putting family first is learning to leave that problem at the door. And we must be wary of the hump that is never crossed: the conviction that there will be more time once this project is finished, until twenty years have passed.
Work as Good for the Family
There is another side to this tension. Work undertaken with a co-redemptive intention is not only good for the world; it forms the family. Your son learns something important when he sees you leave in the morning not only to earn a living but to fight for the world—because your family is committed to leaving that world better for the next generation, and such a commitment demands hard work and sacrifice. The father goes out like a soldier, promising to return as soon as he can, and careful to hide his scars so as not to frighten the children.
That witness forms children only if it is sincere. Boys are remarkably good at detecting pretense, and they know when we mean what we say.
Such work forms us as well. Work can be satisfying because it is interesting or because it pays well. But the deepest fulfillment comes from knowing that we are spending our intelligence, our time, and our strength on the greatest mission there is.
Encouraging the Next Generation
Striking the balance between a wide platform and a faithful presence at home is difficult, and no one can strike it for another. But as we strike it in our own lives, we should encourage our sons to seek influence through their professions. I do not mean the influence of followers and views. I mean the kind of influence that helps others flourish.
Some years ago I heard the story of a man who served as the right hand of the CEO at a European investment bank. For three years he led the largest deal in the firm’s history, and it finally closed after two grueling days of negotiations in Germany.
The next morning the CEO came into his office. “That was the biggest deal this company has ever done,” he said, “and it was because of you. It was the best day of my life.”
“Thank you,” the man replied. “It was the worst day of my life because yesterday was the first day in thirty-five years that I did not go to Mass.”
The CEO, a professed atheist, sat down. “Tell me about that,” he said. “I don’t understand it, but I want it.”
That is the kind of influence I mean. And if this man affected his boss so deeply in a single conversation, he must have affected many colleagues over the years, because his life was coherent. Notice, too, that he did not shy away from a demanding, high-stakes career. He embraced it, and he found a way, for thirty-five years, to keep God first within it.
This is what we want for our sons: minds shrewd enough to engage the world and hearts simple enough to love it and take it back for God (cf. Matthew 10:16). We want this, of course, within the limits of their gifts and within the order of charity, with their families first. But we want it.
What can you do as a parent to foster this disposition? Let me offer three suggestions. First, talk with your son about why you work—not only what you do, but whom it serves and what you hope it accomplishes. Second, when he begins to think about his future, add the question of reach to the questions of interest and aptitude: Where could you do the most good? Third, let him see the coherence of your own life. If your faith goes with you to the office, he will notice. Boys always do.
I do not think we must choose between an Elon Musk school and a Mother Teresa school. The question is not whether our sons will achieve but what their achievement will be for. We should want them to aim high—in finance, law, medicine, engineering, public service, wherever their gifts lead—and so carry the joy, competence, and charity of those first Christians into every room of the mansion. That is how the house is taken back.
About the Author
Alvaro de Vicente
Headmaster of The Heights School and an advisor to hundreds of school leaders, both of start-up schools and established schools seeking to revamp their offerings—especially for boys.