‘See the World Through a Sacramental Lens’: Bishop Conley on Education

In a lyrical and substantive pastoral letter on the nature and meaning of a Catholic education issued in early September, Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, reinforced — and in a way reintroduced — the need for Catholic schools to embrace the treasures of their intellectual and pedagogical inheritance. 

“Every subject bears the fingerprints of God, pointing to the beauty, joy, and wonder behind all reality,” he writes. “Whether that be the marvel of number, equation, order and sequence in mathematics, or salvation history, all reality is ‘charged with the grandeur of God.’ It is filled with meaning and purpose and should provide the answer to the ‘whys’ behind everything.”

Bishop Conley’s widely circulated letter, entitled “The Joy and Wonder of Catholic Education: Developing Authentically Catholic Schools,” has been hailed online for both its spiritual resonance and its erudition. For American Catholic families dismayed and betrayed by an increasingly hostile education system, Bishop Conley’s vision is something like an antidote. 

The response to the letter didn’t surprise the bishop, given the state of public schooling and the recent spark of interest in traditional Catholic education. 

“This letter was six years in the making,” Bishop Conley told the Register. “I noticed a groundswell of renewal in Catholic education and a desire to recover the beauty and the treasury of our heritage. So I’m not too surprised by the response. Whether the home-schooling movement and these ideas that are resonating with so many families, or the explosion of the Chesterton Academies and the charter-school movement, there was a lot of underground fermentation going on. The timing was right.”

In his letter, Bishop Conley repeatedly points toward the aspects of Catholic education that distinguish from other forms of schooling — this is a marked reversal from previous decades that saw Catholic schools emphasizing commonality with public schools and, indeed, mainstream culture more generally. In Bishop Conley’s view, this was done to keep up with standards of accreditation and to maintain recognition within the secular world — or else lose students as a result.  

“This was really the downfall of Catholic higher education, I think,” Bishop Conley said, acknowledging instances where “Catholic universities acquiesced their Catholic identities to be accepted by the secular academic culture. But now there’s a realization that we can no longer keep one foot in the public-school arena and one foot in the Catholic-school arena. We really have to decide who we are and what we want to be. More and more, dioceses are coming to that realization. There really is not much of a future for Catholic education if they try to keep their feet in both worlds.”

The bulk of the new pastoral letter is dedicated to proposing answers to the questions of “who we are” and “what we want to be” for Catholic schools. Bishop Conley uses former secretary for the Congregation for Catholic Education Archbishop J. Michael Miller’s five essential characteristics for Catholic schools, which were derived from studying numerous Vatican and papal documents, as a launching point for his arguments. According to Archbishop Miller, Catholic schools must be:

1) inspired by a supernatural vision

2) founded on Christian anthropology

3) animated by communion and community

4) imbued with a Catholic worldview throughout its curriculum

5) sustained by Gospel witness

For Bishop Conley, a truly Catholic education is a truly holistic education, one that is concerned with the whole person, including the moral and spiritual dimension. 

“A Catholic education should offer so much more to students because we see the world through a sacramental lens,” he writes in his pastoral letter, “a lens that sees connections, integrates knowledge, discerns the ultimate meaning, destiny, and purpose of the human person, and understands how we fit into the big picture. When students awaken to truth, goodness, and beauty, their lives are changed.”

To drive home the impact a quality Catholic education can have, Bishop Conley frequently refers to his own college experience at the University of Kansas in the early 1970s, where he enrolled in the Integrated Humanities Program, which, while not a Catholic program, contained the very best of a classical liberal arts education. Through immersion in the truth, goodness and beauty of a “Great Books” program, Bishop Conley’s imagination was sparked with wonder — and by his junior year, he was baptized in the Catholic Church. 

After supernatural grace, Bishop Conley credits his exposure to a Great Books liberal arts education with drawing him into the Church.

“Homer’s Odyssey had a powerful influence on my life,” he told the Register. “The story of Odysseus and the heroism and the adversity and his modeling of virtue: It’s just an epic character. What the whole purpose of that epic poem was to show, ‘What is the good life? Who is the good man? What does the good man look like?’ It’s the one who’s loyal and trustworthy and noble and good and courageous — all these virtues Odysseus models.”

He also cited St. Augustine and St. John Henry Newman as integral in his journey to the faith, especially the latter, who, like Bishop Conley, converted to the faith through his pursuit of the truth. Bishop Conley quotes Newman several times in his pastoral letter, drawing on the saint’s arguments that hearts are reached and converted more commonly through the imagination than through reason. 

“We’ve lost the conviction and trust that truth, goodness and beauty can be known. And everything hinges on that,” he said. 

An emphasis on beauty is particularly important for a Catholic education in this age for Bishop Conley. Since both truth and goodness have been corrupted in the modern mind — declaring that anything is “true” or “good” makes one seem judgmental — beauty still has the ability to draw students into the mystery of the faith. This makes the focus on subjects such as poetry, music and outdoor education even more important for a truly Catholic education. 

“Whether it’s the beauty of nature or the beauty of friendship, these things still have a way of capturing the heart and the imagination in a way that truth and goodness have lost,” he told the Register. “We need more music and poetry, especially for little kids. It’s time-tested that young people love music and love to sing. This forms their imaginations and orders their emotions and their passions.”

Bishop Conley also stressed in both the letter and in his interview with the Register the importance of a “play-based” childhood, citing popular social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s recent release, The Anxious Generation, which warns of the effects of a “screen-based” childhood. 

“A ‘play-based’ childhood is where you really do experience real things,” he said. “Nature, person-to-person friendships, adventure, discovery … and a screen-based childhood robs you of those things.”

LISTEN

Readers can listen to Bishop Conley reading his pastoral letter here.