The following keynote address by Catholic University President Peter Kilpatrick was delivered on October 18 at the 2023 Duc in Altum Schools Summit.
As a fellow educator and administrator dedicated to the mission, and committed to the success of Catholic education, it is a privilege for me to speak at this, the ninth annual Duc in Altum Schools Collaborative Summit.
I've grown so much within the last couple of days watching you, so you can be great hope. We need your students, and we need our students that we're producing, to go out and be evangelists in the world.
The Catholic University of America is proud to be a partner and a sponsor of this summit. For the mission of Duc in Altum is one we share: “The growth and support of passionately Catholic education at-large, and the transformation of the culture of our society.”
Indeed, the call of Pope St. John Paul II in Novo Millennio Ineunte to “put out into the deep” is the distinctively evangelical call to make Jesus known, loved, and served, and to know Him sufficiently well that he becomes the animator of everything that we say and do. This call to allow Jesus, Our Lord, Brother, and Savior, to enable everything we do in Truth and Charity, is at the very heart of what a Catholic education should be and, in my view, is at the center of the renewal of Catholic education.
I want to remind you what Gravissimum educationis says about Catholic education: “Jesus is the divine founder of Catholic schools, which pursue his mandate of proclaiming the mystery of salvation to all men and restoring all things in Christ. These schools are aimed at forming students who respond to Christ by coming to know better the mystery of salvation, how to worship God, the Father in spirit and truth, and how to be conformed in their personal lives, according to the new man created injustice and holiness of truth.” That's what that's what we're about. That's what you're about. That's what we're about.
In many ways, the success of your member schools in accomplishing this mission and in preparing Catholic young people for further study, ensures the success of my university.
For The Catholic University of America, founded by the U.S. bishops 136 years ago, the integration of our Faith – a deep, supernatural, transcendent faith in Jesus Christ – in all aspects of education is increasingly seen as an urgent task.
The challenge facing Catholic education these past few decades was captured in an essay by my close friend and colleague John Cavadini in 2004.
He described the “religious illiteracy of so many otherwise well-educated young Catholics” in dramatic terms: “This vast ignorance is not just a question of missing bits of information, [like] retinal holes marring an otherwise excellent field of vision. It is rather more like a retinal detachment, a whole field of vision pulling inexorably away toward blindness. Not only are the words gone, the bits of information, but the system in which the words made sense is fading.” I think another way to say this is that the culture of Christendom which once supported our Catholic educational endeavors is now sadly gone, and so we need to rebuild new cultural foundations.
Now while my friend John is so inclined to pessimism that I affectionately call him Eeyore, he makes an important point here. Sadly, the last 50 years has been something of a desert in terms of catechesis and formation.
The people of God in Western culture are hungry to be nourished by the faith. But first, we need to help them recover something more fundamental, namely, a transcendent worldview, informed by word and sacrament that enables them to be ready to receive the real food of the Eucharist, of Scripture, and of the great faith that we’re charged with protecting.
Since Cavadini wrote those words, the Duc in Altum School Collaborative was established as a grassroots response to the crisis he identified. Your mission – to support a “passionately Catholic education” and the transformation of our culture – and the work your member schools do is vital. It is a monumental effort to lay the groundwork for your students to have an authentic Catholic education, to see clearly, to understand our world, the truth about the human person, and each person’s vocation from God in that world.
Education, as you all well know, is not simply learning facts, concepts, and precepts. We serve first and foremost by helping our students more and more discover who they are as persons, and what a proper understanding of the human person is. For the foundational Truth of our faith is that we discover who we are most completely through our friendship with and transformation in Jesus Christ. A friendship that enables us to completely trust Him who is the origin of everything good in our lives, and who gives us His very self in so many concrete ways.
Pope Francis, who has called Catholic education a “spiritual work of mercy,” says it offers “the integral formation of each human person in all his or her dimensions.” Not fragmentation, but wholeness is the fruit of Catholic education. As the Vatican II fathers stated in Gaudium et Spes, “Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.” (22)
Jesus Christ fully reveals man to himself. And in the words of St. Irenaeus, “the glory of God is man fully alive.”
Catholic education, in other words, when it is truly Catholic, best prepares students to know themselves, to become fully alive, and to understand the world they live in with a transcendent perspective.
So what will it take for our students, in both Catholic K-12 schools and in Catholic colleges and universities, to fully know and understand themselves through their friendship, knowledge, love of, and service to Jesus Christ? I would propose it takes three fundamental building blocks: humility, sacred time, and intellectus.
Humility
The first essential building block is humility, the queen of all human virtues and the foundation for an authentic Catholic education. To understand who we are, to locate our place in the world, our vocation, our mission, demands of us a deep and real humility. This is true for all of us: Catholic school teachers, administrators, students and parents of students.
Humility is not a posture, not an act. Nor is it to be confused with insecurity or self-loathing. Humility means seeing clearly the world, our place in that world, and our utter and total dependence on God for everything. In the beautiful prayer of St. Therese of Lisieux, she says, “O my God, make me to see things as they really are, that I may not be deceived by any illusion.”
That is our prayer for our students, our faculty and our entire community. Recall that St. Therese is the architect of the beautiful Little Way, an entirely new elevator to God, that recognizes well our poverty before the Lord in that we rely on Him for everything in our lives.
If you haven't really absorbed St. Therese’s teaching, I would highly recommend reading Jacques Philippe. When I read Philippe, I think I started to get it. And I want to maybe just read one little passage from this, which I think is really outstanding. He says the Gospel path is the opposite of dreaming of our own perfection.
It leads us to receive everything from God, the meaning of our lives, the courage we need, the light by which we make our choices. Therese says the reason for being little means not attributing to ourselves, the virtues we practice, or believing ourselves capable of anything. But recognizing that God places this treasure in the hand of his little child so that you can use it when she needs it. But the treasure is not God’s. That's, that's really what humility is.
Education, as anyone who knows educators understands, does not guarantee humility (what an understatement!). Yet education, authentic Catholic education, helps us to see ever more clearly who we are. It shatters illusions.
As St. Irenaeus said centuries ago, “God did not tell us to follow him because he needed our help, but because he knew that loving him and relying on Him would make us whole.”
So how do we know if we are beginning to cultivate and develop this most critical virtue of humility?
Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand, the philosopher and theologian whom Pope Pius XII called the “20th century doctor of the Church,” wrote in his classic “Transformation in Christ” that humility has a number of characteristic tell-tale signs. Perhaps most importantly, humility rejoices in God’s sovereignty, namely that every good gift comes from above and that all we are and all we do comes from the Lord. This recognition of our utter dependence on Him, for everything, is a characteristic sign of humility.
Humility is also accompanied by joy in our creatureliness, and delight in God’s glory. And humility experiences our dependence on God as being sheltered by Him.
Think about that. How joyful are you, that you're a creature. Jesus said to St. Catherine of Siena, in the dialogue, remember, daughter, I am the one who is, and you are the one who was not. It's just a beautiful reminder.
But perhaps the most telling element of humility is an overwhelming sense of gratitude for all that God has given us, our gifts, our faith, our families, our citizenship in this nation, and even our weaknesses, even our frailties, and being grateful for that.
Perhaps the most telling element of humility is an overwhelming sense of gratitude for all that God has given us: our gifts, our Faith, our families, our citizenship in our nation. And even in our weaknesses, which as St. Paul writes is when God shows his Glory and strengths. This gratitude then is a source of great hope and joy in our lives.
So you want to do a reality check every day. Ask how hopeful am I? How joyful am I? How manifest are the gifts of the Holy Spirit in my life?
So it is nearly impossible to be humble and to be irritated or annoyed at the same time. So do a reality check each day on your humility.
And let's say a little bit about faith and reason. When all of us, understand with clarity and conviction our utter dependence on Christ, for everything in our lives, and that it is in friendship with Jesus that we become most fully ourselves, then we learn that faith, rather than limiting or constricting our vision, intellect, or our reason, actually enables us to probe far more deeply into the ultimate questions of our existence and of the beautiful and mysterious world that God has made. It is where “the creature meets the Creator.”
That phrase is Pope St. John Paul’s. He also said in Fides et Ratio, “Faith and reason are like two wings upon which the human soul rises to the contemplation of truth.” For our effort to explore our world and answer our ultimate questions is not a matter of only faith or only reason, but the two wings together carrying us forward.
The widespread belief that faith and reason are not compatible is one of the great lies of our age. This lie challenges the heart of Catholic education’s mission. It is born in part from what Bishop Robert Barron calls a self defeating presupposition behind the ideologies of scientism and materialism, and I refer you to a book: “Arguing Religion: A Bishop Speaks at Facebook and Google.” It's a really fantastic little book. The principle or presupposition is that the only meaningful statements about objective truth must be made or confirmed by experimentation and empirical evidence. Now the problem with that presupposition is it's self-contradicting and it can't be confirmed itself. So there’s a philosophical challenge with that presupposition. Maybe one of the best books I've ever read on this is by Michael Hanby. That really spends 60 pages of pretty dense philosophy to show that if there's no God, there's no science.
This lie about faith and reason being in opposition to each other manifests itself in two ways. Either it suggests that religion has no role in modern society, an outmoded vestige of an earlier and superstitious age, and needs to be banned from public life. Or it suggests that religion should not be tainted by the concerns or needs of society. It must stay cloistered, removed, private, sequestering itself from a larger, more threatening society.
In 2017, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) found that Catholics themselves are often confused about the compatibility of faith and reason, faith and science. The survey found that Catholics are often unsure what the Church teaches regarding faith’s compatibility with such scientific developments as the Big Bang, ironically a theory first proposed by the Belgian scientist and Catholic priest, Father Georges LeMaitre in 1931, who by the way taught here at Catholic University a few years later.
Overall, the CARA survey found that a lack of knowledge about Church teaching regarding questions of science impacts their sense of whether faith and science are compatible. Far worse, too many Catholics believe that the Church teaches they are in fact incompatible. The gaps in their religious education hinder their understanding of what the Church teaches. It increases the likelihood that Catholics might be blinded by ideologies alien or hostile to their faith, either shallow materialism or a suspicious fundamentalism.
Even at the university level, there is a subtle, sometimes not so subtle, suggestion that a Catholic identity and a Catholic worldview be downplayed. That somehow faith, our faith, is incompatible with reason, with science, with modernity. This is not just coming from external critics, but even within our own faith community, from parents, from professionals, and even among the young who have inherited this prejudice.
CARA also found that “Catholics who practice their faith most frequently are among the most likely to find science and their faith compatible. This is especially so among those who more regularly attend Mass, observe Lenten practices, and go to Confession.”
Faith is not a hindrance to understanding and reason. Indeed, faith forces us to ask the ultimate, the deepest questions about the world we live in. This has always been the credo of Catholic higher education.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “though faith is above reason, there can never be any discrepancy between faith and reason. …Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God.” (CCC 159)
The Catholic University of America was the second research institution founded in our new country. Johns Hopkins was the first. We have understood from our founding the truth enunciated in the Catechism about the compatibility of faith and research and the pursuit of “the secrets of nature.”
This is reflected in the mission statement of this University: “Dedicated to advancing the dialogue between faith and reason, The Catholic University of America seeks to discover and impart the truth through excellence in teaching and research, all in service to the Church, the nation and the world.”
Today the research on our campus ranges from the ethics of warfare, the fair and equitable practice of business, critical questions in constitutional law, biomedical research into prosthetics and the search for new delivery methods for vaccines.
Our researchers are leading the way in investigating some of the most important societal issues that our world faces today. They do so with humility and with rigor.
Understanding the compatibility of faith and reason, recognizing that God has given to men and women the freedom, the intellectual curiosity, and the drive to discover, the educated Catholic recognizes the interconnectedness of all things sacred and secular.
Sacred Time
Which brings me to the second fundamental building block of an authentically Catholic education, what I would like to call “sacred time.”
If we are truly humble, and we recognize well that every good thing comes from above, directly from God’s gratuitous generosity to us, then we would want to express our joy and our gratitude for all of those gifts and talents that the Lord gives us. Indeed, this is exactly what the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is all about, namely, giving thanks to God, asking humbly for His blessings, and receiving Him in the Eucharist, the Greek word for thanksgiving.
To enter into the Mass is to enter into the Paschal Mystery – the Passion, suffering, death, and resurrection of Our Lord – which occurred in a bloody and terrible way 2,000 years ago on that hill in Jerusalem we call Calvary or Golgotha, but which occurs eternally in an unbloody way outside of time in every Mass we participate in.
It is a signal grace to receive the Eucharist at Mass. Indeed, Vatican II in Lumen Gentium 11 calls the Eucharist the “source and summit of the Christian life.” It is our opportunity to receive grace, the life of the Blessed Trinity, into our souls.
St. John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests, says of the Mass, “All the good works in the world are not equal to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass because they are the works of men; but the Mass is the work of God. Martyrdom is nothing in comparison for it is but the sacrifice of man to God; but the Mass is the sacrifice of God for man.”
To enter fully into the Mass, to receive the Eucharist in a state of grace and with full cooperation of our hearts, minds, and souls, does untold good for us and our intentions. It is to enter into what I call “sacred time” and understand that God’s ways are so much higher than our ways and his thoughts are so much higher than our thoughts. It is to be a beggar before God. And it is what Vatican II and many, many saints have called the most important means of grace in our lives.
If so, how important is this sacred time to the proper Catholic education of us and of our students? I assert that it is essential and critical. The teachers and administrators of a truly Catholic school should all be formed in our Faith and eager to receive Christ, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, and to do so frequently. Indeed, we should be prioritizing communal celebrations of the Mass at our schools. Our students need to see this, that we are utterly and completely dependent on Christ for all that we are and all that we do.
So the second fundamental building block of Catholic education is the regular celebration of the Mass within the confines of our schools, to build a rhythm of the school year around key celebrations of the Mass. This is something we are very excited to be doing here at Catholic University. It's central for our mission.
Intellectus
The third essential building block is a concept called intellectus. Not only are faith and reason completely interconnected, as we discussed before, everything is completely connected. God has created his entire creation in such a way that there is deep connectedness among all things in the universe – natural and supernatural. Indeed, it is in the very nature of God that He is not a single person but a remarkably interconnected communion of three persons, so interconnected that God is three persons, but one God.
It is quite remarkable to me that some of the most delicate and nuanced scientific findings of our day are proving out this amazing connectedness. For example, the phenomenon called “quantum entanglement,” which was originally described in a scientific paper by Albert Einstein in 1935, describes the strange connectedness of subatomic particles that can be separated by billions of light years.
How does this remarkable connectedness influence our views on our lives and our education? For one, I think it should cause us to reflect with utter awe on the power and glory of God, and as a result to often contemplate holistically the interconnectedness of all knowledge and all disciplines.
St. Thomas Aquinas called this mode of thinking “intellectus.” One might translate this in modern terms as “holistic grace-filled reflection,” the ability to contemplate the truly big picture, the web of all life and creation.
From the intricate complexity of the human cell to the increasingly refined understanding of atomic structures, and from the complex interrelation of the tectonic forces moving beneath us to the climactic forces around and above us, and from the study of the human genome to the ability to peer back in time toward the beginnings of the universe itself – all of these are not just proof of mankind’s ability to use reason to understand our world. This research, these discoveries, give us some hints at the majestic vision and grandeur of our God Creator.
The English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Our task is to help students understand that every time they encounter beauty, truth and goodness, they are encountering the intricate handiwork of God Himself.
Intellectus, this holistic grace-filled, interconnected reflection, is at the heart of Catholic education, for it asserts that not only in theology and in philosophy do we see the handiwork of God’s creation. Throughout the liberal arts, in the sciences, in law, in business, in nursing, in engineering, and in all the endeavors of educated men and women, we can see the fingerprints of God, who desires that we “connect up the dots” and more fully appreciate his grandeur and our dependence on Him.
Moreover, all of these disciplines are connected with each other in elegant and important ways.
Allow me share one example: The Conway School of Nursing is more than 90 years old. Its roots go back to 1932, and it graduated its first students in 1934. Next year, we officially open our newest building on campus, which will house the Conway School. At our university, nursing is not just care for the body, but for the whole person. It sees the big picture, dedicating itself to human dignity, human freedom and human flourishing.
As the Dean of the school, Marie Nolan, has put it, “Bring your whole self – mind, body and spirit. … We prepare nurse leaders, not just for a fulfilling career of caring and healing, but also to be a light to the world.”
And you may know that nursing is a troubled discipline right now because so many nurses have resigned since the pandemic. And so the demand for nurses is extraordinary. And it's a little bit hard to get them educated because they have to do clinicals. And it's getting harder and harder to find clinical experiences for our nurses. So we thought, gosh, what can we do that would be innovative and creative? What can we do that could maybe integrate some of the disciplines?
And so you all are probably familiar with virtual and augmented reality. Maybe you’ve worn an Oculus and you've toured in three dimensions part of the Metaverse. What we are doing is creating a virtual hospital that can be immediately modified. So in other words, one day you walk into the hospital and you’ve got 12 patients, and one of them's critical, and you have to figure out who it is. And the next day you walk, and you only got four patients, and they're all doing okay, but you got to check up on them just like you did the day before. So every time you use the app, it's a different experience. It's a very agile virtual hospital. That's one simple example of taking artificial intelligence, technology, you know, computer science, and then building into the virtual hospital.
You know, making sure that you're using compassion and kindness and philosophy and theology as you deal with the patient as a whole person, someone who is seeking not just healing of the body, but healing of the soul and your spirit, because they're all totally connected.
The joy of our profession and our vocation as Catholic educators is to share this vision with our students. To enable them to see that, whatever their profession or their vocation, they can discover the handiwork of a God who loves them. They can be a light to the world.
Yet the great risk we run today is the fragmentation, the alienation, the polarization that divides humanity, causing us to see not unity but disunity. Not light but darkness and discord.
The grave threat extends even into all facets of education. In the 21st century universities themselves have become fragmented, and even K-12 schools are in danger of this without very intentionally helping our students understand the principles of integration.
But the genius of the university, an institution founded by Catholics in the 1100 and 1200s, is this holistic vision St. Thomas was describing. Indeed this is why universities are called what they are, rather than multiversities. The risk today is that a university driven solely by the demands of specialization becomes a collection of silos with each department, each school asserting its own importance, viewing the world through its own limited lens.
The silos of academia are a logical outgrowth of increasing specialization, yet they risk threatening our ability to see the big picture, to see God’s imprint on the world, to see the connectedness of all things. The cultivation of “holistic reflection,” the ability to see the truly big picture, must be at the heart of Catholic education.
One final thought. What a blessing it is that our students, yours and mine, can have access to a Catholic education. What a privilege it is for the students at our university here to be able to spend four years at a residential university to study, to reflect, to grow into Catholic adulthood with all these resources available to them.
Duc in Altum. It was a phrase loved by St. John Paul, connoting a sense of courage and faith, trust in the Lord and love for one’s mission. We do not shy away from the challenges. We do not bide our time in shallow and unproductive waters.
We are called to prepare our students for the greatest of adventures, living the Gospel and loving the Lord while fully engaged with the world in which Providence has seen fit to place us. This is our moment. Let us go forth.