Experience highlights three factors in particular that contribute to overall success of Catholic high schools. A Catholic school should also offer students clear ideas of what constitutes human excellence and success.Ĭatholic high schools enjoy a solid reputation as excellent institutions of education and formation. A crucial challenge for Catholic high schools is striking the correct balance between fostering careful reasoning and promoting Catholic faith and practice. Teachers enjoy the challenge of teaching students and getting them to think on their own, to think critically about the human condition, and to think carefully about the role their Catholic faith actually plays and ought to play in their lives. Challenges there are, but the delights and satisfactions are also abundant. At the same time, many students at this age need big injections of intellectual curiosity. Teachers confront difficult challenges, but most teachers accept all the trials and disappointments with good humor, because they are delighted to be in the presence of happy, lively students. The culture of a Catholic high school is both challenging and reassuring for students and teachers. Our hopes and prayers are that teenagers grow in wisdom, age and grace during the four years they are entrusted to us. My subsequent comments take this enchanted high school world for granted. But thank God for parents' admonitions, for honest evaluations by teachers, coaches and moderators, and for the help given by the Church and the Holy Spirit. Those are years filled with wonder, or at least they are meant to be: discovering new friends and new activities, testing our limits and the limits imposed on us, with all of the successes and failures that involves, and sometimes doing dumb and even dangerous things, morally as well as physically, and then receiving the punishment that goes with it. Like many of you, I, too, can think back to teachers in my high school who have had a lifelong effect on me, and one in particular - and not because of what he taught (although yes, he was a great band director), but because of the kind of person he was and the values he modeled to us in word and deed.Īnd like me, I'm sure many, if not all, of you also have wonderful memories of your teenage years. I am grateful for your service and I pray that students indeed listen to you and imitate the fundamental human and religious qualities you share with them. Many of you have an impact on their lives that is humbling to you. The students listen to you and watch you for guidance. But they also want to understand life, which poses many conundrums to them. Although as freshmen and sophomores they may be reticent to think deeply, you encourage them and lead them on, and eventually most students do desire to think critically. In addition to presenting material to them in the classroom, you coach them in making sense out of their experiences in the Church and in our modern culture. I am grateful to you for all you do to help illuminate, order, and sanctify the lives of the teenagers entrusted to your care. While they may not think of it in exactly this way, parents do entrust their children to Catholic schools with the expectation that our schools will form and inform their children as well as shield them from harm. This teaching from so early on in Pope Francis' Petrine ministry clearly reflects the emphasis he places on the theology of accompaniment it also, I believe, gives a helpful definition to what our Catholic schools are called to do: journey with our young people out of the darkness into the light of the risen Christ. The students in our Catholic schools are at the beginning of their journey of life, and it is your privilege, as their teachers, to accompany them at this critical stage of their life's journey, a stage that for many of them will determine the trajectory of their entire life. Those who believe, see they see with a light that illumines their entire journey, for it comes from the risen Christ, the morning star which never sets. To Martha, weeping for the death of her brother Lazarus, Jesus said: Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?' (Jn 11:40). In John's Gospel, Christ says of himself: 'I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness' (Jn 12:46)…. The light of Faith: this is how the Church's tradition speaks of the great gift brought by Jesus. In his first Encyclical, Lumen fidei ("The Light of Faith"), Pope Francis begins with the following words:
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