Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg
If you send your children to a Catholic school, you should ask the principal or a teacher if they can answer two questions: “What is a human person?” and “What is the purpose of an education?”
You’ll likely hear about “21st century skills,” “socialization,” or “preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet.” So, despite the crucifixes on the walls and religion classes, your principals and teachers generally can’t tell you what a student is or what education is ultimately for.
This is not individual failure. It’s the inevitable result of what is properly named the Great Abdication: the systematic elimination of formal and final causes from modern education’s theoretical framework.
Following a scheme that goes all the way back to Aristotle and was adopted by St. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Intellectual Tradition has recognized four explanatory factors or principles necessary to understand anything fully:
Material Cause: What is a thing made of?
Efficient Cause: How is it made?
Formal Cause: What is it? (What is its nature?)
Final Cause: What is it for? (What is its ultimate end or perfection?)
Modern education has eliminated the last two in schools and colleges. It denies fixed human nature (no formal cause) and refuses to name a transcendent purpose (no final cause). This makes authentic Catholic education impossible.
Without formal cause, Catholic schools cannot articulate – and therefore do not even know – what their students are. Instead of affirming that each child is a rational soul created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27), such institutions have been conditioned to treat children as if they are self-creating beings whose self-esteem is of the highest importance.
St. Augustine wrote: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” Education that ignores this primary orientation toward God as our final cause cannot form human persons; it can only deform them. Public schools aim at secular metrics like test scores, college admissions, and career goals. Sadly, most Catholic schools do the same. As St. Paul warned, we have “conformed to this world.” (Romans 12:2)
A Catholic school must acknowledge the crucial truth that all human beings have a soul that survives bodily death. An eternal soul requires eternal ends. Without true final causes, both natural and supernatural, Catholic schools cannot answer a simple question: “What is the purpose of Catholic education?”
The natural ends of a Catholic education are to acquire the intellectual and moral virtues. The ultimate end (as Josef Pieper reminds us, can be found in St. Thomas Aquinas) is the state in which “our powers are fully realized and fully at rest face to face with God for all eternity.”
It may seem impossibly abstract, but True Catholic education aims at the Beatific Vision.
Pope Pius XI wrote in Divini Illius Magistri that Christian education must form “the true and perfect Christian. . .the supernatural man who thinks, judges, and acts constantly in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of Christ.”
Can a school form the “true Christian” if it fails to define what a human person is or what human perfection means? While some Catholic schools are recovering the classical tradition, the vast majority have succumbed to the Great Abdication promoted by secular humanist education.
You don’t need a philosophy degree to see this abdication. Walk into any Catholic school and observe: When a student misbehaves, do teachers correct the objective disorder in the child’s will and guide him toward virtue? (Proverbs 22:6) Or do they practice “behavior management” based on operant conditioning, reducing the moral life to a series of neurological impulses and responses?
When teaching literature, do teachers help students apprehend truth, goodness, and beauty in great texts? Or do they “facilitate personal responses,” where all interpretations are equally valid?
The difference is both practical and metaphysical. One approach assumes students have a human nature to be perfected ultimately toward a transcendent end. The other denies both nature and end, leaving only techniques, feelings, and preferences.
Nowhere is this abdication more visible than in the current crisis of gender ideology. When a student claims to “identify” as the opposite sex, a school operating within the Four Causes framework has a ready answer: the student possesses a fixed nature, objectively male or female. Catholics cannot concede that “identity” is a mere construct of human desire. Sex is a given of our nature, an integral part of the body-soul unity. As the Catechism teaches, we do not invent our sex; we “acknowledge and accept” it. (CCC 2333)
But the Catholic schools that have trained in secular educational theory cannot respond to the gender fad clearly. They’ve been taught by implication that students “construct” their own identities, that subjective experience trumps objective reality. So they equivocate, compromise, and adopt policies indistinguishable from public schools.
This is not primarily a failure of courage but of formation. We teachers and administrators were mostly trained in secular universities where the Four Causes were never taught. We absorbed educational frameworks that make coherent Catholic answers impossible. This didn’t happen through malice. We were formed in a system that had already abdicated from these truths, and which cannot pass on what it doesn’t possess.
If you have children in Catholic schools, ask those two diagnostic questions at your next parent-teacher conference. Then watch what happens. If your principal and teachers cannot answer them clearly, if you hear therapeutic jargon or vague appeals to “values,” your school has succumbed to the Great Abdication. Then ask yourself: “Am I paying tuition for secular humanism with a crucifix on the wall?”
The problem is now quite visible. So now we must act: recover what was abdicated and put Christ, the Logos, back at the center of Catholic education.
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David G. Bonagura, Jr.
Catholic Schools Week, like other events and feasts of the Church’s year, has two dimensions. One calls to mind the event itself: in this case, the multitude of blessings that Catholic schools provide for the faithful and their surrounding communities. The second is external: the forces that surround, or even threaten, the event. For decades, Catholic clergy and educators have constantly felt the threat of one impending reality: closure of schools for low enrollment, a sign of unfaithful times.
To this decades-long threat we now have an alluring new one: the mass availability of artificial intelligence (AI). The primary concern is not what schools will do to prevent students from employing AI to do their assignments (though this is a grave problem), nor is it a fear that AI-adept young people will no longer need schools (they will). The issue is deeper and cuts to the core of Catholic schools’ mission: Will AI and its associated pressures change the nature of Catholic education?
The more technology develops, with AI as the latest iteration, the more disconnected we grow from ourselves and from natural realities. Technology, and the ideology of progress that drives it today, tricks us into believing we are potent masters who push buttons to satisfy our desires. Education, under this influence, serves as technological training. Technological gadgets are tools; human beings are reduced to tool wielders whose function is to contribute to the nation’s economic growth.
Catholic schools reject this instrumentalized view of education – though visitors to schools today may grow confused as they witness even young children plastered to Chromebooks and constantly completing digital assessments.
Catholic schools do not exist for teaching students to harness artificial intelligence or any other form of technology. They exist to cultivate holy intelligence within their students.
Happiness, wrote Aristotle, is the goal of human life, a sentiment that most people, religious or secular, affirm. But where is happiness to be found? Illuminated by the Gospel, St. Augustine clarified that “God is the source of our happiness, the goal of every desire.” (City of God X.3) Catholic schools exists to lead students to God so they may be happy and may learn to direct their desires heavenward.
Intelligence refers to the ability to understand. Artificial intelligence is computer simulation of human intelligence. In fact, AI does not understand; it computes and predicts based on the data it contains within its system. Certainly, its scope, speed, and power are remarkable. But AI is, at root, just that – artificial, that is, man-made, and therefore a tool of its creators.
Holy intelligence understands things in the light of God. Catholics see all things – natural, mathematical, historical, scientific – as having a place in the seemingly limitless order that God has created and arranged “by measure and number and weight.” (Wisdom 11:20)
Catholic schools certainly teach students to acquire skills that the world requires: arithmetic, writing, reading, typing. They also teach essential knowledge: geography, history, science, religion. But Catholic schools do more than this. They orient all these realities within God’s plan of salvation. Some fit more easily than others – evil and suffering are the proverbial square pegs – yet they all go somewhere, even if the “why” lies beyond our full comprehension.
Holy intelligence is not innate. God grants it through Baptism; it is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. But holy intelligence cannot function properly without cultivation, the task, as mentioned, of Catholic schools. By teaching their students the faith, the truths of the world in light of faith, and, above all, how to pray, Catholic schools form children’s minds and hearts to know the Truth that sets them free.
Freedom from the disorientation generated by a technological world that forbids notions of God and objective truth is among the greatest fruits of Catholic education. Holy intelligence discerns truth from falsehood as well as how to use new technologies for good ends. Technology’s addictive powers and instant access to evil have enslaved so many, young and old. Holy intelligence remains free, in part, because it knows to avoid these temptations.
Today holy intelligence is not only something to develop in students. It is a virtue required of Catholic school leaders who must resist the siren songs of “progress” and “getting with the times” that demand schools reform their programs around AI. Leaders must maintain steadfast confidence in the Catholic vision of education that boasts of 2,000 years of success. Catholic education exists to form disciples of Jesus Christ through training students’ minds and souls. Traditional academic subjects and the Catholic religion, not technological tools, are the ways to reach this goal.
When marketing Catholic schools to today’s parents who almost all feel disoriented without knowing how to respond, pastors and educators can present this technology policy (because every school has one these days): “We don’t allow AI; our students use HI – holy intelligence. By this divine gift students learn the truth that is God, for only in Him can happiness be found.”
As more parents and children burn out from artificial living, holy intelligence grows more appealing. If Catholic schools can demonstrate success at cultivating HI while rejecting AI, they may also find a solution to that other threat: low enrollment.
