Catholic Education Impacts Us Every Day
I had another column all ready to go for this issue of The Message. After reading a Catholic News Service story about the keynote address Carolyn Woo delivered at the National Catholic Education Association meeting, I decided that column could wait.
Woo’s remarks moved me because she connected with my own experiences through 12 years of Catholic education. She now serves as CEO and president of the U.S. Bishops’ Catholic Relief Services agency, and she began her education in a Hong Kong school run by Maryknoll Sisters.
“The nuns taught us not to compete with each other but to help each other and to become friends," she told the NCEA. "Today, I am in almost daily contact with my colleagues from first grade, and so in my life I have been in many competitive contexts but never felt competitive with my peers.”
Last year, I joined my classmates from St. John the Evangelist High School in Uniontown, Pa., in celebrating the 40th anniversary of our graduation. St. John’s high school closed two years later, and the building – where one of my great aunts also went to high school – came down a few short years later to make room for additional church parking. Thankfully, the elementary school we all attended together remains open and, more importantly, alive with Catholic education.
I wasn’t able to make it back home for the formal reunion dinner because of its timing. But one of my classmates created a Facebook page for us; and through it, I have been in regular contact “with my colleagues from first grade” – or, at least, a good number of them. We all spent way too long out of touch. Life has a way of doing that.
“Clearly Catholic education is trying to teach students about Christ and Christianity and how this belief forms values and these values inform behavior," Woo told NCEA attendees. "It's not just about academic rigor but all the different things that allow us to make God real in the lives of young people."
One floor below me as I type, juniors from one of our diocesan Catholic high schools are in the middle of a two-day retreat that the Catholic Center has been hosting. They are “doing things” that are helping make God real in their lives – and I believe they will remember and benefit from the experience from now on.
My 12 years of Catholic school measure the most important educational time of my life – not because my teachers were so much better than those I could have gotten in the public schools I would have attended; not because the textbooks were better; not because the college preparation was better.
No; they are the most important educational years of my life because something happened every day that made God real in my life. More importantly, every day of school helped reinforce the notion that God should be part of my life – every day, regardless of the situation.
My classmates and I have picked up – in many ways – where we left off more than four decades ago. Our conversations suggest that so much time couldn’t have passed because we are still that family we were in the 1970s. From here, that’s because of our Catholic education; because we realize that God is a real part of our collective life.
