Back-to-school time: reviewing “The Imperative Need for a Catholic Education”

By Fr. Michael Miller

On my first and only trip to Rome in August of 1994, I was given a tour of the Roman Rota by Fr. Raymond Burke. My classmates and I were impressed by how kind and gracious he was. It would be 17 years before I would see him again. This time it was in my parish in Stillwater where he offered Mass at St. Michael’s and gave an excellent talk called “The Imperative Need for a Catholic Education.” Now he was a Cardinal and Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. Again, I and all others were impressed by how kind and gracious he was.

His words echoed what I have written in these pages many times: that a Catholic education is “complete” because it not only studies the things of this world but also the One Who made them. As Cardinal Burke put it: “By a complete education, I mean an education given in and by the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, so that her children, like the Child Jesus, may grow ‘steadily in wisdom and age and grace before God and men.’ The older I become, I appreciate ever more deeply the various aspects of the education which I received in the Catholic school, an education in all of the subjects and skills taught in any worthy school but set within the context of prayer and worship, and the daily conversion of life to Christ through the practice of the virtues.… The Catholic educator is truly a ‘bearer of wisdom,’ assisting the child to see, with the eyes of faith, everything he learns in its deepest reality as coming from the hand of God and destined to return to God at Christ’s Final Coming, when He will inaugurate ‘a new Heaven and a new earth,’ making ‘all things new.’”

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