I Wish I Knew What Catholic School Identity Was

                What is Catholic School Identity? What does it mean when a school puts that little word “Catholic” on their sign or in their mission statement? I have been working on this question for some time now, and, to be honest, I want to keep researching. I want to really dive into the depths of what it means when we say that our schools are Catholic.

St. Pius X Catholic High School in Atlanta, Georgia. My alma mater, St. Pius definitely deepened my understanding of Catholicism on an academic level, but I am sure that my relationships with teachers, students, and priests at St. Pius, at least, equally gave me an encounter with Jesus Christ which really sparked my Faith now. But are Catholic schools even more than this? (photo P. Smith)

                I have asked colleagues and contacts around the world what they think and the answers vary. I do not want to exhaust the space on this blog (I rarely want my blogs to be longer than just a few paragraphs), but suffice it to say, I have heard an entire spectrum of what “Catholic Identity means. Most of these descriptions fall into two major camps: Catholic identity is “confessional” or “value-based”. The goal of a “confessional” Catholic school is for students to know the teachings of the Church and to encounter the Sacraments and the Liturgy so students can become adults in the Catholic Faith. The “value-based” Catholic school seeks to avoid alienating any non-Catholics in the school and to make the school more “inclusive”; the focus of Catholic schools should be to infuse in students so-called universal values that are available to all people and can make all people better human beings. Of course, these are simplifications of these systems, but without going into detail, I suspect real Catholic School Identity is not an “either/or” situation between “confessional” and “value-based”. But it is not a both/and situation either. It is something more dynamic… maybe more mystical.

I think (and this is what I want to research) that Catholic School Identity is somewhere in the dialogue between “confessional” and “value-based” pedagogies… AND it is somewhere in the dialogue between Catholicism and the world. Catholic School Identity is in the relationships we have between faculty, students, stakeholders, dioceses, the universal Church, and, really, the entire world. There is more going on here than simply doctrine or Faith or values or catechesis or theology. The Truth of Catholic School Identity is always like that hunted animal, just beyond our grasp, though it is never actually running away from us; Truth is always present. My prayer, as a teacher, is for people in whatever camp they claim as their “Catholic School Identity” to simply listen to other ideas. This is the beginning of a deeper understanding of what it means when we say “Catholic School Identity.” Maybe the Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery can be our model; maybe if we just spend more time being still and listening to the world around us and actually dialoging we will witness the Truth of Catholic School Identity.