September 10, 2006

Lively minds never stop learning. Medical experts are persuaded constant reading and curiosity about events are a good protection against senility. I might add that it is also a cure for juvenility. To follow Christ requires learning Christ. That prime educator, St. Augustine, wished he had started sooner: "Late have I loved thee, beauty ever ancient ever new."

September seasons our energy after the gentle lethargy of summer, and not least of all because schools open. That includes the education programs in our parish. I cannot say enough how much all of us are obliged to those volunteers who teach our CCD and RCIA groups and have brought them to an unsurpassed level of excellence. That certainly explains in part why we have the largest enrollments in the parish's history. These programs are supplemented by the instruction given in preparation for baptism and marriage. Because of the large number of baptisms now, I am combining the meetings with parents, and this works out well as an opportunity for young mothers and fathers to meet one another.

In 1861, when our nation was in turmoil, Orestes Brownson paid attention to the importance of catechesis, for he knew that wars come and go but the spiritual warfare is lifelong: "No amount of pious training or pious culture will protect the faithful, or preserve them from the contamination of the age, if they are left inferior to non-Catholics in secular learning and intellectual development. The faithful must be guarded and protected by being trained and disciplined to grapple with the errors and false systems of the age."

Last week I gave the inaugural address at a catechetical institute founded by the new bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph. It is a much needed development in a time when there is good will but much poor information about the Faith. Happily, the same communications revolution which disseminates errors can provide unprecedented access to Christian truths, including the commentaries of our Pope, whose clarity and practicality are drawing immense crowds to his audiences.

An indolent society would reduce education to entertainment, the way it has deformed worship in many quarters. Cardinal Newman writes in his classic Idea of a University: "Recreations are not education; accomplishments are not education. Do not say, the people must be educated, when after all you only mean amused, refreshed, soothed, put into good spirits and good humor, or kept from vicious excesses. I do not say that such amusement, such occupations of the mind, are not a great gain; but they are not education." One modern form of idolatry is exploitation of sports as a substitute for the life of the mind. Recreation and games are one of life's joys, but if they pre-empt the worship of God, they reduce us to those victims of the pagan "bread and circuses" culture in which the first martyrs died.

Fr. George W. Rutler