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Christendom
College Bulletin
Table of Contents Page
Educational
Principles
Fides
Quaerens Intellectum
'Faith Seeking Understanding'
Christianity, and nothing short of it, must be made the element and principle
of all education. . . . Where revealed truth has given the aid and direction
to knowledge, knowledge of all kinds will minister to revealed truth.
But if in education we begin with nature before grace, with evidences
before faith, with science before conscience, with poetry before practice,
we shall be doing much the same as if we were to indulge the appetite
and passions and turn a deaf ear to reason. In each case we misplace what
in its place is a Divine gift.
-John Henry Newman
Discussions and Arguments
Inevitably, an educational program will be based upon some view of man’s
nature and end. The understanding of human nature implicit in the vast
majority of university curricula today is secular humanism, a world-view
in which man is merely an animal, a by-product of blind evolution, having
no ends or values but those which he determines for himself. Hence contemporary
college and university curricula are at odds with the view of man that
formed Western civilization itself—the Catholic view that man is
uniquely endowed with a rational and immortal soul, that he is created
in the image and likeness of God, that his life is subject to objective
moral norms, and that he is called to an end that transcends this life.
As today’s parents and students have been learning to their sorrow,
educational institutions at odds with Western civilization cannot hand
it on; they can only attack it with ideological violence or abandon it
altogether, as they pursue lesser goals, pragmatic and utilitarian.
A century and a half ago, the Venerable John Henry Newman was already
doing battle with a utilitarian view of higher education. He, too, had
heard the shortsighted demand with which we are all too familiar: that
education be of immediate utility or usefulness (i.e., lucrative). In
the nine discourses of The Idea of a University, Newman outlined
a nobler view of education and summarized it thus:
This process
of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed
to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession,
or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception
of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called Liberal
Education. (I.vii.1)
Following Newman’s lead, Christendom College does
not limit its aims to training students for particular careers. It seeks,
rather, to give them the arts that are fundamental to the life of reason
itself. These “liberal arts” are universal in application, both
inside and outside a chosen career.
The liberal arts student learns to think logically and to express himself
clearly–skills absolutely necessary for one who wishes to influence
his society for the better. He immerses himself in the great ideas and
works of the Western tradition in order to appropriate that tradition
and make his own contribution to it. He studies the past actions of mankind
in history, and the morality of individual and corporate deeds, in order
more prudently to determine his own actions, assess his society, and influence
the course of events. For this very reason, no graduates are more eagerly
sought in law, business, journalism, politics, teaching or other professions
than the graduates of traditional liberal arts colleges, such as Christendom.
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A Catholic Education
There is no understanding the nature of man, however, unless it includes
man’s relation to God. No education is complete if it concentrates
only on that part of the truth which man can come to know by natural means.
Supernatural truth, the gift to man of a God who chooses to reveal Himself,
must also be taken into account. And when it is accounted rightly, it
does not sit in the curriculum like a foreign lump but orders and informs
everything.
The classical tradition of the liberal arts was based on a philosophic
understanding of the innate dignity of man and the nobility of his intellect.
The Church appropriated that tradition as conducive to the development
of the intellectual faculties in submission to revealed Truth. As Newman
stated, “Liberal education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation
of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than
intellectual excellence” (I.v.9). Newman, however, was also at pains
to note that “Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the
Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman,” Newman
continues:
It is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid,
equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct
of life—these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge .
. . but still, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for
conscientiousness. . . . Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor
the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and
delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against
those giants, the passion and pride of man. (I.v.9)
Clearly, liberal education for Catholics must entail the guiding hand
and nourishing spirit of the Church in an integral manner, lest both students
and faculty eventually fall away from the Truth, as Newman so prophetically
described in The Idea of a University: “If the Catholic Faith
is true,” Newman asserts:
a University cannot exist externally to the Catholic pale, for it cannot
teach Universal Knowledge if it does not teach Catholic theology. This
is certain; but still, though it had ever so many theological Chairs,
that would not suffice to make it a Catholic University; for theology
would be included in its teaching only as a branch of knowledge, only
as one out of many constituent portions, however important a one, of what
I have called Philosophy. Hence a direct and active jurisdiction of the
Church over it and in it is necessary, lest it should become the rival
of the Church with the community at large in those theological matters
which to the Church are exclusively committed. (I.ix.1)
This is precisely what has come to pass in the vast majority of nominally
Catholic colleges and universities in the United States since the Land
O’Lakes conference in 1967, with the development of a “second”
or “parallel Magisterium” of dissident theologians over and
against “Rome.”(See Msgr. George A. Kelly, Catholic Higher
Education: Is It In or Out of the Church?, Brownson Studies,
3 (Front Royal: Christendom Press, 1992), 7 ff.)
Two years before the founding of Christendom College, Pope Paul VI, in
his address to the presidents of Catholic colleges and universities, warned
against the secularizing of Catholic universities:
In recent years some Catholic universities have become convinced that
they can better respond to the various problems of man and his world by
playing down their own Catholic character. But what has been the effect
of this trend? The principles and values of the Christian religion have
been watered down and weakened; they have been replaced by a humanism
which has really turned out to be a secularization. Morals within the
university community have degenerated to the point where many young people
no longer perceive the beauty and attractiveness of the Christian virtues.
Responding to this crisis in Catholic higher education, the founders established
Christendom College on the bedrock of fidelity to the Chair of Peter and
its teaching on faith and morals.
Two years after the foundation of Christendom College, and within a year
of his ascension to the papacy, Pope John Paul II, on October 7, 1979,
defined the mission of the Catholic college as follows:
A Catholic college must make a specific contribution to the Church,
must train young men and women to assume tasks in the service of society
and to bear witness to their faith before the world, and must set up a
real community which bears witness to a living Christianity. Yours is
the qualification of affirming God, His revelation and the Catholic Church.
The term Catholic will never be a mere label, added or dropped according
to pressures. This is your identity. This is your vocation.
At Christendom College, in their academic, spiritual and social lives,
the faculty and students aim at living out this Catholic vocation and
identity in its integrity.
Christendom College has taken the lead in demonstrating how a Catholic
college can be institutionally faithful to the Magisterium and committed
to the principles of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the Apostolic Constitution
on Catholic Universities.
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A Personal Education
The education at Christendom College is classical and traditional, emphasizing
our Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian heritage as understood in the light
of the Catholic Faith. Rather than offering an array of different ideas
all seen as equally valuable, courses at Christendom College focus on
the truth, examining different theories not merely for their historical
position but precisely for their truth. Fides quaerens intellectum,
‘Faith seeking understanding,’ describes the intellectual pursuits
of the Christendom student.
Because it is rigorous and demanding, the Christendom College curriculum
is best appreciated by the student with a thirst for knowledge of the
truth, and best appropriated by the serious and self-disciplined student.
However, the Christendom student lives and learns in a caring community.
Professors counsel and work individually with students to help them overcome
any special weakness or develop their unique strengths. Although the abilities
of students vary, all students are motivated, challenged and helped to
fulfill their individual potential to the utmost. Because of the small
size of most classes and the willingness of the professors to help on
an individual basis, the students who avail themselves of the opportunities
presented become well-educated men and women.
The primary aim of Christendom College is of course academic, but intellectual
formation is never severed from spiritual, social and personal formation.
Just as the different disciplines are integrated in the Christendom curriculum,
so too that curriculum is integrated with the rest of the student’s
life at Christendom College. Education is furthered not only in the classroom
but also in the chapel, and at mealtime, in leisure time, and throughout
the entire day as students converse with each other and with professors.
Christendom College is not merely a curriculum of courses: it is a season
of life in which the whole man matures in wisdom, in virtue, and in ability–intellectually,
morally, socially and spiritually.
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An Education for the Laity
Students educated in the liberal arts at Christendom College are well
prepared for their role as laity in Christ’s Church. The curriculum
is primarily designed for young men and women who will live and work in
the world with other laymen, who must face the problems and challenges
in that state of life, and who will contribute as laymen to the fulfillment
of the mission of the Church.
The Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity
stresses the importance of the laity’s share in the priestly office
of Christ and in the salvific mission of the Church. In their jobs, their
families, their schools, their society and their personal relationships,
the Catholic laity are called to promote salvation by their example and
witness, by bringing the message of the Gospel to men, and most especially
by informing and penetrating their temporal society with the spirit of
the Gospel. It is Christendom College’s hope and expectation that
the graduate of Christendom is, in the words of the Apostolic Exhortation
Christefideles Laici, “to take an active, conscientious and
responsible part in the mission of the Church in this great moment of
history” as we enter the Third Millennium.
Those men and women who take seriously their vocation as Christian laity
will find in the integrated program of studies at Christendom College
excellent preparation for whatever type of apostolic activity they may
undertake in later life. The liberal arts curriculum which develops students
into leaders capable of influencing others and changing their society,
when totally informed by the truths of the Faith, produces men and women
whose natural leadership will be apostolically oriented.
In addition, intensive philosophic study of Christian social and political
principles, especially as taught in the papal encyclicals of the past
two centuries, not only acquaints students with the virtue of social justice
and its application to current social problems, but also provides them
with a veritable program of social reconstruction, their primary task
as Catholic laity.
The liberal arts education provided by Christendom College, then, enables
its students to respond enthusiastically to the call of the Second Vatican
Council (Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem,
33):
The Council, then, makes an earnest plea in the Lord’s name that
all lay people give a glad, generous, and prompt response to the impulse
of the Holy Spirit and to the voice of Christ, who is giving them an especially
urgent invitation at this moment. Young people should feel that this call
is directed to them in particular, and they should respond to it eagerly
and magnanimously. The Lord himself renews His invitation to all the lay
faithful to come closer to Him every day, and with the recognition that
what is His is also their own (Phil 2:5), they ought to associate themselves
with Him in His saving mission. Once again He sends them into every town
and place where He himself is to come (cf. Luke 10:1).
Thus, when the question is asked, “What can you do with a liberal
arts education?” the answer should be clear: “Whatever I am
called to do.”
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An Education Productive of Religious Vocations
While the primary purpose of Christendom College’s foundation was
to provide a revitalized Catholic laity, by the grace of God we have also
produced a significant number of vocations to the priesthood and the religious
life.
Our curriculum in philosophy and sacred theology provides a superlative
preparation for seminarians and pre-seminarians, and for those young men
and women who will be the leaven of new or revitalized religious orders.
Christendom College is proud of its alumnae and alumni who have joined
such orders as the Benedictines, Carmelites, Dominicans, Fathers of Mercy,
Miles Jesu, the Oblates of Our Lady of Fatima, the Priestly Fraternity
of St. Peter, Poor Clares, Salesians, and many others. We are likewise
proud of those who have joined the ranks of the diocesan clergy in, for
example, the dioceses of Arlington, Virginia; Burlington, Vermont; Lincoln,
Nebraska; Manchester, New Hampshire; Peoria, Illinois; Sioux Falls, South
Dakota; St. Augustine, Florida; and several foreign nations. Through the
development of actively faithful and liberally educated clergy and religious,
Christendom College is playing a role beyond all human calculation in
the universal task to restore all things in Christ.
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St. Thomas Aquinas and the Curriculum
The object of all liberal education is freedom in truth. Christendom College,
in keeping with the teaching of Holy Mother Church, acknowledges the essential
role played by St. Thomas Aquinas in our curriculum. All those who would
pursue wisdom, both natural and supernatural, will owe a special debt
to the Angelic Doctor, for the truth has been set forth most clearly in
his writings. As Pope John Paul II has said:
If today
also . . . philosophical and theological reflection is not to rest on
an “unstable foundation” which would make it “wavering
and superficial,” it will have to draw inspiration from the “golden
wisdom” of St. Thomas, in order to draw from it the light and vigor
it needs to enter deeply into the meaning of what is revealed and to further
the progress of the scientific endeavor.
The philosophy of St. Thomas deserves to be attentively studied and accepted
with conviction by the youth of our day, by reason of its spirit of openness
and of universalism, characteristics which are hard to find in many trends
of contemporary thought.
From the Address on the Perennial Philosophy of St. Thomas
for the Youth of Our Times, at the Angelicum, Rome, 1979.
Therefore, in accordance with the mind and discipline of
the Church for the formation of the young, Christendom College is committed
to a Thomistic educational policy: programs of instruction in philosophy
and Sacred Theology shall be taught according to the spirit, method, and
principles of the Common Doctor.
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