While much of Catholic education has withered for lack of connection to its roots and the water of Christian faith, the Adeodatus Foundation is preparing to nourish many gardens in the desert. Those who want to be part of this movement of renewal might consider a trip to Pasadena later this month.

Much of American Catholic education, from primary school to university is, as the late Newton Minow famously opined about television, a vast wasteland. The remarkable system of Catholic parochial schools has itself withered due to a fatal addiction to “relevance” in the form of American Progressive educational dogma and faddish discipline. Whereas once religious brothers and sisters consecrated to the Lord made cheap or even free education possible, the fall-off in religious life after the Second Vatican Council meant that Catholic parochial education had to hire a lot more lay teachers, many of whom brought their secular Deweyite ideas with them and very little in the way of Catholic faith. Many of the religious and priests who remained in their cloth also went to education school and came back aping the secular trends.

While many Catholic schools have been able to hold on due to residual cultural allegiances and American public schooling’s even worse crisis, much of the Catholic school market has dried up because the intellectual and spiritual roots of too many institutions have been cut. The only sector of Catholic schooling that is growing is that smaller section that is looking forward by looking back to the classical model of schooling and greater fidelity to orthodoxy.

There are a number of players in the movement doing great things, perhaps most notably the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education. A relatively new one is the Adeodatus Foundation, of which I am a board member. If the name sounds familiar, it is the name of St. Augustine’s son, spoken of fondly in Confessions. The founder is Alex Lessard, a Catholic educator in California who studied with Don Briel, the innovative founder of the Catholic Studies program at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, and theologian Fr. Matt Lamb, who wrote extensively on the declining character of Catholic education in the U. S.

Dr. Lessard believes that seeds of renewal found in the Catholic classical movement will grow into something large and beautiful—and he wants to water them and make sure their roots are thick and deep. Adeodatus will pursue a number of ways to do this, including consulting, publishing, and other ventures, but their immediate task is to establish an event where those involved in Catholic education can come and reconnect themselves to those roots. Thus the first annual Adeodatus Conference to be held in Pasadena, California, this month from June 21-24. [There are still openings to attend the conference both live and online—as well as incentives for registering. For those interested, see the foundation’s website.]

This inaugural conference, “Major Sources of Catholic Education and Its Renewal,” will be followed by next year’s conference on pedagogy, strategies, and resources, and a 2025 conference in which the goal will be to draw as many Catholic educators as possible to compare notes about successes and failures, while working to chart out a future in which more Catholic schools embrace a better model and more are founded.

What are the major sources of Catholic education and its renewal? Fittingly, the topics include: the Bible, Homer, Virgil, and Plato; the great Patristic and Medieval figures such as Augustine, Benedict, Dominic, Francis, and St. Thomas Aquinas; and also the great figures navigating the modern world such as Newman, Dawson, John Senior, Ron McArthur and the Berquists (founders of Thomas Aquinas College), and Don Briel. There are more, which readers can see by looking at the website, but this short list gives the idea of the approach taken: classic writers and texts as well as those modern disciples who have worked to make them well known to the next generation.

This writer will be speaking about St. Benedict, but he is much more interested in hearing more distinguished scholars such as Fr. Robert Spitzer on Ignatius Loyola and his Ratio Studiorum, Edward Feser on Aristotle, Margarita Mooney Clayton on Jacques Maritain and Luigi Giussani, Michael Foley on Augustine, and Michael Waldstein on “Jesus the Teacher and the Holy Spirit, Advocate.”

Even better is that the conference is not just talking—even if they are brilliant—heads. There will also be a lot of actual culture. At the beginning of the conference, artist, iconographer, and writer David Clayton will be speaking and demonstrating some artistic techniques as part of a fundraiser for Los Angeles’s Catholic Sacred Arts Academy. Daily Mass will be celebrated at Pasadena’s Church of St. Andrew, a 1927 structure that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and famous for its Romanesque tower and façade (a replica of the twelfth-century Roman Church Santa Maria in Cosmedin), its interior (a copy of the patristic Roman Church of Santa Sabina), and its mural of St. Andrew above the baldachin painted by Carlo Wostry. The closing Mass’s musical setting is composer Frank LaRocca’s Mass of the Americas. This is the first time this music will be played in Los Angeles.

While much of Catholic education has withered for lack of connection to its roots and the water of Christian faith, the Adeodatus Foundation is preparing to nourish many gardens in the desert. Those who want to be part of this movement of renewal might consider a trip to Pasadena later this month.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is “Saint Augustin” (before 1652) by Pieter de Grebber, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email