In The Beginning the Word, Part 1: Signs of the Times
Pastoral Letter to the People of God in Northern Colorado on Catholic Education
J. Francis Stafford
Archbishop of Denver
Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord
25 March 1995
FOREWORD
In recent years, demand has steadily grown throughout the Archdiocese of Denver for Catholic education services of all types. At first, much of the evidence was anecdotal—but it was insistent, and it came from across northern Colorado, including Catholic people from all walks of life. One year ago, after listening to the counsel of parents, pastors, directors of religious education, principals and teachers, I commissioned an archdiocesan-wide plan for Catholic schools to determine the scope and seriousness of the demand.
The results of that study and strategic plan are now complete, and elements have appeared prior to this pastoral letter. Parents and pastors voiced overwhelming support for Catholic schools, and an urgent need for enhancing and expanding our Catholic school system was demonstrated beyond doubt. At the same time, Catholic schools are only one part of the larger Catholic education apostolate. Many Catholic school-age children cannot attend Catholic schools, but have exactly the same right to a rich education in the faith. Moreover, neither Catholic schools nor religious education programs—including those programs for adults—can be understood outside the context of the purposes which guide them both.
To that end, rather than attempting to address these important issues in a single pastoral letter, I will be writing the people of the archdiocese throughout 1995, which I hereby designate a “Year of Celebrating Catholic Education.”
This letter, concerning basic principles, begins a three-part reflection. Additional reflections Will follow on Catholic schools in May and religious education in August. I invite all the people of the
archdiocese, through the Denver Catholic Register and other means of parish and archdiocesan communication, including the general public news media, to join me in the discussion of these matters, which are critical not only for the future of our Church, but of the wider civic community as well.
I. “MAKE DISCIPLES OF ALL NATIONS”
Reflection: In following Jesus Christ, we must also follow His command to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19). Faith is never a private matter. It is always public. The Christian cannot remain silent about the Gospel. We must bear witness to the world, for the sake of the world. Neither the world nor the Church can draw nourishment from invisible or “anonymous” Christians. We should recall that in the ancient Church “to be a witness” to the Crucified One led to the use of the Greek word “martus” (martyr). While the manner of our witness may have changed, the need for it has not.
1. To the people of God of northern Colorado and to all persons of good will: Greetings in the Lord Jesus Christ!
2. Today, as I write these words, we begin to reflect together on the education of our young people. This is a matter of central importance for our whole community. Therefore, I ask God’s blessing on all of us-both those who have encountered the Lord, and those who have not. Just as Mary listened with an open and willing heart to the message of God’s angel on the great day of the Annunciation nearly two millennia ago, so may all of our parents, educators and public leaders find “the power of the Most High” in their daily lives and listen for His Word.
3. May God also fill each of us who has responsibility for the young people of our cities and towns, farms and ranches, with the light of His truth. May He restore within us a sense of community and responsibility for each other; and may He help us build a future that is rich in the common good, one that is worthy of human persons created in His image and likeness.
4. We in Colorado live at a crossroads of change, both in time and place. Less than two years ago, 200,000 young people from around the world converged on our state for a celebration of life and love. World Youth Day ‘93 showed us that today’s young are filled with far more hope than fear. Their yearning for the truth connected with our own. Their goodness sparked an outpouring of welcome from our entire community. Their faith rekindled a desire for God in thousands of hearts locally which had grown weary or cold. At the closing Mass at Cherry Creek State Park, 500,000 people gave glory to Jesus Christ in the largest gathering Colorado had ever seen.
5. As transforming as this event was, its memory was dwarfed barely two months ago by the crowd which gathered the closing Mass of World Youth Day ‘95 in Manila. Five million people packed into Lunetta Park’s few square miles. There was no violence, no panic, just a deep passion for God which surrounded, and then lifted up, the 130 pilgrims from Colorado, drawing us into a larger community than any of us had ever imagined.
6. Human nature is such, however, that even miracles like World Youth Day soon fade from the heart unless we ponder them, pray over them and actively discern their meaning. The success of World Youth Day teaches two lessons. First, a profound shift is happening globally. Old orders are passing, cracked apart by rapid technological progress, environmental change, and social and political unrest. A wave of expectation is rising across every continent, and in every individual life, for something new, something different, something better. A renewed thirst for higher truths, a thirst which ignores national boundaries and ties together the whole world in spiritual longing, is part of that something.
7. Locally, the energy, talent, capital and technical resource now pouring into northern Colorado make us one of the first new urban hubs of the 21st century: a new kind of city comprised of many communities, many peoples and new ideas; a place where unrivaled telecommunications weave the individual and the world together, and make the local and global interchangeable. But the pace of today’s change creates great risk along with enormous opportunity. Amid the anxiety and uncertainty of the age, we will either satisfy the spiritual hungers of our young people, both at home and abroad, or we will be swept away by them.
8. In that light, we see World Youth Day’s second lesson. Despite the permanent whitewater of modern life, solid moral footing does exist for those who seek the truth. The pope who drew half a million persons in Colorado and 5 million in Manila is the same man who urges us all to “cross the threshold of hope” and find sustenance in Jesus Christ. His message is for all humanity, not merely those who believe. The Gospel is the Good News for every human heart, not simply the baptized.
9. Again and again throughout his pontificate, John Paul II has taken the Lord’s commission to “go [and] make disciples of all nations” literally and enthusiastically. As followers of Jesus, we can do no less. But we need not travel to Asia, Latin America or Africa to accomplish the task. Our most important mission ground is here, in our own communities, in our own families, among our own children. The ancient Greek philosopher scientist Archimedes once said that, given an appropriate lever, he could move the world. In our day, we have that lever: young people. They will move the world, for good or for ill, by what we teach them.
10. Thus, reaching out to young people and forming them as morally whole and mature human beings is the most important challenge our civic institutions face. It is also a priceless opportunity for our local Church to contribute, in a profound way, to the commonweal. Both for the sake of our believing community and for the sake of the wider culture within which we live, Catholic education must be a central priority as we approach the third millennium of the Incarnation. For the Church proclaims to the world God’s eternal love, which radiates from the union of the Cross of Christ and His resurrection.
II. SIGNS OF THE TIMES
Reflection: Jesus sends us to “make disciples of all nations.” To do that effectively, we must understand the terrain we will traverse. America in the ‘90s, and perhaps most especially Colorado, is a place of dynamic growth, but also deep contradiction. We are rich in knowledge, but often poor in wisdom. We have accumulated many little truths, but we cannot see the larger Truth behind them. We are a new kind of “mission territory.”
11. In December 1993, an article appeared on an interior page of one of Denver’s local newspapers. It was brief. It was also significant. The article documented the founding of a “Center for Character Development” at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Like the other service academies, the Air Force Academy enforces a rigorous honor code among its young officer candidates: “We will not lie, steal or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does.” The Center for Character Development had become necessary, said an academy spokesman, because incoming cadets no longer had the ethical formation of previous generations, leading to a troubling increase of honor code and personal conduct difficulties.
12. Honor problems are by no means limited to the Air Force Academy, which consistently produces outstanding officers and which, to its great credit, acted quickly to address the situation. But traditionally, the service academies rank among the country’s premier leadership training centers. Successful candidates for admission are an elite within America’s high school senior population. Many are Catholic. If these high-caliber young women and men show a growing need for better ethical formation, questions naturally arise about the content of their secondary and primary education.
13. Fortunately, northern Colorado is blessed with excellent teachers and administrators in its public education systems, and numerous gifted students. It is no accident that Colorado has one of the best educated populations in the nation. Yet, despite this, the growing gravity of discipline problems in our community schools is a matter of record. So is their frequency. Some 2,200 suspensions occurred in the Denver Public Schools in academic year 1986-87. That number had more than tripled (to 7,183) by academic year 1993-94, while the total student population had increased only slightly.
14. Why is this happening? A spokeswoman for the Denver Public Schools district recently told the press that “We believe society has created a generation of at-risk kids.” In a sense, she is right. Public school teachers and administrators, no matter how heroic their dedication, cannot reverse the effects of a broken home, domestic violence, drugs or poverty. They cannot take the place of parents who cannot or will not take educational responsibility for their children, or who simply are not there.
15. In another sense, however, “society” cannot be blamed without indicting all of us who comprise it. Society is a shared project, fashioned by our social choices, relationships and actions. It is what we have made it. If we assert that we are a free people, then we must also believe that we ultimately determine society far more profoundly than it determines us. If we are free, we are also responsible. We are not victims unless we choose to be. All freedom carries with it a commensurate burden of responsibility. We are responsible for the consequences of choices we freely make.
16. In regard to public education, too often we have chosen to exclude even the most generic influences of God and religious faith from the curriculum. The new “model content standards” for teaching history in Colorado schools, currently under discussion in draft form, try to address this problem. They show a respect for the role religious and philosophical systems have played in human affairs. But reading about religion is not the same as examining and discussing the merit of its message. And since broadly shared religious convictions have traditionally been the strongest foundation for our public morality, the result has been predictable: We face a dilemma which has led, in the words of historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, to the “de-moralization of society.”
17. On the one hand, we need to educate citizens who base their actions on proper ethics, so that our common life can proceed in reasonable harmony. The runaway success of William Bennett’s recent bestseller, The Book of Virtues, is no fluke; we all sense a problem at the spiritual core of our shared public institutions. On the other hand, we can no longer invoke any higher moral authority to arbitrate right and wrong, to define civic virtue and to sort out an appropriate hierarchy of rights which come into conflict.
18. Some will argue that in a democracy, what is “right” is always obvious: the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But that is not ethics; it is a form of mathematics that reduces the human person to the object of group utility. Aggregate opinion has no soul; but persons do. The irony is that today, while the public hunger for an education founded upon the dignity of the human person has grown steadily more urgent, and therefore more clearly the will of the majority, our sense of community and our belief in “the common good,” have eroded. So has mutual respect, even in the classroom.
19. Unfortunately, the current national discussion about teaching “values” often becomes mired in nostalgia and contradictions. We cannot recover the cultural uniformity of the 1950s, even if we wanted to. But neither can we spontaneously create a new canon of “right values.” The virtues which undergird public life are not arbitrary. They do not draw their legitimacy from personal taste or majority opinion, any more than objective reality does. Virtues are rooted in objective truths about human nature, and truth makes demands. Truth requires us to have a conscience. It binds our behavior. The shared perception of truth, and the rights and duties which flow from it, cement together every community of persons. But if we exile the search for binding moral truth from public school discourse as a matter of principle, the “values” we advertise become disconnected from their roots. They cannot inspire or compel. They remain pious ideals. They cannot give life.
20. This is why the charter-school movement sprang up in Colorado, and why home-schooling and private schools, including non-Catholic Christian schools, have grown so rapidly nationwide over the past decade. Parents want their children to succeed in life. But they know, often from hard personal experience, that true success—the kind that involves friendship and love, prayer and contemplation—requires a cultivation of the spirit. Education means much more than accumulating new skills and more data. Quantity of facts is not an adequate goal; quality of growth toward spiritual, moral and emotional maturity is. If our public classrooms merely create more effective producers and more discriminating consumers, we fail as a people.
21. In his 1989 book, The New Realities, Peter Drucker notes that modern culture has broken with the past in at least one decisive way: It has become a society where “knowledge is becoming the true capital and the premier wealth-producing resource” of the American people. The practical implications are enormous. Few of the great industrial captains of the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, had formal educations. As a result, their path to success would be much more difficult today. But the moral implications are even more troubling. Knowledge is expanding more rapidly each week; technology is advancing far more quickly than our ability to understand and absorb it. Like never before in human history, the adage “knowledge is power” is disturbingly accurate. Those who have education may increasingly manipulate those who do not. Therefore, like never before, Drucker argues, our schools must inculcate social responsibility; provide moral formation; deepen our definition of an “educated person” to include character; and teach people not only what to learn, but more importantly how and why to learn. And, I would add, they must insist on the dignity of every human being.
22. In each of these tasks, many of our public institutions have failed. None has the authority to guide the new knowledge society with the necessary moral compass. But in each of these same tasks, Catholic education has excelled for decades, and continues to achieve outstanding results at modest cost, today. Moreover, the moral compass that guides Catholic education—whether it takes the form of Catholic schools, or parish religious education programs—benefits far more people than those who are baptized. Through Catholic young people and their families, who act as leaven within society, it enriches the civic community at large. In all its various forms, Catholic education fills a pressing public need and provides an invaluable public service, today more than ever. It gives a persuasive response to the deepest human question: “Why is there anything at all and not simply nothing?” Clearly, Catholic education is not part of the past–but part of the future.
III. CATHOLIC EDUCATION: ITS BASIC PRINCIPLES
Reflection: We must adapt our methods and strategies to the “signs of the times,” but the goal of Catholic education always remains the same: forming the whole person in Jesus Christ; and then, through the witness of each individual student, teaching and helping to form society at large. Catholic education must develop men and women of prayer who are servant-leaders. It must inculcate in each student a love of Scripture; a spirit of authentic freedom lived in the gift of self, even to the total gift of self like Jesus; a rightly formed conscience rooted in the Truth; a zeal for the Church and her teachings; and an eagerness to share Church teachings with others. The modern world sees knowledge as a tool to master nature and control the human person. In contrast, the Christian sees knowledge as a means to glorify God, to serve others and to steward the gifts of the earth for the benefit of all. The world needs the Gospel, and the Church needs a new generation of missionaries, and yes, even of “martyrs” (c.f. Veritatis Splendor, 90-94), to carry it into the public square.
23. In Scripture, angels who bear God’s glad tidings to humankind frequently begin with the same greeting: “Do not be afraid.” So Gabriel spoke to Mary at the Annunciation (Lk 1:30), and her response is rich in meaning for our discussion in this pastoral letter. Mary’s “yes” to God brought God into human flesh and made the redemption of the world possible. But what made her “yes” possible? Mary’s faith, received from and nourished by her parents, Ann and Joachim, enabled her to be open to God. Through that faith, she could recognize and trust God’s messenger. Neither, however, was she naive. The Jews of Lower Galilee were a hardy and forceful people. Mary’s canticle reveals her as an astute daughter of that region. The same young woman who said yes willingly to God could also proclaim that:
”[God] has shown strength with His arm; He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of low degree. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent empty away” (Lk 1:51-53).
24. Courage moved Mary’s heart to say, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38), and confidence resonates in her canticle. These same qualities must inhabit all Catholic education. The Christian knows that the created world is not an accident. It is not chaos. Despite the wounds and disharmony we have inflicted on nature by our own sinfulness, creation can be trusted because its Creator is trustworthy. Like Mary, Catholic education should teach us to be alert to God’s presence in all persons and things. Like Mary, Catholic education should be neither naive nor cynical but creatively open in discerning and doing God’s will.
25. In that light, the governing principles of Catholic education can be summarized:
First, truth exists, it has been revealed by God, and men and women can discover and understand it.
Second, truth is not an idea or an abstraction, but a person, Jesus Christ.
Third, we encounter the truth, Jesus Christ, most fully in the Catholic Church.
Fourth, we must share the truth with the world.
Fifth, this sharing must proceed from a critical reflection on, and must involve a challenging dialogue with, the surrounding public culture.
Sixth, we begin that task of evangelizing, or sharing the truth, in the home. Thus, parents are the primary educators of their children and the most important educational resource in any secular or faith community.
Those are the principles. Now let us examine them in greater depth.
26. First, truth exists, it has been revealed by God, and men and women can discover and understand it. The foundation stone of all Catholic education is a biblical verse that I have prayed over throughout my life and chose as my motto when called to the episcopate: “In the beginning, the Word.” We find it in the Gospel of John, which opens with one of the most beautiful and moving passages (1:1-5) in Scripture:
“In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
27. What this means is simple: Jesus of Nazareth is Lord. His relationship with the Father is unique; indeed, He is identified as equal to God. He is the messiah, the only Son and “Word” of God. Before anything was, He is. All things were created through Him. All things find their source and meaning only in Him. In Jesus, truth exists from eternity. Truth is not something created by human cultures or individuals; it is not relative to the times or subjectively conjured by “personal conscience.” Truth cannot die or change. Moreover, by creating us in His own image, our heavenly Father has given us a hunger for the truth and intelligence to seek it out and be grasped by it, even to be caught up in an ecstatic love of God. Guided by the Holy Spirit, we see God’s truth revealed in the broken heart of the eternal Son.
28. Second, truth is not an idea or an abstraction, but a person, Jesus Christ. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life” (Jn 14:6). Truth, at its source, is not an abstraction. It is not an idea; ideas may capture the mind, but they cannot sustain the heart because they cannot love or be loved. Rather, truth is a person, Jesus Christ, who loves and engages us; who knows our suffering and who shows us the way to happiness; a divine person who is both God and man and whose Cross illumines the significance of the Incarnation. Facts, statistics, data, technologies, and all disciplines and tools of knowledge about our world-these things are vitally important, especially today. But their meaning is even more important. And only something higher than the material world in which we labor, a someOne, can provide that meaning in a way that satisfies the human spirit. If we seek truth, we must seek Jesus. If we want to give the gift of truth to others, we must give them Jesus. For in the pierced heart of the crucified Lord is revealed the secret of God’s love for us.
29. The Second Vatican Council teaches that in and through Christ, we gain full awareness of our human dignity. In a paragraph which Pope John Paul II describes as “stupendous,” quoting it in eight of his 10 encyclicals, the council says that, “It is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. For Adam, the first man, was a type of Him who was to come (Rom 5:14), Christ the Lord. Christ, the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of His love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling” (Gaudium et Spes, 22).
30. The council continues, “He who is ’the image of the invisible God’ (Col 1:15) is Himself the perfect man who has restored in the children of Adam that likeness of God which had been disfigured ever since the first sin. Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in Him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare. For, by His incarnation, He, the Son of God, in a certain way united Himself with each man” (GS 22).
31. Jesus also said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (Jn 8:32). Human freedom takes its meaning from the truth, and therefore from Jesus Christ. Authentic freedom cannot exist in a life built on contradictions and untruth. If our public discourse and institutions substitute license for freedom, we will reap the consequences.
32. We already see this, even in Colorado. Too often we have rejected the God-given dignity of human sexuality and put an idolatry of “choice” in its place. What results is an unraveling of marriage and the family. And since the family is always the primary educator of children, the suffering that stems from this breakdown widens geometrically throughout the civic arena. “Choice” is never an end in itself. It is not an independent value. It is not the heart of our freedom. What counts is the moral content of what we choose. Education only serves human dignity insofar as it enables persons to be authentically free; freedom cannot exist separately from the truth; and truth is found most completely in the person of Jesus Christ. Catholic education, therefore, can never reside purely in academic excellence, or good discipline, or the transmission of useful social values. These are important issues, but they are not the heart of the matter.
33. Third, we encounter Christ, and therefore the truth, most fully in the Catholic Church. God speaks to us both in Scripture and Tradition. He touches our lives daily through the sacraments. In the new millennium, therefore, the Church needs to reappropriate her own book, the Sacred Scriptures. Catholic education must be rooted firmly in the Word of God, and in a reverential and authentic Catholic liturgical life. It must teach the meaning of the sacraments and encourage their reception; it must immerse people in their grace. It must also develop healthy consciences grounded in the truth and guided by the Church. With Augustine, Catholic educators must urge their students to “return to your conscience, question it...Turn inward...and in everything you do, see God as your witness.” Catholic education must always teach as the Church teaches, led by the pope and the bishops in communion with him, who are successors of the Apostles and the chief teachers of the believing community. It must fully and faithfully bring the content of the great Catechism of the Catholic Church alive for all who seek the truth.
34. Fourth, we must share the truth with the world. Jesus Christ is the source and meaning of all creation. We find Him most fully in the Catholic Church. Therefore, encountering Him ourselves, and bringing others to Him through our Catholic faith, become the greatest urgencies in life. Again, we cannot be silent about Christ. We must evangelize; we must “go [and] make disciples of all nations.”
35. Fifth, this truth-sharing must proceed from a critical reflection on, and must involve a challenging dialogue with, the surrounding public culture. Catholic education must apply the Gospel to the world. It must encourage an engagement with, never a withdrawal from, the wider issues of the day. Herein lies the importance of the Church’s social teaching, from the encyclicals of modern popes, to the pastoral letters of local bishops. This has been the goal of my own pastoral letters, from “The Crisis of Rural Colorado” (1987), which focused on farming and rural life on the Eastern Plains; to “This Home of Freedom” (1987) and “Virtue and the American Republic” (1989), which explored the meaning of American political life; to “Praying with Peter” (1993), which examined the relationship of men and women in American culture; to “The Heights of the Mountains Are His” (1994), which reflected on the moral implications of economic development on the Western Slope. Catholics make their most important contributions to society as citizens when they bring their faith to bear on the practical problems society faces.
36. Sixth, this task of evangelizing, or sharing the truth, begins in the home. Parents are the most important educational resource in any community. The family is the first cell of society, and parents are the primary educators of their children. In the words of the Second Vatican Council, “Since parents have conferred life on their children, they have a most solemn obligation to educate their offspring...Their role as educators is so decisive that scarcely anything can compensate for their failure in it. For it devolves on parents to create a family atmosphere so animated with love and reverence for God and others that a well-rounded personal and social development will be fostered among the children. Hence the family is the first school of those social virtues which every society needs” (Gravissimum Educationis, 3).
37. This is a great privilege and responsibility. Pope John Paul II notes that “In a society shaken and split by tensions and conflicts caused by the violent clash of various kinds of individualism and selfishness, children must be enriched not only with a sense of true justice...but also and more powerfully by a sense of true love, understood as sincere solicitude and disinterested service with regard to others, especially the poorest and those most in need” (Familiaris Consortia, 37). Catholic education must inculcate in every Christian child a respect for the dignity of each human person. Only parents are fully equipped to do this.
38. Most importantly, “So great is the educational ministry of parents that St. Thomas [Aquinas] has no hesitation in comparing it with the ministry of priests...[God calls parents to] the mission of building up the Church in their children. Thus, in the case of baptized people, the family, called together by word and sacrament as the church of the home, is both teacher and mother, the same as the worldwide Church” (FC, 38).
39. The implications of these words are fundamental to our mission as a believing people. Catholic education begins in, and hinges on, a culture of active Christian love and faith within the home. Parents must teach their children to pray each day—in the morning, before meals and in the evening—in order to nurture their relationship with Jesus Christ. Religious education classes for an hour or two each week at the local parish cannot take the place of daily family prayer and consistent Sunday worship. Catholic schools, no matter how dedicated the teachers, cannot take the place of parental witness for Christ, or compensate for a family life that ignores the Gospel outside the classroom.
40. At the root of all Catholic education must be the conviction that we are centered, as a people, in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is our solace. It is also our strength. Our schools and religious education programs exist for one reason only: to proclaim the lordship of Jesus Christ. In so doing, they create witnesses and models of Christ’s love who become His leaven in the world, for the sake of the world, even when they are sent out as innocents among wolves (Mt 10:16). Moreover, Jesus is not some distant memory; He is with us here and now, in real flesh and real blood, in the Eucharist. We become a part of His own Body every time we receive the bread of life at Mass. Thus we are not alone. His courage becomes our courage; His trust in the Father becomes our trust in the Father. Therefore, we need never be afraid.
41. What does the Eucharist really mean in each of our lives? As Catholic adults, we can say we believe in Jesus Christ with our words, or we can show we believe by our actions. The Eucharist teaches us that we should be thankful to God with our whole being. We owe everything to Jesus, who loved us and gave Himself up for us (Gal 2:20). If Catholic education has a future—and the overwhelming evidence of field studies and the growing waiting lists of our schools in northern Colorado shout out that it does—then we must begin by making ourselves one with Christ’s gift of Himself. We must develop a repentant conscience through the Sacrament of Penance and nourish our love for God and each other with frequent reception of the Eucharist. These two sacraments are the heart of Christian life and prayer; they are the doorway to lives of service to God and neighbor.
42. Finally, no discussion of Catholic education can be complete without asking God for the gift of the three great theological virtues which undergird all of Christian life: faith, hope and love.
43. Anselm’s principle credo ut intellegam (“I believe, in order that I may understand”) is key to the Catholic educational enterprise. In the obedience of faith, true knowledge is possible. To be led by God’s revelation in Scripture and Tradition requires an intimate consent of the human spirit, a voluntary, inner obedience which is much more demanding than any conformity to a norm imposed from the outside. But the cost of faith, and the understanding arising from it, are the only paths to true freedom. Only by dying to ourselves do we find ourselves (Mt 10:39).
44. We should recall as well the Beatitude, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Mt 5:4), and Henri de Lubac’s enduring words, “Suffering is the thread from which joy is woven.” I am concluding this pastoral letter shortly after the death of my mother, who embraced the Cross throughout her life, but especially in the difficult years of her final illness. Never was my mother a more powerful teacher. To all who knew her, she taught, by her witness, that Christian hope is the great antidote to the despair and inhuman logic which so deeply wound the modern world; and that love is stronger than death. In her last days on earth, even in her tears, she rejoiced with an exalted and unutterable joy (1 Pet 1:8) because she saw that our destiny is everlasting life.
Brothers and sisters, we stand on the threshold of a great period of renewal for Catholic education in northern Colorado. It is a fitting time to examine our own hearts and actions. We are each of us teachers and witnesses. Our young people are watching.
J. Francis Stafford
Archbishop of Denver
Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord
25 March 1995