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To Notre Dame's President Hesburgh, all this means that "we have our work to do."
"Total Truth." What is that work? The text of Catholic education is that of the old Baltimore catechism: "God created man to know Him, to love Him and to serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him forever in the next." In the Catholic view, education is thus committed to "total truth"—moral, religious and intellectual. Unlike secularists, Catholics cannot divide reason and revelation into tidy compartments; each informs and reinforces the other. "The hell of secular society unredeemed by Christianity," said St. Augustine, "is not even capable of improvement." Summed up Pope Pius XI: "There can be no true education which is not wholly directed to man's last end."
At the lower school levels, this means strict training in "habitual good acts," the cultivation of faith and morals that constitutes "soul saving," the impressive air of neatness, manners and discipline that strikes visitors to any parochial school in the land. It means piety: Mass before school, prayer before class, grace at lunch, prayer when school lets out, and an average 2½ hours of religious instruction each week. It means "conditioning the will" in order to have "the power to choose freely what is good in life."
At the university level, Catholic education finds its roots in the great tradition of the Catholic universities in the Middle Ages, when all-inclusive learning was no problem. Universities then organized their faculties around the "queen science" of theology, which supernaturally interpreted all natural knowledge. It was a time when St. Thomas, the breathtaking synthesizer of Aristotelian reason and Christian faith, could say: "The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as a dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false."
Unhappily, lesser theologians forgot this sound advice. When Galileo peered through his telescope four centuries later and saw a heliocentric rather than a geocentric universe, the result was conflict between baffled theologians and fascinated scientists. The Roman Inquisition forced Galileo to "abjure, curse and detest the aforesaid errors," but science was not to be stopped that easily.
The wound did not really heal until this century. Yet as far back as 1852, Britain's John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote The Idea of a University, a plea for "cultivation of the intellect." Newman held that a university "is not a convent, not a seminary; it is a place to fit men of the world for the world."
Belligerently Protestant. While Catholicism was in mid-journey from the Inquisition to Newman, Jesuits in 1789 founded the first U.S. Catholic university, Washington's Georgetown. Georgetown raised its head in an overwhelmingly (99%) and belligerently Protestant new country. A pamphleteer of the time warned of the "calm, shrewd, steady, systematic movement of the Jesuit order . . . to subvert the Reformation, and to crush the spirit of liberty."