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A Christmas Card from Mary
Does Contraception Minimize the Incidence of Abortion?
Secularism, Culture of Death Hothouse
What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in Education?
Toppling Dominos
Anti-Christians don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of Secularism
"Don't Impose Your Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death Warrant?
Court Ordered Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
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"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for Catholics in this Election
Christians Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay Marriage
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Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake Cloning Bans
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No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
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Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
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When Religion Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way, Baby
The Incarnational Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them.  How Else Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
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Dutch Treats
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Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality, and Common Sense
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Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
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"You Taught me well, Mommie dearest"
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"These are the Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few are Married
"...Prepare him for additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a Person?
The Point of a Point of View
Politically Correct, Morally Depraved
Population Controllers out of Control
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Social Progress through Immorality
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Reason and Faith
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Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal if...
Get Rid of that Worthless Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues Prior to Voting

by Monsignor James C. Brunner

Faith Points

Catholic schools teach pretty much the same things that other schools do. What then is the point of the considerable expenditure of talent, funds, and other resources to maintain Catholic schools? Is it for teaching religion? That is a worthy enterprise from my point of view, but could we not contrive to have secular subjects taught in public schools and arrange an hour of religious instruction each school day? There must be more to Catholic education then the extra hour devoted to religion.

The main difference between Catholic and public schools (apart from the well-documented educational superiority of Catholic schools) lies in its point of view. Education is not just amassing facts just as health is more than mixing together drugs. A corpse contains the same chemicals as a living person. But the corpse lacks a soul, the living body’s unifying principle. Similarly education must have a soul or unifying principle. That is its point of view or philosophy and it is the most important element of education.

Let me cite some examples of how a point of view affects education. One might think that mathematics is value neutral since there is only one correct answer to a problem. But even mathematics is influenced by one’s point of view. A. S. Thorndike, a pioneer in educational psychology, once wrote, "Everything exists in some quantity and therefore it can be measured." This is rank materialism. Not everything exists in some quantity. Souls cannot be measured. Grace does not come by the pound. Thoughts do not have length, breadth, and width. Now Thorndike was probably not deliberately setting out to strike a blow for materialism. He was merely stating what he personally believed. His point of view insinuated itself into his teaching.

There is no subject at all that can escape being influenced by one’s point of view. There is no Catholic biology that differs from everyone else’s. But there are different points of view in biology. What is ultimate origin of life? Did it originate by chance? Is human life to be differentiated from that of the beasts? The viewpoint in many universities is that life originated by chance although the odds against it make the notion absurd and that humans differ only in degree from beasts. That is not what you are going to learn in a Catholic school.

There is no Catholic history that differs from history in general. But history is more than a recounting of past events. History is explanation and justification. Take the matter of the Reagan presidency, which most readers of this article have experienced for themselves. Conservatives contend that Reagan’s economic policies were responsible for turning around the disastrous policies of Carter and ushering in a period of unparalleled prosperity. Liberal publications counter that Reagan introduced horrendous deficits that were not eliminated until Clinton’s tax program. Conservatives respond that the ten-year bull market was the result of the fiscal discipline that the Republican-controlled Congress imposed on a completely reluctant Clinton. It is not my purpose here to decide who is right. I only want to show that one’s political point of view colors the interpretation of historical events. Nobody quarrels about the events, but their interpretation depends upon the interpreter.

And so it goes for all the subjects in the curriculum. The constant bombardment a student receives from a teacher who has a secular point of view or must teach from that point of view because the education occurs in a public school, is nothing less than the indoctrination of the student in secularism to the exclusion of religion. Such indoctrination tends to weaken the faith of immature students. Many college students including Catholics conclude from their education that there is a conflict between religion and science. Pasteur, one of the world’s greatest scientists, saw no such conflict. He said that the more he learned about science the deeper his faith became. He wanted to learn more about science so as to have the faith of a Breton peasant and that if he were to learn still more he might have the faith of a Breton peasant woman.

Exiling religion from the curriculum favors the secular point of view. It does not create a neutral no-man’s land between religion and secularism. Leaving out religion downgrades it in importance and leaves students with the impression that only secular concerns are worth attention because only these are taught in the classroom. Only when religion is no longer one’s ultimate value is there any justification for excluding it from the formal educational process. Leaving God out of the curriculum is not merely a negation like the lack of color on a wall; it is more a privation like the plucking out of an eye. Nowhere more than in education is the saying of Jesus true: "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters." (Matt. 12:30)

The "facts" that one generation learns in a school are often repudiated by teachers of the next generation. So the facts taught are of less importance than the philosophy that is taught. Some people think that philosophy is unimportant because it is merely theoretical. It is actually the most practical of all the disciplines. If a man sits on a bulldozer he is using a machine that can move more earth in one day than he could in a thousand. But which of this pair is the more powerful. Clearly it is the man who directs the tremendous power of the caterpillar. So it is with philosophy. It directs the activities of all the other disciplines.

Your philosophy gives your value system. If you think that man is nothing more than a clever beast you are not surprised, or should not be, that men act like beasts or that they take their mores from the jungle and the barnyard. As you view a thing so you value it. Monkeys are sacred in parts of the Orient and so they are respected and go largely unmolested even when they wreak havoc on crops. In the West monkeys are not sacred and so monkeys who steal food from cornfields would very likely be shot. In the Orient monkeys are not used for medical research. They are commonly so used in the West. The difference in treatment depends upon one’s philosophy. It is likely that monkeys would prefer the philosophy of the Orient to that of the West and would agree that philosophy has very practical consequences.

So the considerable commitment of the resources of the Catholic Church to schools is justified because it allows the light of the gospel to illumine the secular subjects and to teach us to value things from the point of view of the Creator. In the last analysis the Creator’s point of view is the only one that counts. That is what you learn in a Catholic school and it is worth the cost.