Recently, Catholic Times reporter Hannah Heil sat down with Bishop Earl K. Fernandes to talk about his new pastoral letter, Catholic Education: An Act of Hope.
Bishop Fernandes, you’ve been bishop for four years now and this is your pastoral letter. You mentioned that you felt the time is now because we are in an age of secularization with rising attacks against human dignity. How do you see us being under attack now, and why is Catholic education the answer?
In some ways, we’re under attack. Society is becoming more secularized. Rather than looking at it from a defensive point of view, I want to look at Catholic education as something that the Church offers to our young people. Catholic education is an act of hope in a world that sometimes falls into despair.
The world falls into despair because of wars, because of violence, because of extreme poverty. People feel that they have no other option. Yet, sometimes, in the face of great challenges, education is the correct answer – and not just an intellectual sort of education, but an education and formation of the whole person – body, spirit and soul – to educate someone’s mind but also to have them be physically fit.
Pope Benedict (XVI) used to say, ‘He who does not offer God offers too little.’ And so, we have to propose Christ, the Teacher par excellence, to our young people as the solution to the world’s problems and to what the world needs and to what ails young people today. We see less and less room in the public square sometimes for persons of faith.
Yet, we also believe that — and historically, in the United States — the Catholic educational system has had something to offer, especially to immigrant communities that first came here. Catholics lived in Catholic ghettos and went to Catholic schools in the face of anti-Catholicism, and discrimination because people were Catholic, but that Catholic school system educated people well and educated them for success in the world and has produced some of our finest citizens in our nation’s history.
So, I’m less on the defensive and more on the positive of the goodness of Catholic schools and Catholic education – not just education, but we might also say formation of the whole person.
READ: CATHOLIC EDUCATION: An Act of Hope
You also mentioned in your letter that you are a son of immigrants, and you wrote that you benefited greatly from attending Catholic schools when your family emigrated here. How would you say that helped shape you, and maybe even, your leadership today in the diocese?
My brothers came from India along with my parents, and then quickly, my parents had three more children, but despite prejudice in the public school system, they found welcome and ready acceptance in the Catholic school system.
It wasn’t easy. It was the time of the migrant worker movement, and with a name like Fernandes, with our skin complexion, there was some of that prejudice. There were fears when the economy was beginning to change, especially at the end of the Carter and Ford administration, or even when the American automobile industry was getting killed by the Japanese. People would say, ‘Go back to your own country.’
But at the same time, there were a lot of people who just didn’t know who we were. And then they saw that we went to Mass like they went to Mass, and we were part of the community, we sat in the classroom. They respected us because we were bright. They respected our hard work. They saw us also on the sports teams and things like that.
We, little by little, became part of the community. We became bonded by our common experience of Catholic education and our faith. Decades later, when my parents both passed, it was those kids who were in Catholic schools with us who came to the wake, who came to the funeral because we had a shared experience.
We were taught by the Ursuline sisters. Some sisters taught us but also laypeople. Everyone was from a blue-collar neighborhood; everyone worked hard. We tried to make something of ourselves. I think Catholic education also helped solidify our work ethic, in addition to providing intellectual formation. I was also blessed, because at that time catechesis was sort of up and down in the Church, especially following the Second Vatican Council, but I had good parents who assumed their role as primary educators of their children in the faith. I was also lucky because my mother – or unlucky, depending on how you looked at it – had been a Catholic school teacher in India.
There was this tradition; my parents both had gone to Catholic schools. They wanted to give that to us in the new world. In the Catholic schools because what they offered academically, what they offered spiritually, what they offered to us in terms of community life was superior. That helped my brothers and me to go on to St. Francis de Sales High School (in Toledo), which was run by the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales.
We had Catholic priests and brothers teaching us in the classroom, and that launched us into college, and we managed to retain the faith, in part because of my parents. From the experience of Catholic education, and I don’t want to brag – we were immigrants and we were poor – but you have from one family, three physicians, a magistrate and a Catholic bishop, and that’s the potential that Catholic schools have.
When I go, and sometimes, for example, at our Guadalupe Youth Summit that we have for Spanish-speaking high school students, I look out at young people, I see where our family was 50 years ago. Just as we had hopes and dreams of greatness in America, they have those same hopes and dreams, and I want to help make their dream a reality. I think Catholic schools can help make their dream a reality.
I serve on the board of Cristo Rey High School here in Columbus, and at each board meeting, they have a student come in to give his or her testimony witness, if you will, of what they’re doing, what they’re learning, why they’re at Cristo Rey, what they’re doing and co-oping in business and the confidence that they’re building.
Very often, some of those same students will talk about their peers who are not in Catholic schools, who don’t have that same opportunity are not getting in their education and formation. There’s a great poverty for some of our young people, and we have the possibility of making them rich in what matters most, in the wealth of the Church’s wisdom.
You also mentioned how our diocese is going more toward the family catechesis model, bringing parents into their children’s faith. As you mentioned, it’s “essential” to their education. What would you say is your vision for the diocese?
I think those are two separate questions: the vision for the diocese versus family-based catechesis, because family-based catechesis falls into the idea of what we call evangelizing catechesis.
Before, there was a presumption that the teacher who was a catechist or the catechist in the PSR (Parish School of Religion) program had information about the faith to convey to the student and that the student was supposed to learn from the teacher or catechist. But then, we began to realize the teachers, the catechists, are themselves not that well versed in the faith.
And then, we say that parents are the primary educators of their children in the ways of faith, but sometimes, in our Catholic schools, we didn’t get very much in the religion classes, in the content of the faith, or sometimes people were from broken homes and their parents didn’t practice the faith.
Archbishop (Daniel) Buechlein of Indianapolis some years ago now did an examination of the catechetical textbooks and things, and they just didn’t do the job. So when people my age were parents – or now they’re grandparents and their children are parents – you had two generations of people with poor catechesis. You’re saying, ‘Okay, be the primary educator in the way of the faith,’ but we realize that it’s not only a student and teacher that need catechesis and formation, but also the parents.
Then there are all those people who do not know Christ at all, who have never been evangelized or exposed to the Gospel, or people who were maybe baptized but never actually catechized or formed in any way. You have all these people who are simply highly secularized. All of them need Christ and the Gospel.
All of our catechesis ought to be directed toward evangelizing, beginning with the basic Kerygma, the basic formula of the faith, that then is transmitted. Little by little, by doing family-based catechesis, in a way, we’re inviting rather than forcing parents to assume their responsibility. We’re equipping them with the materials they need to be able to accompany their children, even as the catechist accompanies their children and the clergy accompany the whole family in formation.
I think that the model of evangelizing catechesis has to be applied to Catholic schools and Catholic education. Pope St. Paul VI says the Church exists to evangelize. We aren’t a sports program that happens to have a school that happens to have a church, right?
We’re a Church that exists in order to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ, and we do that in and through our schools. Our schools also help to form the whole person, which might involve athletics, but if we aren’t evangelizing and our Catholic schools aren’t making new disciples and better disciples who are strong in the faith and promoting the Church’s evangelical mission, we should close our schools because we have public schools to do that and we have charter schools that aren’t Catholic to do that.
There’s something distinctive about Catholic education. We propose Jesus Christ and the Church that He founded and life in the Church. We want our Catholic schools to engage our students, our young people, in the life of the Church. My measure of success for a Catholic school is growth and holiness – to engage in the sacramental of life of the Church, to see our students coming to Sunday Mass.
We can produce a lot of smart people, but what is that? Is that the goal of Catholic education? Or is it to make saints? We educate for eternity, as the phrase goes. That would be part of my vision for Catholic education.
Part of my vision of Catholic education is to go back to the question: What is unique about Catholic schools besides the sacraments? I would say that there’s a whole Catholic intellectual tradition in philosophy and theology, in the arts, across the curriculum. In science, for example, in genetics, the father of modern genetics, was an Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel. The inventor of the Big Bang theory was a Catholic priest.
What are the significant contributions of the Church in history? How did Catholicism shape the future of the Western civilization? What was the role of the monks in all of that? We need to begin to look at the contributions of Catholic men and women, even in literature. Rather than reading controversial and controverted literature, which one could read, maybe there’s something beautiful in our Catholic tradition to offer – and the same thing could be said in art and architecture.
If all we’re doing is imitating our secular peers, we’re only ever going to be a cheap imitation, because they’re going to have greater sources of funding than we will. Is that what we’re called to be? Or are we called to be something more, something greater? And so, this is what I propose – is that we make saints, and we capture the best of our tradition and propose it for new generations as a way of confronting the challenges of the modern era.
READ: Unapologetically Catholic: OCS Strategic Vision
You speak about how important it is that Catholic educators are themselves formed and that they have a relationship with Christ in order to be credible witnesses for their students.
In the pastoral letter, I examine the vocation, if you will, of the Catholic educator. Part of it goes back to what I was talking about evangelizing catechesis. We thought, okay, the student needs catechesis, but so does the Catholic educator to deepen his or her not only knowledge of the faith but knowledge of the person of Jesus Christ.
In the Bible, to know is to love. And so, I think, we want the person to be so utterly convicted of the truth of Christianity and the truth of who Jesus is that he or she could not not adhere to Him, because I think young people very easily sniff out a fraud or a hypocrite, someone pretending, someone acting, rather than someone authentically living.
I think our teachers need to be so convicted of the truth of the faith that they witness to it in their words and their deeds, in the way they present the material and so on, because if you meet the person of Jesus, you’ve met Someone Who is not afraid to be Himself, not afraid to go forth boldly and challenge the scribes and Pharisees, not afraid even of death.
You meet a Man in Whom there is no fear. He even was victorious over death. When you meet such a Man, He changes your life the way St. Paul’s life was changed on the road to Damascus. So, all of us are in need of ongoing conversion and deeper daily conversion to Christ, including our teachers.
When we are more and more converted to Christ, then we live that in the classroom. We create a culture in the classroom to take questions the way Jesus took questions, to be patient, the way Jesus was patient, to be firm when we need to be firm, but to be merciful when we need to be merciful, to teach as Jesus taught by word and deed, humbly washing His disciples’ feet, but also by explaining things the way Jesus explained things in parables and when His disciples didn’t at first understand, to draw them along.
Our teachers need to be convicted of the truth. It’s not that the Catholic faith is accidental to who they are or accidental to the school. It’s integral to the culture and to the identity of the school, and it should be integral to the identity of the Catholic educator.
In the pastoral letter, I also talk about the role of the priest as pastor, especially for our parish schools. He’s the chief educator in the parish, just as I’m the chief educator, chief teacher, in the diocese. The pastors need to accept their responsibility. They can’t just simply say, ‘You run the school; I run the parish,’ to the principal.
There has to be a mutual understanding, a collaborative relationship, and the pastor needs to set the vision to help preserve and promote the Catholic culture of the school. In addition to the bishop and the priest, then you have the school principal who is also a leader in that community, and that’s why we’ve invested a tremendous amount of resources in forming our school administrators.
They do a retreat; they have formation days throughout the year. We’ve also invested, especially with the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, in both our teachers and our administrators. Then we try to get the teachers and the administrators and the pastors all together. We’ll have a day like that on Aug. 17, a day of prayer for Eucharistic wonderment, to deepen the faith so that what has been handed on to us can, in turn, be handed on to future generations.
You hope that more priests in our diocese and consecrated religious will become teachers in Catholic schools.
That would be a hope and a dream of mine. Dr. (Adam) Dufault (superintendent for the diocesan Office of Catholic Schools) points out in his accompanying document, Unapologetically Catholic, how, over the last four years, we’ve gone from 2 percent of our schools having priests and religious to 45 percent in a short period of time.
Maybe it’s only one or two, but that presence does make a difference. We will continue to build on those successes. I think it’s important. I’ve said this in a talk I gave a couple of years ago at the summit on evangelization held at Ohio Dominican University, that there exists kind of a gap – I describe it as a gap between the institutional Church and the charismatic Church.
By institutional Church, what people associate with the diocesan offices or with the bishop, sometimes slow moving and sometimes bureaucratic. There are many places where bishops and priests cannot go, where religious can go. That’s what I mean by the charismatic Church. They can go in and be close, so that the young people can experience the accompaniment of the Church in these critical formative years, in high school especially. We want to have them (religious) again.
I’m very grateful, for example, that we have the Salesian Sisters teaching in some of our high schools. As an example, over at Cristo Rey, there are a couple of the Sisters of Our Lady of Kilimanjaro who are over there, as well as some of the priests who are serving as chaplains in the high schools.
They’re doing wonderful work, young people are staying close to the Church. I think in my own experience teaching in Catholic high school, during my first years as a priest, of how many of those same students practiced the faith, got married in the Church, had their children baptized, and how many of them asked me to do the weddings and the baptisms.
Even annually at Christmas time – now they’re all about 40 years old, but a lot of them live in the Columbus area — they come to my residence. And as adults, as Catholics, as having that common bond and experience of Catholic school, we can be together as part of the family of God. It’s beautiful for me. I have a sense of spiritual fatherhood seeing them grow into the fine young people that they are.
You also mentioned how Catholic education offers freedom – and not freedom from something but freedom for something.
Often, we think of freedom as freedom from the law, or the Church says, ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ to all these things. On the other hand, freedom is distinct from license, which is doing whatever we want to do whenever we want to do it.
Freedom is necessarily connected to the truth. But can we use our freedom, the freedom that comes from knowing more, the freedom that comes from being free from sin, for something? In his encyclical letter on Artificial Intelligence, Pope Leo talks about what type of civilization we want to build: another Babel where no one can communicate? Or a Jerusalem where all the nations are streaming toward it and where there’s a place for everyone, where there’s a Lamb who’s seated on the throne?
Can we use our freedom constructively, not to simply attack another person, or even to defend ourselves, but to build something constructive?
My parents wanted a better life for their children. We, in turn, want better, something for future generations, which is why education is an act of hope. We want to transmit wisdom from generation to generation so that they might have life and have it abundantly. We want to train people to not only think critically in Catholic schools, but also, to use their freedom wisely.
Sometimes parents will tell small children, ‘Make good choices; make good choices,’ but really, that’s what we’re doing. We’re training people to make good choices. And in making good choices, they make good choices to act in particular ways, and those actions have an effect on one’s character, on who the person is becoming.
So we ask questions: How does who I am affect what I do? How does what I do affect who I am, or who I am becoming? We want to shape and form people into the image of Christ more and more each day through the actions that they carry out, which are based on who they are, their own Catholic sense of identity.
We were baptized so that we might live in the freedom of the sons and daughters of God. And it’s not just a freedom from slavery to sin and death, but a freedom for building the civilization of love and the culture of life.
Your letter will be released next week. For everyone in the diocese who’s going to read it, is there anything that you hope people take away?
I’m never short for words. I tried to be brief, but it’s still relatively long. Read it in short parts and reflect on it. Don’t just read it, but reflect, section by section. ‘What is this saying to me?’
I hope Catholic educators and administrators thoroughly explore it. I hope they discuss it even amongst themselves, and in small groups, to have reflection upon it. I hope it casts a new vision, which is in light of Pope Leo’s apostolic letter last year, Drawing New Maps of Hope.
We want to reflect the vision of our Holy Father, and we want to be consistent with the vision of the Holy Father. That’s why this time seemed opportune to address the question of Catholic education.
I hope people begin to see Catholic education as something distinct, something unique, something that offers the best of our Tradition to our young people today. I hope they also understand very clearly that the bishop of Columbus is not interested in private education for the well-to-do. I’m interested in evangelizing. I’m not interested in maintenance of what we have. I’m interested in the mission of the Church, which is to evangelize, to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to each and every person who walks through our door.
We’re not here to proselytize, but we’re here to propose Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life. Without vision, the people perish; the Pope has articulated his vision. Through this pastoral letter, I’m giving my vision, because there are exciting things happening in the diocese. We are at about 90 percent capacity in our Catholic schools. We are opening the first new elementary school in 30 years. We are looking to build the first new Catholic high school since the early 1960s. We are experiencing tremendous growth.
The opportunity that my brothers and I had, I want to give to the next generation, and I’m hopeful. When I meet our young people at our Catholic schools, they’re full of life, they’re full of enthusiasm, they love to learn. And yet, they also need to be equipped to defend themselves against the depersonalizing effect of an overuse of technology, of a secularized economy or a political system, which is always polarized and where faith is sometimes pushed to the margins as something private.
I want to form disciples who are convicted in the faith and who are willing to witness to the joy of the Gospel.