Cardinal, bishop participate in education panel

Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the pope’s apostolic nuncio to the United States, and Bishop Earl Fernandes were part of a panel discussion on education as the pathway of freedom held at Columbus St. Charles Preparatory School on Sept. 11.

The panel, which also included Dr. William Kuehnle, the associate director for social concerns at the Catholic Conference of Ohio; Dr. Silvia Guslandi, visiting assistant professor at Kenyon College; and Ryan Michelle Pettit, principal at Cristo Rey Columbus High School, discussed the book “The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny” by Servant of God Luigi Giussani.

The event was sponsored by Communion and Liberation, a lay ecclesial movement in the Church that has a branch in Columbus.

Communion and Liberation is so named because, its members profess, only the Christian event lived in communion with one another can bring about the liberation of the human person. Then-Father Giussani founded the movement in Milan in the 1960s with a group of high school students.

“After his ordination, he began teaching at the Venegono seminary with a bright academic career ahead of him, that is, until a chance meeting with a group of young people in a train car, traveling from Milan to the seaside town of Rimini,” Dr. Holly Peterson, the assistant superintendent for academics in the Office of Catholic Schools, said in her opening remarks.

“After spending hours discussing life with those teens and with many others later, he understood that there was an absolute indifference toward faith, the Church and Christ particularly among the young, and that, even if Jesus rose from the dead, He had no influence upon their lives. … Giussani’s response to these promptings was to leave a promising career in academia to teach theology in a public school.”

At Berchet, a high school in Milan, Giussani taught his students a method to judge the experiences of everyday life and discover how faith was relevant to the most fundamental needs of their hearts.

“He was keenly aware that he wasn’t there to tell students how or what to think, nor to think as he did,” Peterson said. “Instead, he wanted to teach them a method with which to judge everything they would encounter in life, a method that was 2,000 years old.”

Under Giussani’s leadership, a movement known as Student Youth was born. Much like Communion and Liberation today, the movement was a battle against indifference and the marginalization of Christians and Christianity in modern society through total involvement in the Christian cause regardless of class or profession, and a community lifestyle.

The panelists reflected on Giussani’s “The Risk of Education,” focusing on the Servant of God’s idea of education as the pathway of freedom and the relationship between educator and student.

Cardinal Pierre said it is the educator’s task to develop “what is already there.” He said the educator must accompany the disciple in his discoveries, paying primary attention to the person.

He also highlighted Giussani’s idea of education as an “introduction into total reality.”

Giussani said, “A Christianity reduced to words alone, a Christianity which is not reflected and lived as an ontological reality, touching our profound nature, is only a superficial Christianity.”

Cardinal Pierre described education as leading an individual along the path to discovery of reality.

He noted that, in society today, many want to transform ideologies and impose their own truth. He pointed out that Jesus introduced people to a path of truth and what it means to be truly human.

Educators must imitate Christ in helping students to become truly human. Teachers, professors, parents and priests must discover what is true education, he said.

“They have to become, for the younger generation, an ‘authority’ to present the meaning of life with authority, not in a dogmatic and ‘authoritarian’ manner, mainly by the power of their convictions,” he said.

“In his encyclical ‘Redemptoris Missio,’ Pope John Paul II said, ‘The Church proposes; she imposes nothing.’ This supposes that we are always ready to be challenged and to give the ‘reasons’ for our positions and convictions,” Cardinal Pierre said.

In his remarks on “The Risk of Education,” Bishop Fernandes explained that his parents, who were educators, were “incredible witnesses.” 

As a child, he recalled wondering if his parents believed and practiced the values that they instilled in him and his brothers. He recounted spying on them late one evening and observing his parents fasting, each eating an egg for their dinner, while his father gave his mother the larger egg.

Bishop Fernandes explained the importance of educators being individuals who students want to imitate, as well as parents for their children, and the role of an educator as a mentor.

Educators should train students’ minds to be critical and ask questions, which, he said, is the purpose of education.

The bishop explained that students are human beings who have desires, and it is an educator’s responsibility to help students encounter the true, good and beautiful.

He said educators “ought not to give up” on their students, and they should see their students’ true potential.

Pettit, who is in her fourth year as principal at Cristo Rey, concurred that educators can never give up on their students. She noted that God made the human heart. Thus, there is always hope for each student.

Pettit also explored the idea that understanding is not the full purpose of education. 

She added that self-awareness is critical as well as vulnerability. Describing herself as having a tendency to be guarded, she explained the positive impact that resulted from being vulnerable with her students.

Guslandi, who teaches Italian and comparative literature in addition to being a literary translator at Kenyon College, focused on the importance of tradition and handing on values. She explored the idea of education as a proposal through lived experiences.

She was born and raised in Milan, and she attended high school at Berchet, where Giussani began his teaching career. She later graduated from the University of Milan and the University of Genoa. She formerly taught humanities and writing at the University of Chicago, where she earned a Ph.D. in Italian.

As an educator, Guslandi offered questions for self-reflection, including: Are we engaging? Do students want to be like us?

As a parent, considering her children, she asked: Do they see in us something attractive or compelling?

In Kuehnle’s remarks, he focused on Giussani’s idea of conviction. He explored conviction as something that generates authority.

A former high school teacher, Kuehnle shared a story from an out-of-state field trip to the nation’s capital that was particularly challenging for him. He recalled that, one evening at dinner with his students in Washington, one by one they shared their wounds: divorce, alcoholism and drugs in their families. Kuehnle said the “weight of their sorrows hit like a wave.”

He recalled that night being the night he truly became a teacher.

Kuehnle, who received a Ph.D. in political theory from Ohio State University, explained that educators and students share the same wounds. He said conviction binds individuals to reality.

Noting the gospel story of the good thief who was crucified next to Christ, Kuehnle said the Good Teacher, Jesus, and the good thief were bound together. On the cross, he said, the good thief moved from “doubt to conviction.”

He noted that authority derives from conviction. On the cross, Christ offered conviction. In the same way, educators should offer conviction to their students, particularly the convictions of the gospel.

In his current position with the Catholic Conference of Ohio lobbying on behalf of Ohio’s bishops, Kuehnle acknowledged that, while he might not have as much to offer as other lobbyists, he can offer conviction to the senators he meets with.

He referenced Acts 9:4-5, when St. Paul heard a voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” and the voice said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” Kuehnle explored the correlation between the persecuted Christ and those persecuted today: the single mother, preborn child and migrant.

As a Catholic lobbyist, he explained that he shares these convictions in meetings with senators, and they can share that conviction together.