Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education by Caldecott Stratford

Author:Caldecott, Stratford [Caldecott, Stratford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education/Home Schooling
Publisher: Angelico Press
Published: 2013-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

This study will contend that the wager on the meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and response when one human voice addresses another, when we come face to face with the text and work of art or music, which is to say when we encounter the other in its condition of freedom, is a wager on transcendence.14

We make the same wager here.

The Liturgical Heart

For that reason, the final section of this chapter on Rhetoric will be concerned with liturgy, or with the ‘liturgical consummation’ of education and of the Trivium.

The public and shared act of worship, especially the Mass, is where we learn the ethos of a Catholic culture. Faith, reason, and imagination come together in liturgy. A school without a liturgy, like a culture or civilization similarly deprived, is cut off from the source of its unity and its life. It may survive for a generation or two, using up the spiritual capital of the past, but it will wither and decline eventually.15 This has been hinted at in the documents published by the Congregation of Religious Education, but has not received enough attention in Catholic writings about education generally. Even among Catholic educators, the liturgy tends to be regarded as an add-on or a necessary ‘marker’ of the Catholic identity of a school, but little more. The difficulty of persuading the majority of pupils to take it seriously or even to attend is something teachers and administrators are all too aware of, and there are no easy solutions to this.

We can glean the importance of the question by looking at an interesting document from the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education in 2007, Educating Together in Catholic Schools. Though concerned primarily with the shared mission between consecrated persons and the lay faithful, the core of the document was an exposition of the personalist philosophy applied to education. This it formulates as follows:

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