A Personal Reflection on "Catholic" Education (Part 1)

I'm going to be working on a little series here. As the title suggests, I'll be fleshing out some reflections of my experience with Catholic education. The series will continue until I get bored or until I run out of things to say.

As some of you may or may not know, I went to parochial school. Specifically, I attended three different Catholic grade schools, and one Catholic high school, before shaking their dust from my feet and attending a public university. Regular readers of the old blog might find my reasoning strange: I wanted to receive a degree in Computer Science/Computer Engineering--I hadn't quite decided which--at the best possible price. To my mind, the only imaginable effect of a Catholic education was an increase in tuition.

That's actually an extraordinary statement. It wasn't that I hated the school I attended. I made a number of very good friends, and the education I received, especially in math and science, was fairly good. Nor had I become an apostate. During the first semester of my freshman year of college, I attended Mass every week. I'm not sure when I began to skip, but it certainly wasn't right away. To me, being a Catholic meant little more than attending Mass on Sundays and Holy Days. Some of us gave up something during Lent, although sacrifice was being replaced with the idea of doing something nice instead. There was also the issue of Mary, and the Saints, but these were optional devotions; the Rosary was distinctly Catholic, but Catholics weren't required to say it.

With such a pathetic conception of the Faith, it's not surprising that my attendance at Mass began to lapse. Without an intellectual foundation, religion had become a series of customary, though largely meaningless, gestures. The blame resides properly with me; I knew what the Faith was about, even if I had forgotten. But it's also fair to criticize the Catholic schools for failing to provide me with the depth of education I would need to combat temptation and spiritual sloth.

It's important to realize that my story isn't atypical. More accurately, the atypical thing about my story isn't the fall, it's that I've found my way back by the grace of God. I can only speak from my personal experience--though, as Mark Judge points out in God and Man at Georgetown Prep, I'm not completely alone--but only two of my friends from high school regularly attend Church. The rest aren't anti-theists in the Richard Dawkins vain, but apostates, like James Joyce perhaps; except that, not only do my friends lack genius--sorry guys--they also lack the depth of understanding of the Faith that Joyce had. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man could only have been written by a Catholic, one who had rejected the Faith to be sure, but one who had received a rich and rewarding education from an institution that had existed for nineteen hundred years. Even if my friends were visited by a kindly literary muse, they would be wholly incapable of writing such a book.

I would have to include myself in the group along with my friends. Now, I can follow Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's hero, and understand him fairly well. The harrowing sermon on hell now resonates with me. But it would have struck me as peculiar had I read the book while in high school. The pre-Vatican II Catholicism of Joyce would have appeared to be wholly unrelated to my own. This perception was wrong of course; the idea that the "spirit of Vatican II" changed the Roman Catholic Church from a doctrinal standpoint is simply wrong. But it would have struck me as a reasonable.

The problem, as I say, was that to my mind, Catholicism was something utterly unrelated to the intellect. The idea is ludicrous, but it appeared quite sane. I'll try to further work out my thesis--without fear or trembling I hope--next time.