Oct 27, 2022
How to Promote Eucharistic Devotion at Your School by Dan Guernsey at Cardinal Newman Society. Teaching young people about the Eucharist is important, but as Pope St. John Paul II warned in Catechesi Tradendae, the academic life can become too “intellectualized” without sacramental and Eucharistic devotion. Our students need to know of Christ’s Real Presence in the Mass, but then they need to love and adore Him. At Donahue Academy, a parish K-12 school in Ave Maria, Fla., that I am honored to lead, we have taken several steps to promote Eucharistic devotion…. We turned our most central and visible classroom space into a beautiful Eucharistic chapel, big enough for an entire class to visit. Every day our students walk by the chapel, prompting many to stop in for a visit. Read
Restoring the Catholic in Catholic Schools by Gary Houchens at Missio Dei. The purpose of learning grammar, history, the sciences, art, or anything else is ultimately spiritual. Children can master the entire body of human knowledge, but if they lose their souls, their schooling was a massive, tragic waste. Rather, academic studies provide the content for students to learn virtue and self-mastery, what St. Augustine called ordo amoris, or the proper ordering of our affections. Read
Nation’s Report Card: Catholic School Students Excelled During Pandemic While Public Schools Lost More Ground by Joe Bukaras at National Catholic Register. “I think the real story is that our Catholic schools were the first to transition to distance learning, and then after that brief time were the first to come back to in-person instruction everywhere they could, as soon as they could,” [Lincoln] Snyder told Catholic News Agency. Snyder said that the differences in scores between public and Catholic schools are a testament to Catholic school teachers and leaders who chose to be physically present in the classroom. Read
Stronger Moral Leadership Needed at University of Notre Dame by Susan Ciancio at The Catholic World Report. I would like to see an official statement by its president, Fr. John Jenkins, stating that the university adheres to Catholic teaching on abortion, that abortion will not be promoted on campus or by staff, and that any student facing an unexpected pregnancy will have as much help as she needs from the university. This is what it means to be pro-life. And this is the only acceptable response from a university that claims that its “faith is not just a characteristic present at our founding and then slowly relegated to the past. It is an inextricable part of Notre Dame’s identity today and will continue to be in the future.” Our Catholic faith commands a respect for life from creation to death. And it commands strong moral leaders to teach it. Read
Gender Ideology Comes to Notre Dame by William H. Dempsey at The Catholic Thing. When Pope Francis spoke out about the “woke” gender theory fueling today’s transgender frenzy as “a great falsehood” and “ideological colonization,” he doubtless didn’t anticipate that Notre Dame, America’s leading Catholic university, would become one of the colonizers. But it has. Read
Catholic Medical School Teaching Gender-Transition Therapies by Edie Heipel at National Catholic Register. Medical students at Georgetown University have been taught that the only way to help patients suffering from gender dysphoria is to “fix” their bodies through drug therapies and gender-transition surgeries, a claim that contradicts Catholic teaching on human sexuality, according to an investigation by The Spectator. The news outlet cited information drawn from lecture slides from a course taught last year and a description of a clinical rotation course in a course catalog. Read
How Michigan’s Proposal 3 Allows Child Sterilization Without Parental Consent by Jenny Ingles at National Catholic Register. [T]here is a growing movement among people suffering from gender dysphoria who seek to change their physical sex to match what they believe is their internal gender. And we know these conversations and actions around “transitioning” are happening at younger and younger ages. One only needs to follow the news headlines about how these gender-identity issues are handled in public schools, for example. With that in mind, it is not unreasonable to think that a teenager who is struggling with his or her gender identity would seek these procedures and do so without his or her parents' knowledge or permission. Under Proposal 3, that teenager would be allowed to do so without his or her parents' knowledge or consent. Read
'Back on the Field': Praying High School Football Coach Reinstated after Supreme Court Win by Jeremiah Poff at Washington Examiner. Joe Kennedy will be reinstated as the head coach of the Bremerton High School football team in Washington state, according to court documents filed Tuesday. The filing comes after the Supreme Court in June ruled 6-3 on ideological lines that the school district had violated his right to exercise his religion freely when it fired him for praying after football games. Read
Throwback Thursday
Catechism of the Catholic Church: The Eucharist, In Brief by Jim Cosgrove at National Catholic Register on April 6, 2003. The Eucharist is the heart and the summit of the Church's life, for in it Christ associates his Church and all her members with his sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving offered once for all on the cross to his Father; by this sacrifice he pours out the graces of salvation on his body, which is the Church. Read