Fifty-eight million students in 210,000 Catholic schools and universities all over the world show how seriously the Church takes Christ’s command: “Go and teach all nations”. The Vatican II Declaration Gravissimum Educationis formally and forcefully stated this in 1965, fifty years ago.

On this anniversary, the Congregation of Catholic Education organised a World Congress in Rome (November 18-21) with the theme Educating Today and Tomorrow. A Renewing Passion, bringing together more than 1,200 participants.

Stories of educational ventures in all kinds of contexts brought out the richness in which this mission is being carried out: schools for the poor and marginalised in slums, inner cities and rural areas; schools for refugees and in war zones, conflict ridden communities and diverse religious contexts.

A worldwide survey held in preparation for the Congress focused on “the challenges that the ‘educational emergency’ provokes today”.

The most highlighted challenges were the following:

• giving every student an integrated education,

• forming educators,

• reaching out to the poor,

• affirming the identity of Catholic Education in an increasingly laicised and non-religious context.

Meeting so many people gripped by the passion for education was a forming experience in itself. But the highlight was the concluding audience with Pope Francis.

He spoke in his usual incisive and highly challenging style. For him, educating means introducing the child to the truth in its totality, both immanent reality (fulfilling earthly needs and aspirations) and transcendent (fulfilling our ultimate destiny as children of God).

“How can we speak of Catholic Education without speaking of humanity?” asked the Pope. “Promoting human values in their totality opens to Faith and hence to Christian education.” Christian education cannot be equated with just catechising or – God forbid – proselytising, he said

Pope Francis emphatically appealed to Catholic educational institutions to go beyond educating the privileged, not limiting their mission to those who live at the centre of society, well shielded from the vulnerabilities of the poor.

“We can no longer justify this in the name of ‘forming leaders’,” he said.

It is the mission of Catholic education to help the wounded poor develop the full humanity they already have. “Our passion for education leads to the full humanisation of those we serve.”

This is indeed their core mission of Church schools: to be living witnesses of Christ as the most complete expression of true humanity in the world of today.

Yes indeed, as one speaker said, “One cannot educate without love and without passion.”

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