Fides et Ratio Seminars

             
CHRISTIAN LEARNING, CATHOLIC EDUCATION, CHRISTIAN LIVING
ARCHDIOCESE OF OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLAHOMA
SATURDAY,  JULY 8 – SATURDAY, JULY 15, 2023
INSPIRATION, VISION AND MISSION

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Fides et Ratio Seminars Mission Statement

In the year 2000, after reading Fides et Ratio by then-Pope John Paul II, the founders of the Fides et Ratio Seminars were inspired and challenged, to invest their intellectual, spiritual and professional resources to enable a transformation of the way Catholic and non-Catholic teachers and administrators prepare themselves to carry out their educational and formational responsibilities in the professional and institutional setting of contemporary American schooling and culture.
 
The founding vision of human flourishing that motivates the Seminars is expressed in its mission motto. By contributing to the education and formation of educators interested in Christian and Catholic learning, we seek to “nurture the souls of young men and women by strengthening Catholic liberal education.” We do so by nourishing the intellectual and spiritual preparation of educators with an enriched understanding and appreciation of the principles and practices of the time-honored Catholic intellectual tradition about the ends and means of a liberal education in the arts and sciences.
 

Vision Statement of the Catholic Learning,
Catholic Education, Christian Living Seminar

In our times, American Catholic education - from primary and secondary to colleges, universities and seminaries – suffers from an intellectual and spiritual malaise of unprecedented proportions not witnessed since the founding of the first American institutions of Catholic learning from the late 18^th century into the early 20^th century.   The most serious difficulties embroiling institutions of education and formation identifying themselves as Catholic are not the highly publicized financial and counter-cultural challenges sweeping across the entire American higher education landscape. The heart of the crisis is that nominally Catholic institutions of learning, at all levels, no longer know why they are Catholic and thus no longer understand the why and how of education.
 
The telling symptom of the serious threat to American Catholic educational identity is the fact that the curricula of most Catholic centers of learning are shaped by thinly formulated statements and understandings of mission. These serve as weak umbrellas holding diverse programs, faculty and academic agendas together in an intellectual and spiritual compromise that is ordinarily little more than tenuously guided and integrated by any long-established Catholic vision of the why and how of Catholic education and formation.  
 
The mission motto of the Fides et Ratio Seminars is: “to nurture the souls of young men and women by strengthening Catholic liberal education, starting with their teachers and mentors.” The path to educating and forming Catholic teachers and mentors is the same, whether their vocation is to serve students at the primary, secondary, college, university or seminary levels. They must be schooled to understand how and why the nurturing source of Catholic liberal education and formation is the millennia-old comprehensive Catholic spiritual and intellectual vision of why and how young men and women need to be educated in order to become the Christ-formed mature persons they were intended to be at the moment of their creation in God’s image and likeness.
 
The aim of all Fides et Ratio Seminars, starting with the foundational “Christian Learning, Catholic Education and Christian Living” Seminar, is to introduce attendees to the Catholic intellectual tradition that ought to inform, integrate and inspire their vocation as teachers and mentors. The intellectual tradition of the why and how of Catholic education, which emerged with the early Church Fathers, especially with Saints Basil and Augustine along with Boethius, was most highly developed in the Middle Ages, especially in the thought of Hugh of Saint Victor, Saint Anselm and Saint Thomas Aquinas. In the nineteenth century, Blessed John Henry Newman restated and recast the best of the Church Fathers and Doctors’ millennia-old reflections on Catholic education for our late modern times. We would do well to listen to Newman’s account of why and how a unified Catholic education, which grows from Christian learning about fallen and redeemed human nature, leads to forming students for Christian living in faith, hope and charity.
 
On the first Sunday of the 1856 academic year at the Catholic University of Ireland, John Henry Newman, then rector and master- mentor, preached a remarkable yet little-known sermon on the Feast of St. Monica. In an essay entitled “Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training,” Newman gave a timeless diagnosis of the psychological disunity of the mind that plagued the young Augustine, has always plagued youth, and already plagued university studies in his own time. Newman recounts the trials and tribulations of St. Monica as she worried and prayed over the future St. Augustine.  He moves from describing the particular youthful unrest and wanderings of Augustine to uncovering its universal cause in the disruption of the divinely ordained original perfected nature of the human mind that was rent asunder by man’s self-inflicted post-lapsarian disordered condition.
 
The picture of Monica suffering over the restless Augustine is not just about the condition of a fourth-century young man’s disordered soul. His story is that of all generations of young men – in fact, of mankind in all ages and all cultures – held fast in the “same doleful dreary wandering…” that is counterbalanced by “the same anxiously beating heart of impotent affection.” Augustine is every young man rushing forth into life filled with young ambition, intellectual energy and turbulent appetites. He is “educated, yet untaught” with sharpened “but unenlightened and untrained” powers. Newman makes clear that, as things are found now in the world, not only Augustine’s soul but the state of every man’s soul is unendingly marked by internal rebellion.
             
Newman asserts that he wants “to destroy that diversity of centers, which puts everything into confusion by creating a contrariety of influences.” Newman’s manifesto of what is required to ameliorate the dispersion, since time immemorial, of the intellectual, moral and spiritual powers in young men, not just in Augustine, is clear, direct and specific. “I wish the same spots and the same individuals to be at once oracles of philosophy and shrines of devotion. It will not satisfy me, what satisfies so many, to have two independent systems, intellectual and religious, going at once side by side, by a sort of division of labour, and only accidentally brought together.”
 
Who has responsibility for mentoring youth in the re-integration of their intellectual, moral and spiritual powers? As Newman remarked earlier, there is “something happy in the circumstance that the first Sunday of our academical worship should fall on the feast of St. Monica.” Youth needs the first mentorship of their natural mothers such as Monica. Only later, are they ready to be delivered to the schools and universities as their alma maters under the guidance of the Church, the Holy See and our spiritual Mother in the person of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
 
Still, Newman gives pride of place to the influence of the schools and universities on the minds of youth. The influence of sanctity is greater over the span of their entire lives. But, in the heat of their youth, as their minds open beyond the confines of domestic upbringing, the influence of their intellect – be it well-formed or deformed – is greater and more determining for their lives to come. Given that the literary and scientific teachers, rather than religious and ecclesiastic authorities, really have the attention of young men, it is the obligation of the schools and universities to articulate and implement the program of educating and forming young minds to restore and preserve the unity and integration of the mind’s two dimensions of intellect (truth) and duty (virtue).

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CHRISTIAN LEARNING, CATHOLIC EDUCATION, CHRISTIAN LIVING

ARCHDIOCESE OF OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLAHOMA

SATURDAY, JULY 8 – SATURDAY, JULY 15, 2023

 TENTATIVE SYLLABUS

SATURDAY EVENING: WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION TO THE FIDES ET RATIO SEMINARS (Blue Folder) 

SUNDAY: TWENTIETH CENTURY EDUCATION, THE AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL WAY AND CHRISTIAN LEARNING 

                   MORNING I: Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, pp. I - 116

                   MORNING Ii: Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, pp. 117-242

                   AFTERNOON I: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Book), Preface & Introduction, pp. 19-43

                   AFTERNOON II: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Book), 

                                                          Music, pp. 68-81 and Relationships – Sex, pp. 97-108, Love & Eros, pp. 122-137

MONDAY: VOCATION, FREEDOM AND LEARNING IN THE AMERICAN WAY 

                   MORNING I: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Notebook II), 48 pages 

                                           Volume II, Part One - Preface, Section 1-Chapters I, II, V, VI, VII, VIII, X, 

                   MORNING II: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, ‘The Revolt of Mother’ (Notebook III) Short Story, 14 pages 

                     LEARNING IN THE CHRISTIAN/CATHOLIC WAYS THROUGH VOCATION AND OBEDIENCE 

                   AFTERNOON I: Saint Benedict, The Rule of Saint Benedict, pp. xxxi – 70, especially pp. 3-21 

                   AFTERNOON II: Saint Thomas More, Selected Writings, pp. 119 - 243 

 TUESDAY: TIMELESS CHRISTIAN MAN AND THE CATHOLIC EDUCATION OF HIS SOUL

                   MORNING I: St. Augustine, Confessions (Book), Book One-pp. 1-21 and Book Five - pp. 73-92  

                   MORNING II: St. Augustine, Confessions (Book) Books Seven– Nine  

                   AFTERNOON I: St. Thomas Aquinas, (Notebook V) Selections to be announced 

                   AFTERNOON I: St. Thomas Aquinas, (Notebook V) Selections to be announced                         

                   EVENING SESSION: “The Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo” (Notebook VI), 3 pages 

WEDNESDAY: TWENTIETH CENTURY CATHOLIC MAN – INHERITOR OF TIMELESS CATHOLIC EDUCATION – PART I 

                   MORNING I: Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings (Book) entire, pp. 5-76

                   MORNING II: Pope Benedict XVI, “Wounded by the Arrow of Beauty” (Notebook VI), 5 pages

                   AFTERNOON I: Josef Pieper, The Christian Idea of Man (Book), pp. 3-22

                   AFTERNOON II: Josef Pieper, The Christian Idea of Man (Book), pp. 23-42

THURSDAY: TWENTIETH CENTURY CATHOLIC MAN – INHERITOR OF TIMELESS CATHOLIC EDUCATION – PART II

                   MORNING I: G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown Stories (Notebook VII), 35 pages

                   MORNING II. G. K. Chesterton, “Furrows” (Notebook VII), 2 pages 

                   AFTERNOON I: Rudyard Kipling, Kim (Book), pp. 1-118 

                   AFTERNOON II: Rudyard Kipling, Kim (Book), pp. 119-230                       

FRIDAY: CHRISTIAN-CATHOLIC WAYS OF LIVING - MARRIAGE, PRIESTHOOD (RELIGIOUS AND CONSECRATED LIVES)

                   MORNING I: Saint John Paul II, The Poetry of John Paul II – Roman Triptych (Notebook VI), 39 pages  

                   MORNING II: St. John Chrysostom, On Marriage and Family Life (Notebook VIII)

                   AFTERNOON I: Blessed John Henry Newman, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (Notebook I)

                                                          “Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training,” 6 pages

                   AFTERNOON II: John Paul II, Gift and Mystery (Book) entire, pp. 1-114

                   EVENING SESSION: Banquet

 SATURDAY: WAITING FOR CHRIST AND THE PRESENCE OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION  

                   MORNING I: Samuel Becket, Waiting for Godot (Book) entire, in English or French, circa 85 pages 

                   MORNING II: Simone Weil, Waiting for God, (Notebook X), 9 pages

                                                           “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”

“Nurturing the souls of young men and women by strengthening Catholic liberal education”

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