– Fr Leonard E Dollentas
Last year in September Dr Astrid S. Tuminez, a Filipina was named as the 7th president of Utah Valley University (UVU), Utah’s largest public university. She is the first ever female to hold such post. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University, a master’s degree from Harvard University, and a doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the video posted by UVU, it shows her welcoming students to their campus in six different languages namely: English, Spanish, Ilonggo, Filipino, Russian, and French. She shared in the video her humble beginnings in the Philippines where she said she lived in the slums in Iloilo, and when Catholic nuns came to their home, they invited her and her sisters to study in the Catholic school. She recalled:
“A pivotal event changed the arc of my life when I was five years old. Nuns from a Catholic order called the Daughters of Charity began talking with my mother and older sisters one day. The Daughters of Charity ran one of the best convent schools in Iloilo City, the Colegio del Sagrado Corazon de Jesus. They had just established a free department for underprivileged children – and they asked my sisters and me to attend. They closed the free department a few years later, but five of us kept going and they didn’t charge us anything. What did that education mean for me? From being an illiterate child, ignorant, malnourished and insecure, I became someone who learned to read, discovered numbers and devoured everything.” (Education Carves Patch from Manila to Microsoft. Newsdeeply.com.)
Dr. Tuminez is just one of the countless people around the world who benefited from the educational missions of the Catholic Church.
EDUCATION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
From the days they started their apostolic works, Catholic schools have generously served the needs of the socially and economically deprived. With their mission, they have integrated innumerable young Catholics into the ecclesial and social life of the world. These schools have followed the long tradition of educational charisms of a number of saints and countless other religious and lay people who generously dedicated themselves to Christ in the education and formation of the poor, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized, as well as the wealthy, the middle-and working-class Catholics.
Through the ages, the poor would have always found remarkably innovative ways of helping themselves educationally, through the Catholic schools with its scholarship programs.
Indeed, Catholic education is a mission, a system designed to encourage young people to achieve their dreams. This is done by providing an education rich in life-skills based on Christian principles; assisting and supporting learners to find a direction and purpose in their lives and hope for a better future. Pope John Paul II reminisced this educational direction of the Catholic church when he wrote:
“The girls from poor families that were taught by the Ursuline nuns in the 15th Century, the boys that Saint Joseph of Calasanz saw running and shouting through the streets of Rome, those that De La Salle came across in the villages of France, or those that were offered shelter by Don Bosco, can be found again among those who have lost all sense of meaning in life and lack any type of inspiring ideal, those to whom no values are proposed and who do not know the beauty of faith, who come from families which are broken and incapable of love, often living in situations of material and spiritual poverty, slaves to the new idols of a society, which, not infrequently, promises them only a future of unemployment and marginalization.” (The Catholic School On the Threshold of the Third Millennium No. 15, Congregation for Catholic Education, December 28, 1997)
ENCOUNTER THE POOR IN A DEEPER WAY
Evidently, today’s education is going through rapid changes, and the generation that is being educated is changing quickly as well. This follows that each educator will be facing constantly a situation which, as Pope Francis put it, “provides us with new challenges which sometimes are difficult for us to understand.” (“Wake up the World. The conversation between Pope Francis and Religious Superiors,” in La Civiltà Cattolica, n. 3925, January 4, 2014, p. 17.)
Aware of this present-day situation, the Church’s documents on Catholic Education has introduced a concept called the New Poor. It emphasizes that while many of the school children today are a different kind of poverty; not hungry for material needs, but many of them lack the other crucial basics of life such as love, hope and the offer of a deeper spiritual existence. Many of them have come to accept as normal the present technology addiction, obtuse commercialism, obsessions with celebrities and spiritual deficiency. The new poverty is when one is denied access to access to hope, warmth, joy, love, prayer, and silence.
The document clearly emphasized the primary missions of Catholic schools: “In its ecclesial dimension another characteristic of the Catholic school has its root: it is a school for all, with special attention to those who are weakest.”
SEEING THE POOR IN A NEW LIGHT
The teaching of the church is an incessant challenge to the administrators and teachers of today’s Catholic schools to perceive their tasks not just as professions, but a ministry, an apostolic work they share with the mission of Jesus. To share this mission with Jesus is to carry out the Catholic education not only from the viewpoint of the achievers and successful students, the brightest and the cream of the crop- but from the faces of the losers, the poor and the excluded. While Catholic schools may take satisfaction in their board placers, the best achievers, the passers and honors students- could they pay more attention to those who fail? The Religious who founded and staffed most of the Catholic schools at the beginning of their foundations are the source of the Institutional Charisms of each Catholic school. Sadly, many of these schools are losing these visible, living signs of the Catholic tradition in education. New innovations in educational approaches and heavy competitions among schools pave the way to emphasize more on learners’ achievements that would brag the school status and put them steadily on the limelight, rather than helping those struggling and coping up with the academic demands. The eventual solution for the Catholic schools for those with academic deficiencies or rough students is to advise them to transfer to other schools. This is a depressing experience of discrimination for the parents, and for the learners, this creates an abhorrence that distances them away from the priests, the religious and the church.
CATHOLIC SCHOOLS TO BE OF REAL SERVICE TO ALL
To be of real service to the society, Catholic educators have to be more effective, more creative to address the new and real challenges of today’s society.
Catholic schools can provide alternative sources of Effective Interventions for struggling learners. When it comes to constantly failing learners, ordinary class teaching is not enough and special interventions are required. Instead of advising learners who are academically deficient for an exodus out of the school, out of mercy and compassion they may be retained and benefit from this special program.
Recently, for a pastoral reason I was asked to help the teachers deal with two Filipino boys at Colégio Diocesano de São José (CDSJ) 2 & 3. The academic performance of the two boys, in the major subjects, were not satisfactorily achieved as expected. I talked with the two boys, their Filipina mother, and the teachers. Throughout the whole process of getting deep to the roots of the problem, I could really admire the love, compassion, and support the teachers have shown to the two boys and to the parents. They have proposed some intensive academic interventions in the school, after class hours and on Saturdays. I’m so impressed how the teachers deeply care about the success of their pupils, and how they understood the situation of the parents. The two boys are not even Macao locals, they are Filipinos and foreigners. Many learners in school are in such pretty tough situation. They have no adult guidance or good role models to support them. Teachers in such schools need to be concerned, considerate and compassionate.
Let us, therefore, encounter the new poor in Catholic schools in a deeper way, to take on their struggles as our own. Let them encounter not only the academic discipline but also the warmth, joy, love, understanding, and compassion from the Catholic schools.
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