Voices of the Diocese
By Jeff Schinstock, Director of evangelizationand catechesis
As we begin another school year, an old saying attributed to St. Bonaventure has taken a prominent place in my mind: “If you learn everything except Christ, you learn nothing. If you learn nothing except Christ, you learn everything.”
That is a pretty bold statement for a Doctor of the Church and one of the great intellectuals of the Middle Ages. Bonaventure certainly was not opposed to education. He was a brilliant scholar and theologian. His point was about the purpose of learning. Ultimately, everything we learn should lead us toward the One who is Truth Himself. All truth, no matter what the subject, reflects Him.
That idea captures what we are trying to accomplish as we enter year two of the rollout of the new high school religion curriculum in all six Catholic high schools in the Diocese of Lincoln.
I have the privilege of joining our incredible theology teachers in the classroom myself this year. I am teaching two sections of sophomores at Pius X High School in Lincoln. That means I get to experience firsthand something I have spent a great deal of time helping develop.
The four-year curriculum follows a consistent structure. Each year contains eight units, four each semester. There is an intentional progression across the four years, but there is also a rhythm within each year.
We begin with prayer. Not simply telling students that they should pray, but teaching them how to enter into a relationship with God and how to sustain an actual prayer life. Prayer is not an accessory to Catholic education. If Christianity is fundamentally a relationship with Jesus Christ, our students need opportunities to learn how to speak with Him, listen to Him and remain with Him.
Then we teach them how to think. Our sophomores will review the logic they encountered during freshman year and then build upon it. They will study logical fallacies and begin recognizing the ways rhetoric can be used to persuade and sometimes manipulate.
That seems particularly important right now. Our young people live in a world overflowing with information. Every day they encounter arguments, advertisements, videos, posts and voices competing for their attention. Formation cannot simply tell them what to think. We have to help them learn how to think, how to recognize a sound argument and how to distinguish truth from rhetoric designed merely to provoke a reaction.
After we work on the process of thinking, we arrive at the summit. Jesus Christ.
During freshman year, our students spent considerable time in the Old Testament. They encountered creation, covenant, salvation history and God’s gradual preparation of His people. Now, as sophomores, they turn to the Gospels and take a deep look at the person of Jesus Christ.
Commenting on the prophet Isaiah, St. Jerome famously wrote, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.” We want our students to know Scripture precisely because we want them to know Christ.
They will encounter Jesus in the Gospels, not simply as another historical figure to study, but as the fulfillment of the story they encountered during freshman year. Who does Jesus say He is? What does He teach? Why does He perform miracles? Why does He establish the Church? What happens on the Cross? What does the Resurrection mean? The first semester concludes with the apostolic age and the early Church. The story continues after the Ascension as ordinary men and women, filled with the Holy Spirit, carry the Gospel into the world.
Second semester follows that Gospel as it spreads. Students will encounter the Church Fathers and see how the early Church wrestled with questions, defended the faith and articulated doctrine with increasing precision. They will discover that doctrines did not simply drop out of the sky as theological vocabulary. The Church prayed, argued, suffered, reflected upon Scripture and, guided by the Holy Spirit, came to express more clearly what she had received from Christ and the Apostles.
Then we will spend significant time with one particular Church Father: St. Augustine. Our sophomores will take a deep dive into The Confessions. I love that we get to introduce teenagers to Augustine because he is remarkably difficult to keep at a safe historical distance. His restless heart, ambition, friendships, mistakes, desires, search for happiness and eventual surrender to God remain intensely human, and incredibly relatable to this age group.
Augustine gives our students something more than another text to study. Hopefully, he becomes something of a friend. And that brings us back to where we started. Prayer. At the end of the year, students will return to the same basic sequence of prayer with which they began, but this time they will approach it through the lens of their new friend Augustine. They will have traveled through Scripture, encountered Christ, watched the Gospel spread, listened to the Fathers and walked alongside a restless man who finally discovered the One for whom his heart had always been searching.
Then we ask them again to pray. We want all of that knowledge to lead somewhere. Or, more accurately, to Someone.
St. Bonaventure understood it. St. Jerome understood it. Augustine eventually discovered it. If our students learn everything except Christ, we have missed the point. If through everything they learn, they come to know Christ, we will have given them an education that can shape an entire life.
