Seton Magazine Catholic Homeschool Articles, Advice & Resources
The proper and immediate aim of Christian education is to cooperate with divine grace in forming the true and perfect Christian… For the true Christian must live a supernatural life in Christ and display it in all his actions.
For precisely this reason, Christian education takes in the whole of human life, physical and spiritual, intellectual and moral, individual, domestic, and social.
Hence the true Christian, a product of Christian education, is the supernatural man who thinks, judges, and acts constantly and consistently in accordance with right reason, illumined by the supernatural life of the example and teaching of Christ.
The authentic Christian does not renounce the activities of this life, he does not stunt his natural faculties, but he develops and perfects them by coordinating them with the supernatural. He thus ennobles what is merely natural in life…
This fact is proved by the whole history of Christianity and its institutions, which is nothing else but the history of true civilization and progress up to the present day.
Christianity stands out conspicuously in the lives of the numerous saints, whom the Church and she alone, produces; and in whom [the saints] is perfectly realized the purpose of Christian education, and who have in every way ennobled and benefited human society.
What of the founders of so many charitable and social institutions, of the vast numbers of saintly educators, men and women who have perpetuated and multiplied their life work by leaving behind them prolific institutions of Christian education, aiding families and for the advantage of nations?
Such are the fruits of Christian education. Their price and value are derived from the supernatural virtue and life in Christ, which Christian education forms and develops in man. By His example, he is at the same time the universal Model…in the period of His hidden life, a life of labor and obedience, adorned with all virtues, personal, domestic, and social, before God and men.
Encyclical: Christian Education of Youth
Pius XI, 1939
