What truly makes a Catholic education Catholic? Is it naming the school after a saint? Is it the curriculum? The fact that students go to Mass weekly or daily? Is it the daily interactions of learning and living in a faith community designed to forge disciples?
The recently published Front Royal Statement aims to answer these questions by laying out seven cardinal principles for Catholic primary and secondary education. The document was drafted at the inaugural Front Royal Education Summit held at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. The statement is the fruit of a gathering that convened an impressive group of advocates for the renewal of Catholic education, among them Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, Bishop Thomas Daly, Bishop Thomas John Paprocki, Bishop Earl K. Fernandes, leadership from the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education and the Augustine Institute, and faculty and administrators from Christendom College.
The statement is welcome and grounds Catholic education in a view of the human person as the image of God who is made for ultimate communion with him and relationship with others. As a Catholic school teacher, I welcome the clarity of the statement. As the mom of a child with Down syndrome, I can’t help but notice that something is missing.
If the purpose of the statement is to propose “a well-rounded vision for authentic reform and renewal by integrating essential philosophical and theological foundations with the practical realities . . . that shape Catholic school life,” then the needs of children with disabilities must be taken into account. By and large, Catholic schools do not educate children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). This too must be a stated objective of renewal. Children with IDD are also ordered toward heaven, and extra chromosomes do not afford anyone a shortcut to the pearly gates. They also need to have a sacramental imagination cultivated to inspire a love of heaven.
By and large, Catholic schools do not educate children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). This too must be a stated objective of renewal.
I know many of the signatories of this document know, love, and value individuals with disabilities. In conversations both public and private, they have championed the inclusion of students with disabilities in Catholic schools, and they have likely encountered resistance, fear, and the response that educating students with disabilities is just a bridge too far when engaged in the vital task of renewal.
While each one of these seven principles theoretically applies to a student with disabilities, in practice, students with higher-support needs are often forgotten. And that is why we need documents like this to explicitly state that educating students with disabilities in our Catholic schools is not something to be added on later, when the school is ready, but is fundamental to the mission of Catholic education.
According to the Front Royal statement, human “dignity calls us to love others as ourselves regardless of origin, age, ability, or rank, especially the vulnerable” (emphasis mine). In the statement, there is no recognition of the Church’s responsibility to students like my son. This is a responsibility that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops articulated in the 1978 Pastoral Statement on Persons with Disabilities: “The bishops of the United States feel a concern for persons with disabilities that goes beyond their spiritual welfare to encompass their total well-being. This concern should find expression at all levels” (emphasis mine). The public schools are legally mandated to educate my son; Catholic schools have a higher mandate, one that comes from Jesus Christ himself. As he said in Matthew 19:14 “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them.” A closer look at the seven principles reveals that while children with IDD are called to learn, know, and serve God in a Catholic community of believers, there are many hindrances.
My son also bears the imago dei, the image of God, that educators are called to recognize as stated in principle two, but the practical reality is that students like him do not often attend Catholic schools. He, too, is ordered toward God, relationship, and love (principles 1 and 2). At his public school, I have seen his teachers acknowledge this, and they come from a range of religious backgrounds. In fact, one of their favorite terms for him is habibi, Arabic for “my little love.” Could we not do the same in our Catholic schools?
Principle 3 defines the right of a child as one of “flourishing” that goes beyond “the transmission of information or the cultivation of economic utility.” My son, and children like him, most certainly have a capability for flourishing that will far outpace their economic utility. They too have a vocation to live out in the world. Principle 3 also suggests that the parents have the right to freely choose the best education for the child and that the state should and must support that choice so that economics do not constrain freedom. However, as a parent of a child with disabilities, my freedom is not constrained by the state. The state is often the only option that I have.
We need documents like this to explicitly state that educating students with disabilities in our Catholic schools is not something to be added on later, when the school is ready, but is fundamental to the mission of Catholic education.
No, my choice is constrained by the fact that most Catholic schools are not ready or are unwilling to accommodate his learning needs, and that leads me to principle 4, the ecclesial responsibility of bishops and priests. Many bishops have recognized the importance of educating students with disabilities, including Bishop Michael F. Burbidge, who leads the Catholic Diocese of Arlington, where the Front Royal statement was written. Bishop Burbidge has included the education of students with disabilities as a major initiative of the diocesan strategic plan. Leadership from our bishops and priests is essential. It is their job to provide the spiritual grounding and material support for the renewal of Catholic education. We need more bishops to publicly state that students with disabilities can and should be educated in Catholic schools.
Likewise, principle 5 states that formation of teachers should go beyond “secular licensure, certification, or accreditation frameworks.” The “intellectual, spiritual, and pedagogical” dimensions of effective teacher formation must include explicit instruction on how to reach a diversity of learners. As the 1978 Pastoral Statement says, “Catholic elementary and secondary school teachers could be provided in-service training in how best to integrate disabled students into regular programs of education.” In this they should model themselves after Christ the Teacher and his mother, who always preaches the same message but takes on different names to become closer to her children. The apparitions at Tepeyac, Kibeho, La Vang, and others are a master class in differentiated instruction. Learning consulting companies such as Inclusion Solutions, Catholic Inclusion, and Secret Garden Educational Pathways have been founded to address the specific need of equipping Catholic schools with the tools needed to educate children with disabilities.
The curriculum proposed in principle 6 has the knowledge of Jesus Christ at the center. Each and every discipline serves as a means to know and glorify the Lord. While children with disabilities might not be able to parse Latin grammar or construct a complex mathematical proof, they deserve to receive the patrimony of Western culture as much as any of their peers, be moved by the contemplation of a Bernini painting, or be transported by listening to Bach.
Finally in principle 7, we come to the crux of the matter: Education is not a purely individualistic endeavor. It shapes culture, and “culture is the living bond that unites a people, the sum of practices, symbols, habits, and institutions that together create a shared environment. It is not static, but a vital social inheritance, received and handed on through education, family, religious practice, institutions, and communal memory.” The modern educational school system in the United States was created in tandem with the process of institutionalizing people with disabilities. Thus our education process was segregated from the outset. Catholic schools were created in reaction to the public school system, but could not counter the cultural trends that surrounded them.
The Front Royal Statement declares that “schools . . . embody and transmit living culture.” A true renewal of Catholic education cannot take place without reckoning with the fact that many Catholic schools, while proclaiming to be places of welcoming for all, systematically exclude children with a range of disabilities. In fact, most people educated in Catholic schools since the 1950s would be hard pressed to remember a classmate with an intellectual disability like Down syndrome or similar. Students with disabilities need to know the love of Christ and know that he came to redeem them too. Catholic education must place all human persons, including those who are vulnerable or learn differently, at the center. It must consider these students’ needs in their instructional design, and it must do this as primary responsibility, not as an afterthought.
What those who drafted the Front Royal Statement must acknowledge is that a school that is not educating students with disabilities risks perpetuating the very culture it claims to refute. Exclusion reinforces beliefs that individuals with disabilities do not truly belong because their vulnerabilities are too expensive or inconvenient to accommodate. That belief has real consequences for the sacramental imagination of all students and life-or-death consequences for prenatally diagnosed children, as the tragic case of Youtuber Jesse Ridgeway recently demonstrated. The true success of the renewal of Catholic education will not be how many adults can quote Aquinas but how our Catholic community truly values each member of the body of Christ.
Thankfully, there has been a growing movement of schools and dioceses that have decided to imagine a future that includes individuals with IDD in our schools, churches, and workplaces, one where schools are committed to the challenging, but rewarding, work of educating students with disabilities. You only have to look at the Diocese of Arlington, the Diocese of Kansas City–St. Joseph, the Archdiocese of St. Louis, the Archdiocese of Seattle, and others. Many children in these schools are blessed to be educated alongside a peer with a disability. Immaculata Academy in Louisville, KY; St. Jerome Academy in Hyattsville, MD; and Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington, VA, are just a few that show it can be done. Schools that are currently educating students with disabilities are most generous with their advice, and nonprofits like Porto Charities, the Fire Foundation, One Classroom, the Catholic Coalition for Special Education, and others are there to help provide the funding and training.
As Pope Leo states in Magnifica Humanitas, “Everything that appears as a ‘limit’—incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability—tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.” God will not be outdone in generosity. He tells us time and time again that if we listen to his words, we will have life. We need to start believing him and building schools capable of educating students with IDD. If we do not consciously create a school culture that values every human life, then we are just presenting the wolf of modern education in ecclesial guise. An eighth principle, calling schools to audit the lived experience of students in Catholic schools against these lofty statements, will bring us closer to building the City of God.