Continuing our Leaders in Catholic Education series highlighting Catholic leaders around the country playing significant roles in the Catholic renewal movement, I would like to introduce Michael Ortner, founder of the Ortner Family Foundation. Its mission is
to promote human flourishing by leveraging opportunities for formation and fellowship consistent with Catholic teaching. We believe that the breakdown of three institutions—churches, families, and schools—is the root cause of today’s social, political, and economic problems. We believe that the key to fixing these problems is to fix the culture, and the best way to do that is to fix our schools.
Beginning with our Catholic schools.
Michael coauthored The Catholic School Playbook (Word on Fire). You can read an excerpt of the book here about the past and current status of Catholic education.
Melissa Mitchell: Please tell us about your family, your Catholic community, and your upbringing.
Michael Ortner: I have been married for twenty-two years and we have six children. We homeschool our kids through sixth grade, and then we send them to a local Christian classical school. We are active in our local parish, where all of our boys have been altar servers.
I was born and raised Catholic in a small town outside of Philadelphia with my parents and two brothers. I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and most Catholics I knew were not particularly well formed in the faith. Many of those challenges that contributed to a lack of solid Catholic formation are currently being addressed with amazing ministries and resources available now that were not available back then.
Tell us briefly about your professional career.
I graduated from college and entered the business world of investment banking and management consulting. I then worked for a tech start-up, and it was there that I decided to start my own tech company called Capterra, an online marketplace for business software. I feel very blessed for that experience, and it was a much more fulfilling career than I could have ever envisioned. After eighteen years, I decided to sell the company to spend more time with my family.
What inspired you to form the Ortner Family Foundation? Which organizations do you support?
Our charitable foundation is dedicated to organizations in the world of Catholic education. We’ve been longtime supporters of the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE). The Institute has been at the center of the Catholic education renewal movement for the past twenty years by helping schools regain their Catholic identity. Unfortunately, many Catholic schools followed the public school utilitarian and test-driven model and lost what made them distinctively Catholic. However, with support from ICLE, Catholic schools are rediscovering Catholic liberal education.
Individually, it’s our formation and fellowship that leads to our interaction with others and the lives we choose to live.
St. Jerome Institute is a new Catholic high school in the DC area. It is reenvisioning a Catholic liberal arts high school in terms of curriculum, school culture, teacher recruitment, and teacher-mentor development. They’ve created an institute that is a shining light to inspire other schools to adopt innovative approaches to Catholic education as an integral component of curriculum, such as teaching Latin.
Cana Academy is a training academy for teachers, focusing on the humanities: “Through our exceptional training and resources, we provide everything teachers need to lead their students well. . . . Better teaching improves learning; and better learning advances both the good of each individual student and the common good.” Specifically, Cana Academy trains teachers to guide discussions through interactive seminars with great classics such as Homer’s Odyssey, Plato’s Dialogues, and Aristotle’s Ethics.
Trinity House Community, another organization we support, is a “Catholic family ministry that inspires families to make home a taste of heaven for the renewal of faith and culture. The heart of the Trinity House Way is that families are a communion of persons, an image of the Holy Trinity. We give families the formation and fellowship they need to be able to live out and pass on the faith.”
Our foundation also supports formation and fellowship that has been integral in my own personal journey. The profound impact of who we keep company with and how we are formed by our families and communities is what drives culture because people drive culture. Individually, it’s our formation and fellowship that leads to our interaction with others and the lives we choose to live, which is a focus within our foundation.
How would you describe the renewal in Catholic education movement? How does classical education contribute to the renewal movement?
I describe the Catholic renewal movement as a three-legged stool: spiritual, intellectual, and cultural.
The spiritual leg is a renewed focus on faith with 1) the sacraments: students go to Mass to receive the Eucharist and go to confession; 2) prayer formation: help students form personal relationships with Christ through deeper prayer; and 3) doctrine: theological and philosophical ideas and questions should not be relegated to a religion class—they should be the integrated, foundational force in a curriculum.
The intellectual leg embraces classical education including liberal arts, humanities, the great books, classic literature, and foreign languages, specifically Latin. Latin is the language of the Church, and much of the great literature of history was written in Latin. The Catholic intellectual tradition includes Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante and into twentieth-century Catholic authors like Flannery O’Connor. Students should be reading The Federalist Papers and The Declaration of Independence and great American authors, like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Mark Twain. All of this is part of the renewal movement, and Catholic education is regaining that tradition.
The cultural leg of the stool is directly aligned with classical education and formation of the virtues. We live in a culture that is currently broken; therefore, we should not be afraid to embrace the Catholic virtues and model a Catholic counterculture. A Catholic school culture should look fundamentally different from that of a public school, and it should impact the rest of the culture. It is so much more attractive than what today’s secular culture offers.
What inspired you to write The Catholic School Playbook?
We wrote The Catholic School Playbook because much of the spiritual, intellectual, and cultural phenomena of the Catholic education renewal movement is not getting enough publicity. These three pillars of formation distinguish Catholic schools from their secular peers. A growing number of Catholic schools across the country are differentiating themselves from their public school counterparts. We need to fundamentally recognize these are basic business principles that are clearly differentiated from secular competitors.
We document transformational stories of Catholic schools that have embraced a renewal of a traditional classical Catholic education. Some parochial schools were on the verge of closing until courageous leaders tried something radically Catholic and turned it around. We’re at a time right now where it will take a new group of heroic, well-informed leaders willing to work with current Catholic schools that are not necessarily on the verge of failure but are not fully embracing a strong Catholic identity. These leaders will say, “We’re pretty good, but we want to be great. We want to be fully Catholic spiritually, intellectually, and culturally,” and then persuade their community to share in this vision.
Can you speak to policy changes that make you hopeful for the future of Catholic education?
School choice should be the top policy initiative Catholics support because the financing problem of Catholic schools is very real. Financial issues are a direct result of fewer religious teachers and administrators in our Catholic schools who did not require salaries as part of their vocation. Now lay teachers require wages to teach in Catholic schools—resulting in higher tuition, which many families cannot afford.
Catholic Education Partners (CEP) is a Catholic voice we support that ensures school choice legislation at the state level: “CEP’s purpose is to partner with state Catholic conferences, Bishops and other clergy, Catholic school leaders and families, and other stakeholders to advance state policies that allow more families to access Catholic education, while protecting the autonomy and integrity of Catholic schools.”
Which Catholic leaders have inspired you and your calling to Catholic education?
Bishop Barron’s work is incredibly inspiring. He is bringing people back to the Church, and he is forming generations of Catholics through Word on Fire. I see Bishop Barron almost as my spiritual director because I digest everything he does. I read his extensive library of books and articles every day, and I regularly listen to his Sunday homilies and weekly programs. He is amazing as both a Catholic intellect and as a leader for the Catholic Church.
Catholic teaching desires to seek truth, beauty, and goodness as a fundamental aspect of being human.
I am also inspired by Bishop Conley, whom I met in person just a couple years ago. His story is incredibly inspiring. He studied in the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, which led to his conversion to Catholicism. Additional inspirational leaders in the renewal movement are Andrew Zwerneman of the Cana Academy, Beth Sullivan of ICLE, Michael Hanby of St. Jerome Institute, and Mary Pat Donoghue at the USCCB. Plato, St. Augustine, Homer, C. S. Lewis, and great authors from hundreds or even thousands of years ago have inspired me as well.
What is one of the most pressing challenges in Catholic education today?
One of the most pressing challenges is the way in which a bishop meets the needs of parents within his diocese. Bishops need to be able to meet parents where they are and provide what is in demand for their children’s education, ensuring that the teachings of the Church are accurately presented and understood. Parents want their kids to be happy and fulfilled, and for a lot of parents that means getting into the best possible college. When you reduce school to getting into a good college, there are a number of problems. The brand of elite colleges and universities has diminished, and administrators and professors often promote progressive agendas antithetical to Catholic doctrine.
Catholic education is more than getting into a good college. Catholic teaching desires to seek truth, beauty, and goodness as a fundamental aspect of being human. Catholic schools are places where students fall in love with learning, cultivate their sense of wonder, encounter the great ideas and the great authors while cultivating spiritual, intellectual, and cultural formation. A classical Catholic education can fundamentally change the hearts of parents to demand this renewal in their children’s education. Parents and teachers will then be able to articulate desires and expectations for their children’s Catholic schools to their bishops, who in turn may be more proactive in providing opportunities for Catholic families’ academic and spiritual needs.
Convince the parents, and everything else will follow. At the end of the day, it is a market and we need to educate the consumers about a traditional, classical Catholic education. The parents are the customers making these decisions, and they will seek out what is best for their children. Many of us are parents who went to Catholic schools and did not experience a strong tradition of Catholic formation. We do not want that for our children. If parents are aware that these opportunities are available, they then have models to share with pastors, bishops, and principals. They become a significant part of the Catholic education renewal movement with a classical model cultivating wisdom and virtue. We have to make it happen in our lifetime.
How do you remain grounded in your faith and work in Catholic education, and do you have a special devotion to a saint?
I have personal prayer time every morning and we do family Rosary every night. I have different times in the day for spiritual and intellectual reading and tend to read fiction in the evenings. My family keeps me grounded, so daily habits and relationships are key. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas are my intellectual heroes, especially Augustine’s Confessions and his conversion story. I truly appreciate all the saints.