The Fides et Ratio Institute

Details:

 First-time attendees at introductory seminars must be nominated by a college, university, seminary, elementary  & secondary school and/or F&R Seminar alumni. For advanced seminars, alumni self-nominate.

 – A Stipend of $1,000 per participant attending the full seminar. Stipends to be distributed in late August by the Faith and Reason Institute.
– Concise Library of Works (valued at $200+); some works are read in whole or part during the Seminar.
               – Room and board for the full week.
               – Travel to and from the Seminar site, at the participant’s expense.

More Considerations for the Motivation of this Institute

In our times, American Catholic education – from primary and secondary to colleges, universities and seminaries – suffers from an intellectual and spiritual malaise of unprecedented proportions not witnessed since the founding of the first American institutions of Catholic learning from the late 18^th century into the early 20^th century.   The most serious difficulties embroiling institutions of education and formation identifying themselves as Catholic are not the highly publicized financial and counter-cultural challenges sweeping across the entire American higher education landscape. The heart of the crisis is that nominally Catholic institutions of learning, at all levels, no longer know why they are Catholic and thus no longer understand the why and how of education.

The telling symptom of the serious threat to American Catholic educational identity is the fact that the curricula of most Catholic centers of learning are shaped by thinly formulated statements and understandings of mission. These serve as weak umbrellas holding diverse programs, faculty and academic agendas together in an intellectual and spiritual compromise that is ordinarily little more than tenuously guided and integrated by any long-established Catholic vision of the why and how of Catholic education and formation.  

The mission motto of the Fides et Ratio Seminars is: “to nurture the souls of young men and women by strengthening Catholic liberal education, starting with their teachers and mentors.” The path to educating and forming Catholic teachers and mentors is the same, whether their vocation is to serve students at the primary, secondary, college, university or seminary levels. They must be schooled to understand how and why the nurturing source of Catholic liberal education and formation is the millennia-old comprehensive Catholic spiritual and intellectual vision of why and how young men and women need to be educated in order to become the Christ-formed mature persons they were intended to be at the moment of their creation in God’s image and likeness.

The aim of all Fides et Ratio Seminars, starting with the foundational “Christian Learning, Catholic Education and Christian Living” Seminar, is to introduce attendees to the Catholic intellectual tradition that ought to inform, integrate and inspire their vocation as teachers and mentors. The intellectual tradition of the why and how of Catholic education, which emerged with the early Church Fathers, especially with Saints Basil and Augustine along with Boethius, was most highly developed in the Middle Ages, especially in the thought of Hugh of Saint Victor, Saint Anselm and Saint Thomas Aquinas. In the nineteenth century, Blessed John Henry Newman restated and recast the best of the Church Fathers and Doctors’ millennia-old reflections on Catholic education for our late modern times. We would do well to listen to Newman’s account of why and how a unified Catholic education, which grows from Christian learning about fallen and redeemed human nature, leads to forming students for Christian living in faith, hope and charity.

On the first Sunday of the 1856 academic year at the Catholic University of Ireland, John Henry Newman, then rector and master- mentor, preached a remarkable yet little-known sermon on the Feast of St. Monica. In an essay entitled “Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training,” Newman gave a timeless diagnosis of the psychological disunity of the mind that plagued the young Augustine, has always plagued youth, and already plagued university studies in his own time. Newman recounts the trials and tribulations of St. Monica as she worried and prayed over the future St. Augustine.  He moves from describing the particular youthful unrest and wanderings of Augustine to uncovering its universal cause in the disruption of the divinely ordained original perfected nature of the human mind that was rent asunder by man’s self-inflicted post-lapsarian disordered condition.

The picture of Monica suffering over the restless Augustine is not just about the condition of a fourth-century young man’s disordered soul. His story is that of all generations of young men – in fact, of mankind in all ages and all cultures – held fast in the “same doleful dreary wandering…” that is counterbalanced by “the same anxiously beating heart of impotent affection.” Augustine is every young man rushing forth into life filled with young ambition, intellectual energy and turbulent appetites. He is “educated, yet untaught” with sharpened “but unenlightened and untrained” powers. Newman makes clear that, as things are found now in the world, not only Augustine’s soul but the state of every man’s soul is unendingly marked by internal rebellion.

Newman asserts that he wants “to destroy that diversity of centers, which puts everything into confusion by creating a contrariety of influences.” Newman’s manifesto of what is required to ameliorate the dispersion, since time immemorial, of the intellectual, moral and spiritual powers in young men, not just in Augustine, is clear, direct and specific. “I wish the same spots and the same individuals to be at once oracles of philosophy and shrines of devotion. It will not satisfy me, what satisfies so many, to have two independent systems, intellectual and religious, going at once side by side, by a sort of division of labour, and only accidentally brought together.”

Who has responsibility for mentoring youth in the re-integration of their intellectual, moral and spiritual powers? As Newman remarked earlier, there is “something happy in the circumstance that the first Sunday of our academical worship should fall on the feast of St. Monica.” Youth needs the first mentorship of their natural mothers such as Monica. Only later, are they ready to be delivered to the schools and universities as their alma maters under the guidance of the Church, the Holy See and our spiritual Mother in the person of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Still, Newman gives pride of place to the influence of the schools and universities on the minds of youth. The influence of sanctity is greater over the span of their entire lives. But, in the heat of their youth, as their minds open beyond the confines of domestic upbringing, the influence of their intellect – be it well-formed or deformed – is greater and more determining for their lives to come. Given that the literary and scientific teachers, rather than religious and ecclesiastic authorities, really have the attention of young men, it is the obligation of the schools and universities to articulate and implement the program of educating and forming young minds to restore and preserve the unity and integration of the mind’s two dimensions of intellect (truth) and duty (virtue).

Apply Here