Small Is Still Beautiful—And
the Font of Hope

By Jeffrey O. Nelson

As with so many of Pope Benedict’s statements and writings, his recent “Address to Catholic Educators” at The Catholic University of America is hard to paraphrase, since in itself it is so compact, dense with insight and rich with provocations for further thought. When one searches for telling quotations for inclusion in an essay, the number of phrases worth repeating and considering simply piles up—until at last you are tempted simply to reprint the entire document. Instead, I will do my best to reflect in brief on the parts of his message that seem most pertinent to my own role as the leader of a small Catholic liberal arts college.

He said, “First and foremost every Catholic educational institution is a place to encounter the living God who in Jesus Christ reveals his transforming love and truth (cf. Spe Salvi, 4).” A central truth, and yet one that it is all too easy to forget, particularly when the daily task entails managing an institution, planning budgets, juggling numbers, raising funds and organizing all the necessary but seemingly impersonal aspects of any going concern.

Yet, this statement of Pope Benedict is so important it might be worth putting onto a plaque that sits on my desk—the reminder that amidst all the noble abstractions and the reams of information which students must master in various fields, their task is also starkly simple: Learning the Truth by meeting a Person. A Person who does not just speak the truth—like many prophets and philosophers—but One Who simply, mysteriously embodies the Truth, or better, is the Truth embodied.

His actions as well as His words, the shape of Whose life and death and return to life limns out for our deepest reflection the Truth itself. Since each of us is the image of God, every encounter with a student who—however imperfectly—comes to us in search of the beautiful and the true is, conversely, helping to create another encounter with Christ. Thus, in every honest academic dialogue, in some sense, Christ speaks to Christ.

But to quote the Bible, “What is truth?” Pope Benedict answers this perhaps waggish, perhaps even sarcastic question: “Truth means more than knowledge: knowing the truth leads us to discover the good. Truth speaks to the individual in his or her entirety, inviting us to respond with our whole being…. Far from being just a communication of factual data—‘informative’—the loving truth of the Gospel is creative and life-changing—performative” (cf. Spe Salvi, 2). This assertion condenses in a very few words a crucial distinction upon which we as Catholic educators must insist—not only over against the technocrats in secular institutions—but also against the “inner technocrat” with which most of us must contend as moderns.

Having grown up in a civilization that has willfully turned away from ultimate questions—supposedly for the sake of peaceful coexistence—we encounter an internal resistance to such a lofty conception of our task as teachers. We grow up prematurely jaded, and must spend our maturing years recovering the innocence of youth, the phase of life that naively, but correctly, believes that ideas (wrong ones or right ones) change the world; and that mind is the master of matter. How much more true this becomes when we think with the mind of the Church, which partakes in the Logos that pervades and orders creation. By meditating on this, we can with time, become “young” enough to serve our students.

Then Pope Benedict hits us with this: “When nothing beyond the individual is recognized as definitive, the ultimate criterion of judgment becomes the self and the satisfaction of the individual's immediate wishes.” This statement should sting, since it cuts across the grain of nearly every aspect of our contemporary culture—from the craze for self-assertion that permeates the blogosphere to the proliferation of electives in our colleges.

Our entire economy, it might be argued, rests on the “the satisfaction of the individual's immediate wishes,” and the process of globalization consists in bringing this alternative “gospel” to the poor. Perhaps this tendency is the one we will find most challenging to our students, most of whom have grown up without any reason ever to question this premise. Only the beauty of truthful teaching, of leadership bravely exercised with respect for human dignity, can help tug at this veil that obscures the vision of Truth from the eyes of the young who hunger for it.

With his professorial clarity, Pope Benedict digs deeper than ideology or economics, to hit the nub of the modern disorder: “Yet we all know, and observe with concern, the difficulty or reluctance many people have today in entrusting themselves to God. It is a complex phenomenon and one which I ponder continually. While we have sought diligently to engage the intellect of our young, perhaps we have neglected the will. Subsequently we observe, with distress, the notion of freedom being distorted. Freedom is not an opting out. It is an opting in—a participation in Being itself.” Not just the intellect, but the will—the essence of our freedom, the nexus of choice, the part of ourselves which is so mysterious that our brain scientists try to argue it away. It is in the will that the self says “I will” or “I will not.” Serviam or non serviam.

The almost mystical reality we face as educators is the fact that we must help to train our students’ wills while leaving them free. It is not for us to go further than God, Who leaves each of us with the final say—or nay-say—for our soul. But that does not mean we can simply shrug and watch our charges stumble through error into evil; that way has been tried for a generation at Catholic colleges, and we have all seen where it leads. While we might not legally stand any longer in loco parentis, and while our mission calls us to lead in the formation of the mind, we still retain moral responsibility for doing all we can to form and purify young people’s wills and to uplift their souls.

In an age of bigness, when our youth stand as isolated and seemingly insignificant individuals before the modern behemoth university, this is best done in small-scale educational communities, where the individual intellect can be engaged and the individual will can be challenged with the truth. In small communities it is still possible to do this daily, with specific regard for each human person. The order of love reposes on specific knowledge of each specific person within the community. We must ask ourselves, is such knowledge, and thus such love, possible at the behemoth university?

Yet even within small communities, the world is ever with us. Wherever and whenever we engage the person, it must be done against the backdrop of a culture which discourages even self- (much less external) control and worships the colossal, the powerful and the impersonal. Truly, the only “hope” for us is the Hope that began the entire enterprise of Catholic education—which, it is worth recalling, started with a small community gathered in the upper room.