Truth at the Heart of Education

This podcast is brought to you by Ascension. To discover even more free Catholic podcasts, videos, and resources, to help you live your faith every day, visit AscensionPress.com. All of education is now caught in a world of relativism. And it's very rare, right, that some of these places push through and punch through that relativism to actually teach the truth in a dynamic way. [MUSIC] Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to every knee shell bow, your weekly Catholic podcast on evangelization and discipleship. This is Dave Invicol without tragically without my partner, Michael Gormley. We just can't get our schedules to line up, so it's on me this week. But we will soldier on, and those of you who are just Gomerites can turn the volume down, I guess, for the next 30 minutes or so. We're going to continue on with our series on education and get into that. I'm excited here. I feel like a new lease on life because fall is here. I've kind of given up like, okay, I mean, you know, I love the summer. I love the heat and the sun and everything. And so I've transitioned into now being excited about the fall. And it's just exciting. We have the windows open. It's cool. It's so breezy and windy here. And I'm pretty excited for the lease to change and all that kind of stuff. I'm also excited because 48 days from today, I'm getting married here in Pittsburgh. Just a small occasion, which is family here. But please keep Emily and I in your prayers as we prepare for marriage and prepare for adding one person to our family, which the kids and I are so excited to be doing. So yeah, thank you for all. I mean, thank you so much for all of you out there who have been praying for us for the last eight years. You know, I mean, it's been such a long journey since Amber was diagnosed with cancer. And you've been there all along the way. And even in certain sense, you know, this upcoming wedding, I feel like it's probably the result of a lot of your prayers. So yeah, I just appreciate you all so much. And we pray for you every day and our family prayers. And and I know you guys pray for us and pray for Gomer as well. And that's I can see the fruit of it in our in our ministry. You know, I really can and I'm just I'm I'm really excited. I'm going to be bringing back this fall. A couple of new a couple of rosary sessions at the house. And I think one of them going to try to open up to anyone who wants to join one of the things we're going to do is I'm going to bring back the rosary for addicts. It was just like a really powerful thing. You know, I just it was something that like it's not easy, right? To come to a rosary for addicts. Okay, even if you're praying for someone who's an addict, there's there's you're you're expressing a spiritual poverty there, right? You're expressing like a need. And and so all these people coming together with that need, right? It was just it was powerful. It was it was amazing to pray for each other. And so I told myself I I finalized my calendar tonight, but it's probably going to be tomorrow. But that's going to be coming up too. So please keep that in your prayers. I'm also going to add in I think I might publicize this and maybe maybe add a video component to it. So if you want to join in is I think every we're going to alternate Saturdays. But basically do a rosary for anyone who is specifically praying for a family member to come back to the Lord. And what we're going to do I think is pray the rosary, but then maybe each week do 10 minutes on like like at actual like how do you do that? How do you bring someone back to the Lord, especially when they're in your family? That's the hardest in my my experience as family as the hardest without a doubt. Okay, not necessarily children. Children can be easier. But like if you have someone who was in a relationship with God and they're far away and they're in your family, I mean, they know you, they know that certainly if you're me, they know I'm not a saint. They know that I've made my own mistakes and all these things. And you know, it's like a prophet is not welcoming his own territory. You know, that kind of a thing. And so thought we would just maybe have a rosary for people like that who are praying for a spouse or a loved one to come back to Jesus or come back to the church. And then just spend 10 minutes talking about like how you can facilitate that a little bit if God wants to use you in that way. So yeah, I'll let you know once I get the dates, you know, settled and everything like that. But if you could just pray for that, I would be really thankful. We've just found so much grace in a postulate by opening up our family. And in all honesty, like I just, you know, gosh, it's amazing to me. Like what what the Lord has done by just saying. And you know, like we're not really doing much else other than opening up our family. Like there's not a lot of Bible study or a lot of like small groups going on. There's hard conversations that happen. There's, you know, there's prayer. But we're really just saying like look anyone who needs someone. We want to be there for you. And man, does God show up? Like it's just so plentifully and I'm so, you know, thankful for that. Finally, just keep praying for my dad. He's still in the hospital. But I mean, it seems like the doctors are pleased. So it was quite a scare in our family. And you know, I appreciate all the messages that people sent and that you were praying. And yeah, continue to pray for him. And that would be great. What I want to talk to you about today is, oh, one more thing. I don't want to mention, I don't want to forget. If you are a man within a couple hours of Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Catholic men's conference is coming up in October. And it's going to be awesome. It's, let's see, I'm just going to make sure I get the dates right here because I don't want to lead anyone away. But it is going to be October 17th. And it's the Catholic men's conference of Pittsburgh. And it's on the Holy Rosary. So the weapon of the rosary. And yeah, it's going to be great. There's some awesome speakers. But much better than than I, my good friend, Father Joe Freedy, is going to be speaking Matt Leonard, Bishop Waltershide, who I'm convinced is going to be a Mary and Saints one day. And then I do get a chance to speak as well. So I'll be there as well. But yeah, if you're within the Pittsburgh area, you should come, come for that. It's going to be great. And again, just, yeah, just to do a quick Google search of a Catholic men's fellowship, Pittsburgh conference. And yeah, that's coming up soon. So it's going to be great. What I want to talk about today in continuing our series on education is a topic that I'm going to very, I'm going to try very hard not to just go on a rant. And that is the relationship between education and truth. Okay. The relationship between education and truth, though it should be a first principle, something that we do not take for granted, is very much something at this point in our society and in the world that is taken for granted, right? This idea of what going back to the final moments of Christ's life when when pilot punches pilots says, what is truth, right? There was a moment, there was a time in education where that was the main question being asked, what is the truth and how do we defend it? And now it's kind of like this, what is your truth? You know, and this is scary, guys, because truth is the, the gestalt of education, right? It's the story of education. It's the reason it's there to seek the truth. And particularly for us Christians, right? It's so important because as Christ identifies himself as the way the truth and the life. And when you start to basically say, I'm the truth, right? The truth is mine. Well, who's the savior then, right? Who's the savior then? It's you, it's you. And it puts us in a situation where our hearts are going to be too hardened to be saved, right? And this has been coming for a long time. Like he then Cardinal Ratsinger in 2005 are wonderful Holy Father, Pope Benedict. But when in 2005 he had this amazing quote where he was talking to, I don't remember what group it was, but he says, look, we're moving towards a dictatorship of relativism, which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desire. We are there right now, brothers and sisters. We are there. And this isn't, I mean, this is seeping into even Catholic circles, right? I mean, this isn't just some kind of liberal university out there that is testing all the limits and all the boundaries. No, this is all of education is now caught in a world of relativism. And it's very rare that some of these places push through and punch through that, that relativism to actually teach the truth in a dynamic and an aggressive way, right? And I'll give you an example, like, and I don't mean to condemn anyone. I'm not going to name names or anything. I don't have names to name, but it's very common, right? That I'll see like in a CCD program or a children's faith formation program that someone will do a project and they'll say like, if Jesus were alive now, what would the commandments be? What would he write the commandments to be? And so basically what your exercise is like, I'm going to put myself in the Lord's seat here and I'm going to look at society and say, what would they be? And I remember I was getting ready to speak and I was looking at it. these assignments hanging on the wall as they were, as people were coming into this church, you know, and it was funny to see the responses, you know, had to do with like social media and thou shalt not be on their phone too often and thou shalt not litter, right? These kinds of things. And it was like kind of like this strange moment, right? Because it's like, wait a minute, those 10 commandments were true then and they're true today and they're going to be true forever. Why? Because it's not about what we, what we think, right? And again, this was an exercise for them to, you know, try to think about like, what's, what is God saying to us today? I don't want to be too crazy about this. But the point is that too often we find ourselves putting our own conscience, our own mind in the place of truth, when, when what we're supposed to be doing as Catholic Christians and certainly as schools and teachers, is to be conforming our minds to the truth and to find out what the truth is so that we can proclaim it, right? Because there's something very important, there's this important link between humans and truth, right? And that link is pretty much like, hey, if you don't know the truth about what's out there, it's very, very difficult to be happy, right? And Pope John Paul says, you know, basically, the truth is inside, we're an image of the truth, because we're in the image of likeness of God, you know, and very tired, he splintered, he has a beautiful quote where he says, "The splinter of truth shines forth in all the works of the creator and in a special way in man created in the image and likeness of God." Well, that's gone out the, the window completely, right? I mean, look at this now, where we're letting even a child just decide what they are, what they want to be, they identify as this, they identify as that. This idea of what's true for you might not be for me is a very scary problem that we have. And this isn't new, right? It's been encroaching on us. The example that we all probably know and love, I don't know what year this movie came out, but it was very popular is like the Dead Poets Society. If you remember the movie, the Dead Poets Society, right? It's at one of these very fancy schools and, you know, these boys, they go away, and they go away for the hope of getting the best education they possibly can, right? So you start to learn a little bit about the boys at this school and you realize, you know, one is gonna be a doctor, one's gonna be a senator, one's gonna be a lawyer, one's gonna be this one, and it's very clear, like this is you follow in your parents' footsteps and all of this kind of thing. And so they go to this school to receive a fantastic education. And then one year, there's a new teacher there. And it's a fantastic acting job by Robin Williams, right? This teacher comes in and of course, he's an English teacher. And he's gonna teach poetry to these, to these high school boys. And he comes in and right away, he's just this magnetic character. And it's hard to, it's hard to find a fault with this guy because in these boys' lives, you see on the part of the family and on the part of the school, this intense stress to live life a certain way, right? And then this teacher comes in and basically what he's saying is like, oh, no, no, you find your passion, right? You decide what you want to be. You, you skate, you, you do your reality. And he starts out with that phrase Carpe Diem sees the day, which would be so amenable to any boy in high school, right? Seize the day, yeah, grab with yours, you know, take that kind of thing. So of course, I love that message, right? He starts it with this. And then he, and he starts to like change everything that they know to be education, right? And so in one of the classes, he has him open up the book, the poetry book, and read the preface. And the preface is telling them how to evaluate poetry, okay? And of course, he's offended by this because he's like the hippie guy. He's like, what? To evaluate poetry, right? It's not a math equation. It's how it makes you feel. And so he has him tear out the preface, you know, this kind of thing. And the whole movie is kind of insidious in the sense that you're really rooting for this guy who is basically saying, hey, we're going to create our own truth. And on several occasions, he'll make, he'll make comments basically saying, don't think about how the author feels. Think about how it makes you feel when you read it. And that's the classic phrase, right? That's it right there. That you can, you can kind of invent your own reality. And so you see this as a, it's just a slow seeping into education to the point where, yeah, you know what? Like the main thing you're going to hear when you're a senior in high school is follow your passion, you know, you're going to hear all kinds of stuff like that. And a lot of us are going to hear that. It's not going to strike a discordant chord, but it should because that's not the gospel, right? Christ never says follow your passion. He says, follow me. And not only did they follow me, he's just lay down your life for me. And so if education in the end, right, it is meant to make a person a good human. And we know that the greatest we can be as a human is in a passionate relationship with Jesus Christ. Basically what education, what a lot of education is doing is setting us up to be miserable, setting us up to be totally and completely disengaged with the truth and therefore unable to recognize the truth in the person of Jesus Christ. Because again, it's him revealing himself as the way the truth and the life. So this is a scary thing that's going on here. I've seen it happen on several occasions, like in real life where it's very explicit. I close friend who is a Jesuit priest and an intellectual, he's a professor and has been at several universities that are Catholic throughout the country and in other countries. I was talking with him one day and I asked him about the philosophy program at this particular small Catholic university and he just started to laugh. He was like the philosophy program is just 100% situational ethics. So all they do all day is they just set up these situations where they say like, well, is it wrong to steal bread? Well, what if you're starving? Is it wrong if you're in this situation if you're it's wrong? And basically just toying with the truth, trying to set up situations where something that we know to be true might not, we might not feel it to be true. And so it's just immediately tears down anything that they're trying to do in theology because if it truth is the basis, right? On which you stand to be able to accept that there's a lord and savior here in that sense. And so everything is taught as just this subjective style of truth and what it comes down to as a utilitarianism, right? What hurts the most amount of people? What doesn't hurt the most amount of people? And that's the kind of the way it works. And when they even say like what hurts the most amount of people, it comes down to like almost like a mob rule. And like, I mean, let's take like just something obvious like use an Asia or abortion for something like that, right? You'll have professors arguing that abortion is perfectly viable. Why? Because they'll say it hurts the mother, right? It's like slapping the truth who we know to be a person in the face, right? Because once you've decided that one person can decide what's true for him and another person can decide what's true for another, then all things are off the table, right? Everything's off the table. There's no such thing as a a moral system, right? There's no such thing as a morality. There is some some strange still in modern society, some strange sense of like do unto others as you would have them do to you. But of course that only applies to someone who can speak to you, right? Not a precious child in the womb. Speaking of that, that's where you know, starting 40 days for life now. But when we get to the point where famous philosophers like Peter Singer or someone like that are defending abortion and even heinous abortion. I mean, not all abortion is completely heinous, but even more heinous abortion like like partial birth or something like that. We've gotten to the point where we're so far from truth. Can a person learn anything, anything of value? Like what do you think that university could teach you that would help you to be happy if they can't even teach you that life is sacred, right? And so we get into this like, you know, this terrible problem. And and for I think for a lot of us, right, Pope Benedict again, in his like kind of like prophecy, right? He called us practical atheists, meaning that, yeah, we believe in the truth. Like you sit down with us and you ask us, is there truth? We're going to say yes. But do we live our life that way? Do we live our life based on the fact that there is immutable truths, right? That we can't change. And and you'll see this a lot in like, children, right? We're like, yeah, a parent knows something that's true. But when a child, when a child rejects that, they kind of see it in, I don't know, in a new way, right? Like, well, what are you going to do? That sort of thing. And you'll see that happen with a lot of people. Like, for instance, you know, families who uphold the Catholic moral teaching on sexual ethics, right? And then one of their children moves in with, you know, a girlfriend or a boyfriend or something like that. And all of a sudden, they almost have like a new ethic to their to their home. And this stuff is seeping in left and right. And we have to just be so careful, particularly those of us who are in education. We have to be so careful that what we're trying to do is teach the true truth and making sure that what we're teaching is so that person can become the the fullness of human the best of the human right and Vatican to this document about education and it says a true education aims at the formation of the human person in the pursuit of his ultimate end and of the good of societies of which as man he is a member right again it's about the end of man right it's not just about knowledge it's not just about knowledge and and again we've even rejected knowledge at this point can you actually know something to be or not to be right that kind of thing and Popeyes the I think it was the ninth not exactly sure but he says there can be no ideally perfect education which isn't Christian education why because if we if we take a step back here and talk about truth kind of the opposite way right if if the school's job is to teach the truth and we know that the truth finds it's most brilliant expression in the person of Jesus Christ being the way the truth in the life then eventually yeah that truth better lead to Jesus that truth better lead to Jesus this is one of the things that I was always so puzzled by and and just really in awe of some of my teachers from Thomas Quantess College right they would have a reverence to classes like math or classes like Euclid's elements the you know the geometry class and they would they would come to it with such a reverence and and you would you would see that what what they saw was like hey when Jesus says I'm the way the truth in life and we're studying the truth that's a sacred thing that's a sacred thing and this is why it's so sad to see it go so far away and and to realize like yeah well first we had knowledge and then now we don't even have that now it's just this kind of like this amorphous idea of like will morality has to do with feelings almost entirely and it's situational so it could be feelings at one time that changed to another we have to remember John Henry Newman he is this a fantastic writing on the idea of a university what what what is a university meant to be what is it meant to do he says knowledge is one thing virtue is another good sense is not conscience and refinement is not humility and what he's getting at is again this idea that a school's job is a good human in the end if they're not putting out a more human person in the end then they're failing at their job miserably and it's the job of educators to make sure that that's what it is and so I would just say like you know if you're in that field if you're if you're asking the right questions about education if you are making decisions right you have to ask yourself has has even even in my school even in my situation has the dictatorship of relativism seeped in because it does it does it so does has it seeped in and has it seeped in not just to what we're teaching but to the philosophy behind what we're teaching are we teaching because we think that if this person scores high enough they'll be able to consume more goods at one point and be happy or are we teaching solely because we want to make that person a better human being more fit for heaven that's what we're looking for in in educators that's what it means to be a disciple in the education field and you can't you can't sway from that because you're so powerful right you are so influential in the lives of these children and I I'm sure looking back if I if I'm sure that my parents and my family was more influential in my life but it's hard to think that way because I I know how deeply influenced I was by my grade school teachers and high school teachers in every way possible not just the classes that they taught not just the truth that they taught but in the people that they were and so you have to remember like your only job is to introduce these people these students to the truth and and even if you are in let's say a public school setting right I'm not saying you have to immediately jump out and introduce them to Jesus Christ that truth that you are having them understand and you are defending that has to be a building block right so that they can one day understand like the way the truth and the life in the person of Jesus Christ and take a quick break here and listen to our friends from ascension press as always they have amazing programming I know so many people have been talking to me about the different things that they've been doing like catacism in a year and all these different things and they really are just an incredible organization to work with and go when I love being a part of it and so yeah take a listen and see what they have and we'll be right back to to finish up this episode. Someone shows up in your parish because they're being drawn towards the Catholic Church maybe they can't quite explain why but something is pulling them O CIA could be the moment that changes everything for them where a quiet curiosity becomes a real encounter with Jesus Christ but the gap between how O CIA is and how it could be is real and the catacus leading it need more than a schedule they need vision tools and a program that actually forms disciples invited your journey into the Catholic Church is ascension's new O CIA program 28 lessons that walk participants through the Catholic faith with theological depth personal warmth and a focus on conversion not just completion invited includes a participant guide that meets the seekers exactly where they are a leader guide with catacus formation built right in a trade book with questions and answers many newcomers might be afraid to ask and a mask companion book to help them participate in the mass actively both interiorly and exterior our hope at ascension is that invited will help make O CIA in your parish what it was always meant to be a true journey into life with Christ to learn more visit ascensionpress.com/invited and we're back to every new show bow your weekly Catholic podcast on evangelization and discipleship hey send the emails we love hearing from you guys it's a eks b at ascensionpress.com and we've gotten tons of emails yeah you like we love it when you disagree to like honestly like don't you can't you can't offend us at all you don't really can't offend me I doubt you can offend over he'll just won't sleep at night if you don't he doesn't think that you love him but but you know you're not going to offend us if you have something to push back on we would love to hear your thoughts and particularly with education right and with the with healthcare these are these are personal issue very personal issues and so people you know who have made decisions and you know I want to be clear when we set out to do this season what I really want to get across is like how to disciple children through and humans through education doesn't have to just be children right and that means any branch of education right I'm like I you know we we didn't set out to like you know say like change change your mind or anything like that it was to show what education was really for and really to put an impetus on families that you're you're the first school you're the school that you know is is the most important part what I want to do is close this episode on the relationship between truth and education and talk about freedom and and truth right because this is the issue is that without truth freedom becomes a dictator right like you know in that movie the dead poets society this was the problem is that he was freeing them with no grounding of truth with no grounding of truth and so he was he was able to and again there's clearly the bad guy in that movie was meant to be like the parents the oppressed parents but I'm suggesting to you this that there was some bad stuff going on in that class right he he frees them to just interpret the world as they see fits and that's not okay right we we live in a reality that if I if I hit the wall it's going to hurt and we're getting to the point where we want to be able to say you know what no I'm going to be able to walk through that wall and I just want to be able to do it well guess what go ahead and walk through the wall and see what happens well that's what we're seeing in society today the pain the dysfunction the phobia right is because we're we're we're belling in every chance we get against truth and thinking yeah I can walk through that wall boom we hit our heads yeah I can be what I wasn't created to be try to be happy that way yeah I can do things I can send all I want because I have my own morality good luck being happy in that situation right the absolute sizing of freedom is is is a scary scary thing that's happening you know and and again this isn't new Pope John Paul was talking about this years ago and in his possibly one of the the greatest things ever written very tady splendor right he says certain currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute which would then be the source of values and what he's saying is this and this is you're watching this happen The only value is that you better let me be free to do what I want. The only value is this, this is only the freedom which submits to the truth leads the human person to his true good. Guys, you can do what you want, but if you decide to reject truth and say, yeah, I can walk right through that wall, just be ready, you better put a helmet on. At least, you better put a helmet on. And I think that's what probably 90% of these, like, you know, brain altering drugs that are coming out is that helmet, right? We've done things that we don't, we wanna be happy and we know they can't make us happy. And so we're using chemicals to do that. The ultimate, you know, if the final question is the relation between freedom and truth, right? There cannot be true freedom without truth. And so like this idea of setting the captives free, particularly like in the movie Dead Poets Society or in any hippie kind of teacher's movie, is wonderful as long as they have truth to ground that freedom in. The problem is setting them free without that truth, they become slaves to a freedom that is false. And you've seen it, I've seen it, we're watching it. And people like evangelists like you and I are having to undo those knots left and right. Everybody who ends up at my house because they need healing and they're hurting and they need family, they have gone down this road of like I can do what I want without consequences out. Freedom is my truth. And they tie, and they make decisions over and over again. They tie that knot, tie that knot, tie that knot, tie that knot. And they come here and they're like untimely. What is wrong? What is wrong? And that's what we try to do. We have to try to get them to realize like yeah, there are consequences to a society without truth. This is the question, what is truth? And that hopefully leads to who is truth. All right, Gomer will be back next week. Again, everything's fine. We just couldn't line up our schedules. And we'll continue on our series on education. We're going to have some great guests this season to coming up soon as soon as we can get these scheduled. It's going to be great and some good debate as well. So continue to pray for us. We pray for you every day. We love our listeners. And yeah, I'll be-- I have a few talks coming up so you can take a look at my website to the Catholic truth about angelsanddemons.com. If you want to come out and take a listen. So we'd love to meet you. God bless. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING]