The demand for true education is increasing
We are all concerned for the good of the people we love, especially our children, teenagers and young people. Therefore, we cannot fail to be solicitous for the formation of the new generations, for their ability to orientate themselves in life and discern good from evil, for their not only physical but also moral health.
But educating has never been easy, and today it seems to be getting harder. Parents, teachers, priests and all those with direct educational responsibilities know this well.
There is therefore talk of a great “educational emergency”, confirmed by the failures with which our efforts are too often confronted […].
Today there is a growing demand for an authentic education. Parents are asking for it, worried and often anguished about the future of their children; many teachers are asking for it, as they live the sad experience of the degradation of their schools; society as a whole is asking for it, as it sees the very foundations of co-existence being called into question.
Young people themselves are asking for it from within, as they do not want to be left alone in the face of life’s challenges.
Excerpts from: BENEDICT XVI.
Letter, 21/1/2008
A mission primarily of the parents
The first years of a child’s life lay the foundation for their future.
Parents must therefore realize the importance of their mission in this regard. By virtue of Baptism and marriage, they are the first catechists of their children.
In fact, to educate is to continue the act of generation. […] Children need to learn from and see parents who love each other, who respect God, who know how to explain the first truths of the Faith, who know how to present the “Christian content” in the witness and perseverance “of an everyday life lived according to the Gospel.” […]
It must not happen, dear parents who are listening to me, that your children reach human, civil and professional maturity while remaining children in matters of religion. It is inaccurate to say that faith is a choice to be made in adulthood. A true choice presupposes knowledge, and there can never be a choice between things that have not been wisely and adequately proposed.
Excerpts from: ST. JOHN PAUL II.
Homily, 5/7/1980
Faith is handed on together with life
With a heart filled with gratitude and hope, I would remind all married couples that marriage is not an ideal but the measure of true love between a man and a woman: a love that is total, faithful and fruitful. This love makes you one flesh and enables you, in the image of God, to bestow the gift of life.
I encourage you, then, to be examples of integrity to your children, acting as you want them to act, educating them in freedom through obedience, always seeing the good in them and finding ways to nurture it. […] In the family, faith is handed on together with life, generation after generation. It is shared like food at the family table and like the love in our hearts. In this way, families become privileged places in which to encounter Jesus, who loves us and desires our good, always.
Excerpts from: LEO XIV.
Homily, 1/6/2025
The duty to correct wrong ideas and options
This brings us to perhaps the most delicate point in educational work: finding the right balance between freedom and discipline. Without rules of behaviour and life, enforced day after day even in the little things, character is not formed and one is not prepared to face the tests that will not be lacking in the future. […]
As the child grows up, he becomes an adolescent and then a young person, so we must accept the risk of freedom, always remaining attentive to helping him correct wrong ideas and choices. What we must never do is favour them in their mistakes, pretend not to see them, or worse, share them as if they were the new frontiers of human progress.
Excerpts from: BENEDICT XVI.
Letter, 21/1/2008
Education to discern between good and evil, truth and error
Strive to ensure that your children and young people, as they progress through the years, also receive an increasingly broad and well-founded religious instruction. […] In contrast to the scarcity of principles in this century, which measures everything by the criterion of success, there is an education that makes young people capable of discerning between truth and error, good and evil, right and wrong. […]
But never forget that this goal cannot be reached without the powerful help of the Sacraments of Confession and the Most Holy Eucharist, whose supernatural educational value will never be properly appreciated.
Excerpts from: PIUS XII.
Radio message, 6/10/1948
Nourishment of virtue and repression of evil passions
Those, indeed, whose early days were not enlightened by religious instruction, grow up without any knowledge whatever of the greatest truths, which alone can nourish in man the love of virtue, and repress in him his evil passions. […]
Where these are unknown, all intellectual culture will prove unhealthy; young people, unaccustomed to the fear of God, will not endure the restraint of an upright life, they will not venture even to deny anything to their passions, and will easily be seduced into troubling the State.
Excerpts from: LEO XIII.
Nobilissima gallorum gens, 18/2/1884
An education that excludes supernatural formation is false
Disorderly inclinations then must be corrected, good tendencies encouraged and regulated from tender childhood, and above all the mind must be enlightened and the will strengthened by supernatural truth and by the means of grace, without which it is impossible to control evil impulses, impossible to attain to the full and complete perfection of education intended by the Church, which Christ has endowed so richly with divine doctrine and with the Sacraments, the efficacious means of grace.
Hence every form of pedagogic naturalism which in any way excludes or weakens supernatural Christian formation in the teaching of youth, is false. Moreover, every method of education founded, wholly or in part, on the denial or forgetfulness of original sin and of grace, and relying on the sole powers of human nature, is unsound.
Excerpt from: PIUS XI.
Divini illius Magistri, 31/12/1929
Whatever alienates from Christ is harmful
A formation which forgets or, worse still, deliberately neglects to direct the eyes and hearts of youth to the heavenly homeland would be an injustice to youth, an injustice against the inalienable duties and rights of the Christian family and an excess to which a check must be opposed, in the interests even of the people and of the State itself. […]
Now what scandal is more permanently harmful to generation after generation, than a formation of youth which is misdirected towards a goal that alienates from Christ, “the Way and the Truth and the Life” and leads to open or hidden apostasy from Christ?
Excerpts from: PIUS XII.
Summi pontificatus, 20/10/1939
