A faithful Catholic education is the real solution

Cardinal Newman society founder and president to speak on renewal of Catholic education

Patrick Reilly has been promoting and defending faithful Catholic education since founding the Cardinal Newman Society in 1993.

Reilly, 50, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, will be a featured speaker at Legatus’ 2021 Summit East. He will speak on how recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions will impact Catholic schools and why Catholic education must be faithful to its religious identity and mission. He spoke recently with Legatus magazine.

What will you talk about at the Summit?

I will speak about the latest Supreme Court cases that focused heavily on Catholic education. The Bostock ruling [which declares sexual orientation and gender identity to be protected classes in federal civil rights law] is devastating for Catholic education if schools and colleges are held to it. Although the ministerial exception provides some relief and the school choice ruling is helpful to Catholic schools, we’re still facing a very difficult time going forward.

Is it ominous that cases like these are coming before the court?

On the one hand, we are winning a number of exemptions that provide some protection from the law. Meanwhile, the courts and Congress are generally moving things in a way that is contrary to our faith. We’re facing significant devastation of our culture. The fact that Catholic education is being provided some protection is welcome, but certainly not enough to prevent the devastation.

What got you interested in the field of Catholic education?

I attended a Catholic high school and college that were disappointing in terms of their Catholic identity. While I was in college, Pope St. John Paul II issued Ex Corde Ecclesiae on Catholic higher education. I was a journalism student and focused a lot of my writing on the concerns of Catholic education. So I went on to work for the U.S. Education Department and the bishops’ conference, and later started the Cardinal Newman Society in 1993.

Why did you choose Cardinal Newman as the patron?

I’ve always been very devoted to Newman. He authored his Idea of a University, which articulates clearly the importance of higher education having strong fidelity to Catholic teaching and ensuring that the truth pervades the curriculum. But more broadly, St. Newman is an enormously influential and important saint for our time. He describes his life’s work as fighting liberalism in religion and this idea that our faith is a private matter and not something that pervades everything that we do in our lives.

How would you characterize the state of Catholic identity in Catholic higher education?

There is a very hopeful and exciting renewal of faithful Catholic education happening at all levels. However, there is a lot of work to be done. Much of Catholic education became highly secular over the last 50 years, and we’ve lost two-thirds of our Catholic schools in that time. Catholic education has become not only less impactful in forming saints, but it also has become, at least for a long while, a lower priority both for Catholic families and for dioceses. So we’ve been strongly encouraging the Church to recognize that Catholic education is the key solution to so much of what we’re facing today.

What does a renewal of faithful Catholic education look like?

It means ensuring an integral education, that the education is focused on not only the mind but also the soul and the body across the entire curriculum. There is no such thing as religion separate from other subject matter. The insights of our Faith enter into every science, every humanities course. Every teacher needs to be faithfully Catholic and witnessing to the Faith in both word and action.