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As students across the archdiocese could attest, Catholic identity is high in demand but never short in supply at Catholic schools.
“The origin and destiny of everything that happens in a school is Christ, and the certainty that Christ has become Man,” said Paige Sanchez, the archdiocese’s associate superintendent of schools for mission effectiveness.
“The fact of the Incarnation is the starting point for the life of the school. Homework, prayers said at school, the way a school celebrates life at the school, challenges at the school, testing, every aspect of the school is done in the awareness that Christ has given the experience of the school—that it’s from Him and for Him so that through the life of the school students and their families and teachers and everyone involved can encounter Christ.”
Christ is the very place “from which we begin, and the destiny of everything” the school aims toward, Mrs. Sanchez said.
Students who struggled this past year should find solace in the fact that with a new school year comes a dry erase board that has been wiped clean, so to speak. “Christ makes all things new,” said Mrs. Sanchez. “Our faith teaches us that mercy governs existence.”
She wants students to realize they have a common denominator. “What determines them is that they are loved—that they’ve been loved into existence, they’re loved by Christ and loved by the staff and faculty at the school. What defines them is not their grades or if they get in trouble or not, but that they’re ultimately loved by Christ.
“There’s an awareness of the dignity of the human person that is deeply present in a Catholic school.” That in itself is a grace, Mrs. Sanchez said.
A benchmark for which a student might measure his or her success at school could begin with striving to become their truest self, Mrs. Sanchez suggests. “A Catholic school has this desire at heart—that students become the truth of themselves. To become the truth of yourself means that you do the best you can.”
Being true to oneself means to live in the awareness “that you’ve been made by God for greatness, and that God has made us to desire happiness and fulfillment and truth and beauty and goodness.”
A student knows if he or she has done something wrong or had a bad day, Mrs. Sanchez said. “The human heart can recognize if they’re not being true. A Catholic school has many things that helps call students back to the truth of themselves,” and prayer is among them.
Among the subcommittees of the region boards of the archdiocese is one that addresses adherence to Catholic identity that helps support the Catholic culture of the schools. A Catholic identity assessment tool, which every school completes and submits to the board, identifies all the school is doing in conjunction with Catholicism.
The Catholicism School Project will commence this fall in elementary and high schools, grades six through 11, as a supplemental curriculum. In partnership with Word on Fire, the publisher of Father Robert Barron’s Catholicism series, the archdiocese is offering schools the project for use as an enrichment resource to support the current religion curriculum.
For the project, vignettes were chosen from the series for use in a religion classroom; the vignettes are accompanied by lesson plans written by a group of religion teachers from the archdiocese.
This past school year ended on a high note as 99 percent of the elementary schools—all but two—passed the annual archdiocesan religion exam, administered the first week of June to grades three through eight, according to Mrs. Sanchez.
“Across the archdiocese, the scores are very strong. Our schools, principals and teachers take seriously the teaching of the faith and the teaching of the content of the faith,” Mrs. Sanchez said. “That makes us very happy to know our students are learning the faith.”
