Alumnus Sends Dispatches from Education Congress in Rome

Michael Van Hecke (’86), an American delegate to the World Congress on Catholic Education in Vatican City, has published the first in a planned series of dispatches about the international gathering of Catholic educators. The Church has convened the Congress to address “the challenges that the ‘educational emergency’ unavoidably provokes,” while commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Gravissimum Educationis and the 25th anniversary of Pope St. John Paul’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae.

Prior to the start of the conference, Mr. Van Hecke and his wife, Jessie (Ellis ’86), paid a visit to the tomb of St. Monica, which prompted the following reflection:

“Everything was ordered correctly in St. Monica’s world. She knew her son’s profound intellectual gifts would take him far and wide and make him an intellectual figure of historic proportions, but she also knew that all that really mattered was his immortal soul’s salvation. This is exactly the right orientation to take to a meeting in which we contemplate and discuss Catholic education in the modern world. It is the proper orientation all Catholic education should be modeled upon, in any time or place, but especially the modern world. ‘Ever ancient, ever new,’ as Augustine said.

“If this Congress is to bless the world, it will be because it will have clearly defined Catholic education’s role as a tool of the Church to pass on Catholic culture, both intellectual and moral, to future generations. This culture we aim to pass on means nothing less than living our baptismal call to bring Christ to the world through love of neighbor with our ultimate end, Heaven, as the arbiter of all our acts and decisions.”

Mr. Van Hecke is the headmaster of St. Augustine Academy, a K-12 classical school in Ventura, California, that is consistently ranked among the best Catholic schools in the United States. He is also the president of the Catholic Schools Textbook Project and the president and founder of the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE).

This blog will provide links to Mr. Van Hecke’s subsequent dispatches as they are published.