On the 50th anniversary of Vatican II's Gravissimum Educationis

Of the sixteen documents of the Second Vatican Council, the relatively short Declaration on Christian Education Gravissimum Educationis, promulgated fifty years ago on this day, October 28, 1965, is not one of the more memorable and certainly not one of the more controversial. It was quickly overshadowed by the larger Constitutions and the more innovative Declarations such as Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae. Nevertheless, if only to observe a half-century anniversary that might otherwise slip by unnoticed, it seems fitting to excerpt a few paragraphs that may be surprising when quoted in 2015.

One thing is very clearly established in the document: education, for Catholics, is necessarily bound up with Jesus Christ and with the proclamation of His Gospel. It cannot be “religiously neutral.” There is no sharp separation between the sphere of faith and the sphere of life in the world; everything in human life must be permeated with faith and aim at the ultimate end of heaven. The council fathers even obliquely refer to St. Pius X’s famous motto, Instaurare Omnia in Christo:

To fulfill the mandate she has received from her divine founder of proclaiming the mystery of salvation to all men and of restoring all things in Christ, Holy Mother the Church must be concerned with the whole of man's life, even the secular part of it insofar as it has a bearing on his heavenly calling. ... A true education aims at the formation of the human person in the pursuit of his ultimate end and of the good of the societies of which, as man, he is a member, and in whose obligations, as an adult, he will share.

The document also recognizes that the central subject in Catholic education must be theology, with a strong awareness of its liturgical expression and consummation, as well as its inherently apologetic and missionary character: