Beauty in the Imago Dei

2024 National Conference Keynote Address
Most Reverend Earl K. Fernandes, Bishop of Columbus
Benedictine College, Atchison, KS, July 9, 2024

Introduction

My Dear Friends in Christ,

I am happy to be with you as you address this year’s theme, “Behold the Beauty of the Lord.” I thank Michael Van Hecke, the President of ICLE, as well as Elisabeth Sullivan, your Executive Director, for their kind invitation. I am grateful that so many of you have gathered here from around the country and, as a bishop, I am particularly grateful for your commitment to Catholic education and to the humanities and the arts. This evening I wish to address the theme of beauty as it relates to the image of God. My doctoral degree is in moral theology, and although I won’t be getting into specific moral issues as such, I hope to address the understanding of the image of God, the likeness of God, and the formation of young people, through the educational endeavor, into virtuous witnesses to Christ, the perfect image of the Father.

At the end of Vatican II, the Council Fathers sent a message to artists writing: “The world in which we live needs beauty in order to not sink into despair. Beauty, like truth, brings joy to the human heart and is that precious fruit which resists the erosion of time, which unites generations and enables them to be one in admiration!”

Beauty is a fundamental category of being, nature, man and God. Is ours a world of beauty? The amount of brutality seen on the news answers the question. Many live in a world, characterized by brokenness, disproportion, and a loss of sense of distance and propriety. In a world marked by brokenness, people recognize when something, which was once whole, is now shattered. Society is characterized by fractures: between past, present, and future; between doing and being; private and public ethics; ethical demands and truth; life and love; etc. These things little by little have been separated, leading to a world of moral and ethical relativism.

The ugliness of the modern world is seen in the lack of proper proportion. There is a genuine loss of a sense of measure and pace. Life is marked by excess, by living without breaks or contemplation. People are increasingly immoderate in speech, dress, consumption of food and alcohol, in the sizes of homes and cars. There is little room left for stillness, proportion, nuance, and asceticism. In the end, much of what remains is gross and grotesque.

Beauty is undermined by a loss of a sense of distance and propriety. Modern society is characterized by a lack of sobriety, vulgarity, and coarseness in speech. There is an unhealthy familiarity between people that at times does not respect roles and authority in life, leading to disharmony in society and family life. Cardinal Sarah notes:

Silence teaches us a great rule of the spiritual life: familiarity does not promote intimacy; on the contrary, a proper distance is a condition for communion. Humanity advances toward love through adoration. Sacred silence, laden with the adored presence, opens the way to mystical silence, full of loving intimacy.

It is fitting that you chose this theme during the Eucharistic Revival year, especially with the Eucharistic Congress only one week away. For in contrast to the ugliness of present-day society with its brutality and its “excessive familiarity,” there is the Eucharist, the icon of beauty. It is called the beautiful feast and the beautiful “Bread.” There is a beauty at the Mass in the Family of God, gathered together with a father (in the person of the bishop or priest) and a mother (with the Blessed Virgin present). There is active listening and fruitful discussion, exteriorly and interiorly. The whole family is strengthened and nourished. The image of the Church at prayer, nourished by Word and Sacrament, joined to the Church in heaven, is beautiful.

The Marian presence, especially at Mass and in the liturgy, reminds us of beauty. She, who is called tota pulchra, is beautifully depicted in art, but what is truly beautiful about her is the grace of God at work in her. She was conceived immaculately and lived in full conformity with Christ. Believers are attracted to her interior beauty. As the fairest daughter of our race, her holiness exemplifies true beauty for disciples and draws them close. She will be the one who serves as a model for those whom we educate.

To educate for beauty means to form young people to be committed to holiness of life, which also demands, if we are to be credible, our own personal commitment to holiness. Mary, in her humble acceptance of God’s will in her life, shows us the way of beauty, the via pulchritudinis. She demonstrates that seeking God’s will leads us to that which is true, good, and beautiful. Commitment to the Truth – to the person of Jesus Christ and that which is revealed by the Church – will help restore beauty. We also might reflect on our treatment of creation and our neighbor, which show forth the beauty of God. Dostoevsky said, “Beauty will save the world,” but it is really the beauty of Christ – the beautiful Shepherd – that attracts and saves the world. It is he who helps us best understand not only the image of God but also the likeness of God.

The Imago Dei: The Biblical Vision

Twenty years ago, the International Theological Commission took up the theme of the image of God with the publication of its document, “Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God,” but the theme is more relevant today than ever due to the denial of the sexual complementarity between man and woman and the explosion of the number of young people who report experiencing gender dysphoria and who want to remake themselves, but not necessarily in the image and likeness of God, whose creative hand is sometimes not recognized. 

Today, we need a sound anthropology as a starting point for the formation of our young people, especially in the way of beauty. How are we to understand the human person? Characteristics of a Christian anthropology would be: 1. That we are made in the image of God; 2. That man is a unity of body and soul; 3. That man is endowed with reason so that he may know that which is good; and 4. That man is endowed with freedom so that he may choose the good.

Let us examine the first of these characteristics – to be made in the image of God. Most Scripture scholars acknowledge that the theme of the imago Dei is central to biblical revelation, beginning with the book of Genesis. For the Bible, the imago Dei constitutes almost a definition of man: the mystery of man cannot be grasped apart from the mystery of God.

The peoples of the ancient Near Eastern held the idea that the king is the image of God on earth. The biblical understanding is distinctive because the notion of the image of God is extended beyond the king to include all men. The Bible also views man (and his destiny) as directed, not first of all to the worship of the gods, but rather to the cultivation of the earth (cf. Gen 2:15). Connecting worship or cult more directly with cultivation and stewardship, the Bible understands that human activity in the six days of the week is ordered to the Sabbath, a day of blessing and sanctification. We moderns could learn this lesson, especially in the educational endeavor, namely that our activity ought to be ordered and that we ought to educate, not for efficiency, but for religiosity as our lives are ordered toward the Divine.

Two themes shape the biblical perspective. First, the whole of man is seen as created in the image of God. It is not merely an aspect of his nature, such as his ability to reason, or a quality of function, such as his dominion over the earth or his ability to reproduce or procreate, that is made in the image of God. It is the whole person. The Bible presents a vision of the person in which the spiritual is understood to be a dimension together with the physical, social and historical aspects of man.

Secondly, the creation accounts in Genesis make it clear that man is not created as an isolated individual: “God created mankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). God placed the first human beings in relation to one another, each with a partner of the other sex. The Bible affirms that man exists in relation with other persons, with God, with the world, and with himself. 

According to this conception, man is not an isolated individual but a person – an essentially relational being. He is a social being – made for communion. The fundamentally relational character of the imago Dei itself constitutes its ontological structure and the basis for its exercise of freedom and responsibility.

However, the imago Dei finds its fulfillment, according to the New Testament, in the imago Christi. In the New Testament development of this theme, two distinctive elements emerge: the Christological and Trinitarian character of the imago Dei, and the role of sacramental mediation in the formation of the imago Christi.

Since it is Christ himself who is the perfect image of God (2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15; Heb 1:3), man must be conformed to him (Rom 8:29) in order to become the son of the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom 8:23). Indeed, to “become” the image of God requires an active participation on man’s part in his transformation according to the pattern of the image of the Son (Col 3:10) who manifests his identity by the historical movement from his incarnation to his glory. 

According to the pattern first traced out by the Son, the image of God in each man is constituted by his own historical passage from creation, through conversion from sin, to salvation and consummation. Just as Christ manifested his lordship over sin and death through his passion and resurrection, so each man attains his lordship through Christ in the Holy Spirit, not only in his dominion over creation but principally over sin and death.

The Imago Christi and the Eucharist

According to the New Testament, this transformation into the image of Christ is accomplished through the sacraments, in the first place as an effect of the illumination of the message of Christ (2 Cor 3:18-4:6) and of Baptism (1 Cor 12:13). Communion with Christ is a result of faith in him, and Baptism through which one dies to the old man through Christ (Gal 3:26-28) and puts on the new man (Gal 3:27). 

Penance, the Eucharist, and the other sacraments confirm and strengthen us in this radical transformation according to the pattern of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection. Created in the image of God and perfected in the image of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit in the sacraments, we are embraced in love by the Father. 

Allow me here to digress for a moment on the Eucharist and the connection with beauty. The ancients, in reflecting on beauty, spoke of integritas, harmonia, and claritas, and connected these aspects with wholeness or the perfection of form. My friend, Dr. Mary Catherine Levri, recently taught a course on beauty, and she used Ann Astell’s book Eating Beauty: the Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages. Astell argues that the main spiritualities of the Middle Ages (Franciscans, Cistercians, Dominicans, and later, the Jesuits) receive their charisms from Jesus in the Eucharist. 

These ways of holiness serve to restore the God-given beauty of the fallen world, to appreciate the beauty of God in created things. Nourished and transformed by the Eucharist, the saints restore the beauty of the world in and through the radiation of the beautiful virtues which they have received from the Lord. Beauty is primarily connected with sanctity and commitment to holiness of life.

In the Eucharist, we receive the whole Christ and observe that the deformity of His Passion and the glory of His Resurrection are held together in His form as slave and in His form as God. Christ goes beyond the ancient concept of beauty in His self-giving love, which includes His suffering, and He transforms us. The lives of the saints include the “deformity of the Lord” as well as His glory. We bear the sufferings of Christ in our bodies, even as we experience a foretaste of the pledge of future glory. 

The biblical vision of the image of God occupied a prominent place in Christian anthropology in the Fathers of the Church and in later theology, right up to the beginning of modern times. Early Christians interpreted the biblical prohibition against artistic representations of God in the light of the incarnation. 

The mystery of the incarnation demonstrated the possibility of representing the God-made-man in his human and historical reality. Defense of artistic representation of the Incarnate Word and of the events of salvation during the iconoclastic controversies of the seventh and eighth centuries rested on a profound understanding of the hypostatic union which refused to separate the divine and the human in the “image.”

Patristic and medieval theology diverged at certain points from biblical anthropology, and developed it at other points. A significant development of the biblical account was the distinction between image and likeness, introduced by St. Irenaeus, according to which “image” denotes an ontological participation (methexis) and “likeness” (mimêsis) a moral transformation (Adv. Haer. V,6,1; V,8,1; V,16,2). According to Tertullian, God created man in his image While the image can never be destroyed, the likeness can be lost by sin (Bapt. 5, 6.7). 

St. Augustine presented a more personalistic account of the imago Dei: For him, the image of God in man has a Trinitarian structure, reflecting either the tripartite structure of the human soul (spirit, self-consciousness, and love) or the threefold aspects of the psyche (memory, intelligence, and will). According to Augustine, the image of God in man orients him to God in invocation, knowledge and love (Confessions I, 1,1).

In the Scholastic period, St. Thomas Aquinas suggested that the imago Dei possesses an historical character, passing through three stages: the imago creationis (naturae), the imago recreationis (gratiae), and the similitudinis (gloriae) (S.Th. I q.93 a.4). For Aquinas, the imago Dei is the basis for participation in the divine life. The image of God is realized principally in an act of contemplation in the intellect (S.Th. I q.93 a.4 and 7). 

Thomas’ Franciscan counterpart, Bonaventure, held that the image is realized chiefly through the will in the religious act of man (Sent. II d.16 a.2 q.3) but that this first demands humble supplication of God through prayer; otherwise, one may not properly contemplate God and grow in holiness; that is, in true wisdom, which is, according to the Seraphic Doctor, knowledge infused with charity. Proper education and formation in the way of beauty and holiness requires prayer.

In his Itinerarium, he writes: “I first of all invite the reader to groans of prayer through Christ crucified, through whose blood we are cleansed of the filth of our vices—in order that you might not assume that reading is sufficient without unction, speculation without devotion, investigation without admiration, examination without exultation, industry without piety, knowledge without love, understanding without humility, study without divine grace, merely mirroring things without divinely inspired wisdom.”

Without delving into the controversies of the Reformation, during which the Reformers held that human nature was utterly corrupted due to the original sin and during which Catholics held (and still hold) that our nature was fallen but not utterly corrupted but could be healed by grace, we could say that the educational endeavor also needed/needs to re-examine its understanding of God Himself, if, after all, man was made in God’s image.

Distortions to the Imago Dei

The period following the Reformation also witnessed the rise of both laxism and Jansenism. The image of God affects people’s moral and ethical behavior. A negative image of God, created both by the Church and by forces outside the Church, has led to an outright rejection of God in some parts. God has often been portrayed as the super-policeman or as the “Great Eye” or “Lynx-Eye” that watches everything. 

The French historian, Father Jean Delumeau in his work, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), comments that the Church wanted to encourage people to receive the sacrament of penance to give them a sense of relief and a sense of security. Church leaders wanted to encourage reception of the Eucharist; often, however, this “encouragement” to receive the sacraments involved creating a sense of guilt and anxiety.

What was the experience of penitents immediately following the Council of Trent? While no definitive history of the subjective experience of the reception of the sacrament exists, one can infer a few things from Church documents. For example, the Popes and bishops are constantly exhorting confessors to be discreet in the exercise of their ministry and not to be too vigorous in interrogating penitents; they are telling confessors not to give penances that are too severe. 

What is the implication? The bishops felt a need to say something because too few were frequenting the sacrament because confessors were shaming penitents by their questioning. Too many were simply abandoning the sacrament of penance or being discouraged because the penances were too heavy for them to bear. 

Lateran IV (1215) required the Christian faithful to receive the sacrament at least once a year, especially during Lent (largely in anticipation of receiving Communion once a year during Easter season). The Council of Trent (DS 1608) repeated this. Trent spoke in a pastoral way about the sacraments and had benevolent intentions; however, the implementation of its prescriptions was uneven at best.

In the 1700s, Jansenism grew strong in France and Italy. The role of the priest as “Judge” was emphasized, but this was not the Tridentine understanding of judge. The Jansenists understood the priest-judge as one who had the responsibility of controlling and checking up on his parishioners and their worthiness to receive the sacraments. In some parishes, priests would not give Communion until a person had confessed two or three times. Only 100-200 people might come to Communion at Easter out of 600 parishioners. Many of the baptized would not make their First Communion until they were 25 years old!

This type of rigorism was rooted in a negative image of God, which was promoted in the theological treatises of the day. One image is that of the hunter god, who goes hunting for persons, making use of demons as hunting dogs, subjecting persons to temptation and being ready to “strike” the person as one would “strike” wild game. 

Another image was the God of Wrath. The Father handed over the Son to the anger of the Jews; in the same way, he reserves his anger for sinners. He will treat the sinner as the Jews treated Jesus – as a criminal. Such conceptions of God made every liturgical feast a meditation on hell and punishment. Thus, at Epiphany, a preacher might say, “Let us tremble, Christians, before the sight of the crèche. However humble Jesus may appear, he is terrible…”

Cardinal Gousset wondered why people even came to the sacrament. The answer was that they came to renounce sin for fear of God, his judgment, and hell. This corresponds to the negative anthropology of Jansenists, Lutherans, and Calvinists. The modern era has only worsened the situation. Man was viewed as an abominable sinner, incapable of doing anything but sin and deserving of punishment. Yet, people submitted themselves to this vicious circle of obligation and control, of threat and shame, because beyond this control they lived in constant fear of death and eternal condemnation.

Although Trent had rejected this negative anthropology, at the practical level, this anthropology actually spread. The flight from the confessional, and, with it, from the Eucharist, continues even today because of the “collective” memory of the negative experience of the sacrament and the negative image of God.  Eventually, people got sick of this image of God and these cycles of control and obligation. Atheism told them that God was invented to control them. 

Cardinal Walter Kasper has suggested that atheism, the indifference of agnosticism, relativism of values, the negative dimensions of pluralism, and the image of God as vengeful and angry have deprived theology of its linguistic and imaginative capacity. The true crisis of theology is in its discussion of God; Kasper acknowledges that we risk losing the preambula fidei. 

By this he means that we live our lives based on certain presuppositions, which are based on language. We attempt to teach and use language that people can understand. Now when “God” comes to be associated with only negative images or, at most, with “Creator;” if God is only a “possibly-existing” entity, then the very presuppositions of Christian Faith are called into question.

If we hold that man is made in the image of God and our image of God is distorted, then naturally we must ask: Who is man? Is man someone who is manipulated and controlled or is he free? The anthropological crisis is revealed often through a dichotomy of freedom. We encounter simultaneously in our society exaggerations and reductions of human freedom. Above all, we see a detachment of freedom from responsibility.

Freedom is joined to responsibility. Without freedom, man cannot be said to be responsible. To examine one’s conscience, one has to be free in front of God and be able to say freely, “I am a sinner.” There are a lot of misunderstandings in the minds of people today regarding God, freedom, sin, etc. When we begin speaking of sin, we are already expressing our belief that man is free, that he has the ability to sin or to grow in holiness.

In the modern and post-modern era, the anthropological discussion has revolved around the concept of man as an autonomous subject with rights and freedom. When we speak of exaggerated notions of freedom, we are speaking of a conception of man in which he is free without limits, without connections to society and the common good. Freedom is conceived as having the capacity to do what I want and when I want, without respect for others. Anything that seeks to limit this freedom is considered a threat, whether this is parents, authority, the Church, or even God. This understanding of freedom is a manifestation of atheism: God needs to disappear so that man can have his freedom. Henri De Lubac in his Drama of Atheistic Humanism comments that Kerber says: “Even if I could mathematically prove that God exists, I don’t want Him to, because He limits man’s freedom.”

Today, we often hear: “You have your truth. I have my truth.” Effectively, this wishes to say that “I decide my norms” and “I determine what is good and bad, but it doesn’t really matter anyway as long as I get to exercise my free choice.” 

The encyclical letter Veritatis splendor (32) captures the scenario:

Certain currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values. This is the direction taken by doctrines which have lost the sense of the transcendent or which are explicitly atheist. The individual conscience is accorded the status of a supreme tribunal of moral judgment which hands down categorical and infallible decisions about good and evil. To the affirmation that one has a duty to follow one’s conscience is unduly added the affirmation that one’s moral judgment is true merely by the fact that it has its origin in the conscience. But in this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and “being at peace with oneself”, so much so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivistic conception of moral judgment. 

As is immediately evident, the crisis of truth is not unconnected with this development. Once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its primordial reality as an act of a person’s intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation and thus to express a judgment about the right conduct to be chosen here and now. Instead, there is a tendency to grant to the individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly. Such an outlook is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others. Taken to its extreme consequences, this individualism leads to a denial of the very idea of human nature. 

These different notions are at the origin of currents of thought which posit a radical opposition between moral law and conscience, and between nature and freedom. 

When one exalts freedom to the level of an absolute, a loss of transcendence, practical atheism, or both, follows. Furthermore, the individualistic ethic which proposes “different versions of the truth” leads to a denial of human nature. This type of freedom cannot really build or construct anything. It only leads man to say “I” and “Me” until he finds himself alone and in solitude. Thus, Sartre can say, “the shadow of another is a threat to me.” The exaltation of the individual and his freedom has affected and infected a good number of Christians. Too often, the only thing that matters is the individual’s self-fulfillment or self-actualization. 

Moreover, to the extent that the “transcendentals” of truth, goodness, and beauty are inter-connected, the “different versions of the truth” or “alternative facts” language contribute not only to a misunderstanding of truth but also to a lack of apprehension and wonderment at that which is truly beautiful. For example, the super-exaltation of the right to abortion obscures the truth of the human life existing in the womb and the appreciation of the beauty and complexity of the unborn child.

Conclusion – Recovering the Imago Dei and the Role of the Educator

1. Recovery of Devotion to the Sacred Heart: Practically speaking, we may ask: What is the role of the educator in helping to correct this distortion? In response to Jansenism, the Sacred Heart of Jesus appeared to St. Margaret Mary three-hundred and fifty years ago. The message was not that justice does not matter, but that the Heart of God is full of mercy and love. It is a burning furnace of charity. Pope John Paul II, without denying God’s justice or sovereignty, also emphasized the devotion to the Divine Mercy. Likewise, in his letter concluding the Jubilee Year of Mercy, Pope Francis said that “mercy cannot be a parenthesis in the life of the Church.” In fact, he gave an interview which was published as a book titled, “The Name of God is Mercy.”

While parents are the primary educators of the child in the way of faith, teachers and school administrators play a vital role. Both parents and teachers are called to image God in the world to students and young people. What sort of image do we show forth? Is it one that is modeled after the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who is meek and humble of heart or is it one marked by severity? Through us, does a young person come to know the tenderness of God and see the maternal face of the Church? What does it mean for a child to be a child “of God”? Thus, I would suggest that one means of recovering a proper sense of God is to promote once again the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Related to this would be to model our style and pattern of educating after the heart of Jesus. St. Francis de Sales wrote that “you get more with a teaspoon of honey than a barrelful of vinegar.” He further suggested that things ought to be done “gently and firmly.”

Listen also to the words of St. John Bosco, founder of the Salesians: 

“My sons, in my long experience very often I had to be convinced of this great truth. It is easier to become angry than to restrain oneself, and to threaten a boy than to persuade him. Yes, indeed, it is more fitting to be persistent in punishing our own impatience and pride than to correct the boys. We must be firm but kind, and be patient with them. …

See that no one finds you motivated by impetuosity or willfulness. It is difficult to keep calm when administering punishment, but this must be done if we are to keep ourselves from showing off our authority or spilling out our anger. Let us regard those boys over whom we have some authority as our own sons. Let us place ourselves in their service. Let us be ashamed to assume an attitude of superiority. Let us not rule over them except for the purpose of serving them better.

This was the method that Jesus used with the apostles. He put up with their ignorance and roughness and even their infidelity. He treated sinners with a kindness and affection that caused some to be shocked, others to be scandalized, and still others to hope for God’s mercy. And so he bade us to be gentle and humble of heart.

They are our sons, and so in correcting their mistakes we must lay aside all anger and restrain it so firmly that it is extinguished entirely. … We must use mercy for the present and have hope for the future.” (John Bosco, Epistolario, Torino, 1959, 201-203.)

2. Contemplating the Educator’s Vocation: I imagine that for most of you, to be an educator is not merely a job; it is vocation, which John Paull II described as a “gift whose purpose is to build up the Church and to increase the kingdom of God in the world.”

What does it mean to educate today? I think that part of our vocational task is to introduce young people to reality. To educate is to communicate one’s way of relating to reality. There are so many problems which our young people face – the brokenness of the family, drug addiction, a pandemic of loneliness, worsened by widespread use of pornography, and a woeful educational system that does not truly serve them. We too must confront these problems which also include a culture of violence, exclusion, secularization and polarization.

In this environment, what is the role of the educator? Education is the communication of myself, of the way I conceive of and interact with reality. An educator is a person who is fully engaged in discovering the meaning of the world and the meaning of life; that is, a Catholic educator is one who conveys the Christian proposal to others, especially students, having first verified this proposal within our own experience.

In the first paragraph of Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI wrote: “Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, it is the result of an encounter with an event or Person, who opens up new horizons and gives our life a decisive direction.” 

We ourselves, as educators, must have this experience, like that of Paul on the road to Damascus, of meeting Jesus, because then we will have had the experience of meeting Someone in whom fear had been defeated. That is, as adults, we must make a journey to see what defeats fear, and, if we do not experience the victory over fear, then we will not be able to communicate this victory of love and beauty to our children.

God sent his Son so that the disciples could see a man in whom fear was defeated. Jesus did not fear the Scribes and Pharisees; he did not fear the devil who tempted him; he did not fear the Cross. Christ is the person we propose to our young people, but we must encounter Him personally and be clothed in Him.

For Christ’s presence remains in the human reality in the Church and in her sacraments. He calls and chooses those who acknowledge and recognize Him. His presence reaches young people now, not only through the clergy, but through you educators. The Church, then, is life. The only way to verify whether the Christian proposal is true is participate in this life.

Thus, classical, liberal education, by steering away from the “virtual” world, the imaginary world, proposes that children participate in life – in relationships with each other; in music and art; in the study of languages, both modern and ancient; in contemplating and apprehending beauty. The offering of our own living Tradition, the discovery of the Tradition in history and its impact on civilization, the proposal of our liturgical and musical tradition allows students to share in this life and to verify the truth of the proposal.

However, our students want credible witnesses to accompany them. The beauty of mentoring a student and accompanying a student reflects the beauty of God’s accompaniment of the people of Israel as they fled Egypt or journeyed through the desert. It is the type of accompaniment that Christ showed to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, when they were fleeing from Jerusalem, that is, heading the wrong direction. Beautifully, he turned their despair into hope; their sadness into joy; and they verified through the burning of their hearts and their sharing in the Breaking of the Bread that He was truly Risen!

Thus, during the Eucharistic Revival Year, I offer you this time to encounter the Lord, because only when you personally experience the superabundance and fulness of His presence can you credibly convey to young people how to confront the problems of this world with the force of true Life.

3. Fruitfulness: Education and Formation in the Virtues: Earlier, I mentioned Saint Irenaeus. He suggested that while we are made in the image of God, there was a need for the likeness to be restored through moral action. Mostly, this happens through Christ, who recapitulates and restores all things; nevertheless, we can cooperate with grace through formation in the virtues – both as educators in need of formation and as educators who form young people in the virtues through the educational endeavor.

But which virtues? I limit myself here to those named by St. Anthony of Padua in his Sermon for the Eight Sunday after Pentecost, where he comments on the verse, “Every good tree bears good fruit, and every rotten tree bears rotten fruit.”  He uses the tree as an image.

We need to have deep roots – the roots of humility. He defines humility as “A man is what he is before God and nothing more.” We need to recognize that He is God, and we are not. No matter how well-educated we are we need to be humble before God and before our students whom we serve. Humility is brought about in the educator by reflecting on the Presence of the One who we communicate in and through teaching, but also on the noble, evangelical task to which we are called: to facilitate the encounter with the Truth.

From the roots of humility grows forth the trunk of obedience. As educators we need to be obedient to the rule of faith and to that which has been revealed to us as true. Nothing good comes from disobedience. We need to be obedient not just to the Church hierarchy but ultimately to God, whose voice we hear. This obedience includes obedience to His commandments, not only the ten commandments but also the commandment to love – God and neighbor. Young people want and need credible witnesses, not hypocrites.

From the trunk of obedience shoot forth the branches of charity. We need to be exercise charity – in thought, word, and deed. In short, as educators we need to be witnesses to love just as St. John Bosco encouraged. This also means putting faith into action. In his letter opening the Year of Faith, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of the fides quae and the fides qua; the former is the content of our faith, but the latter is the act of faith. Educators have the ability to demonstrate in the classroom but also outside of the classroom, through service projects and the like, true charity.

St. Anthony continues that from the branches of charity shoot forth the leaves of holy preaching. Of course, we must be charitable in our speech. In the classroom, we are conveying not just words and truths, but the Word and the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In a way, he is suggesting what St. Paul said, “Say only the good things men need to hear – words that will truly help them.” In some ways, we are speaking of the virtue of prudence, which is that virtue which helps us choose the best means for accomplishing an end. We need to be prudent in our speech as we guide young people to the Truth.

Finally, from the leaves of holy preaching comes forth the fruit of contemplation. In the Dominican tradition, there is an emphasis on handing on the fruits of contemplation. One cannot give what one does not have; therefore, prayer and contemplation go hand in hand. How does what we teach stay together in a unified vision of life? What is the fruit of our reflection – about this Life – that we wish to hand on to young people? In a scientific world in which educational models such as STEM dominate, what is that we wish to hand on? What “more” do we have to offer to our students beyond technical knowledge?

Our educational task is to hand on the fruits of contemplation so that our young people may experience the beauty of the faith and the beauty of the Eucharist, of which St. Thomas wrote beautifully: “O sacred Banquet, in which Christ becomes our food, the memory of His Passion is recalled; and the pledge of future glory is given to us.”

Yes, we educate so that all may encounter Christ in the “Beautiful Bread come down from Heaven” and, through this encounter, ascend to the joy of heaven, where the Triune God will be contemplated, adored, and loved in His Eternal Beauty.