Four Podcasts on Educating in Contemporary Culture – 2026 series
Podcast One – An Exciting Age, a Challenging Culture
Through this series of four podcasts, we want to explore the culture in which we live and work, the culture in which our young people are born and grow, the culture in which we are seeking to educate our young. Our education seeks to address the whole person, to enable them to become who they are truly, to assist them to become agents of change for a society that enables human flourishing and cultivates the common good of all, and, ambitiously, to encounter Christ and to led into discipleship of him. However, this project is not possible unless we take seriously the nature of our culture, unless we can see it for what it is, unless we can name its features with honesty and with clarity, engage them and work them. This is challenging because many of the features of our culture are not readily receptive to the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the way in which our Catholic Tradition seeks to live this message. Therefore, particularly, in our schools we can see emerging a great divide, a cultural divide between two ways of approaching life. How we can navigate this divide will determine the future of Catholic education as an agent of evangelisation or as something else.
Through these presentations we seek to apply what Pope Leo XIV put before us towards the end of 2025 when we writes:
The Catholic school is an environment in which faith, culture and life intertwine. It is not simply an institution, but rather a living environment in which the Christian vision permeates every discipline and every interaction. Educators are called to a responsibility that goes beyond the work contract: their witness has the same value as their lessons. For this reason, the formation of teachers – scientific, pedagogic, cultural and spiritual – is decisive. Sharing the common educational mission also demands a path of common formation, “an initial and permanent project of formation that is able to grasp the educational challenges of the present time and to provide the most effective tools for dealing with them… This implies that educators must be willing to learn and develop knowledge and be open to the renewal and updating of methodologies, but open also to spiritual and religious formation and sharing” Technical updates are not enough: it is necessary to cultivate a heart that listens, a gaze that encourages, and an intelligence that discerns.[1]
It is in the service of “cultivating a heart that listens, a gaze that encourages and an intelligence that discerns” that we share the following four reflections.
In this first presentation, I want to explore with you some of the features of our current culture, the ocean in which we swim. The primary question from this will be, how do we speak into this culture a word that might be different?
We live in one of the most exciting times in human history. Never have we had as much access to our past. Never have the possibilities for our future been as extensive. The rate of change in the last fifty or sixty years has outpaced any period earlier. The digital revolutions have altered the way in which we engage our world and one another. Technology has made possible advances unimaginable only a few decades ago. Notwithstanding the enormous challenges of mass migration, climate change and geo-political instability, we stand on the cusp of a new era of opportunity. It is difficult for us to truly grasp the changes that lie ahead of us. The rapidity of change is breathtaking such that as the late Pope Francis once remarked we are not in an epoch of change, but a change of epoch.
The rapidity of this change is evidenced in that the comments I shared in 2024 when I first reflected on the subject with Catholic educators have needed significant revision. And so, the observations I offer in this set of podcasts, though in continuity with those previously developed, are quite new in their content. I am sure that in several years’ time we will need to revise yet again.
When we look back on the rate of change in the 20th century, I often think of the famous line attributed to Hilaire Belloc(1870–1953), the Anglo-French Catholic historian, essayist, and contemporary of G.K. Chesterton when we observed: “The conflict of the future is between Capitalism and Catholicism.” It was a provocative declaration of two remarkable ideologies in tension. I have, however, thought that the real tension in the 20th century was actually between Catholicism and Communism, the winner being neither, but rather Capitalism.
The triumph of Capitalism between the two ideologies of Communism and Catholicism was rather wonderfully depicted in the 1984 John Pilger documentary, Burp!: Pepsi v Coke in the Ice Cold War. The documentary was directed with a satirical long view of the competition between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, showing how their rivalry extended around the world and intersected with political and cultural affairs. A central theme of the project was the demonstration of the intimate relationship between American corporations and the U.S. political establishment. Pilger framed the rivalry between Coke and Pepsi as a parody of the Cold War itself. Two corporations compete aggressively across the globe, mirroring the ideological struggle between East and West. Yet, unlike the Cold War’s professed moral stakes, the cola war is revealed as empty of substantive difference. The competition is intense, but the product is essentially the same — a metaphor for how capitalism creates the illusion of meaningful choice while offering only superficial alternatives. Coca-Cola, in particular, becomes a symbol of a system that presents itself as benign, pleasurable, and inevitable. The presence of Coke in remote or impoverished regions — sometimes more available than clean water — underscores how deeply this form of power penetrates everyday life. The cheerful universality of cola masks economic relationships that leave local communities dependent, underpaid, or environmentally harmed. Pilger repeatedly returns to the idea that the cola war trivialises freedom. Consumers are invited to “choose” between Coke and Pepsi while having no say in the larger economic structures that shape their lives. Democracy is reduced to preference; citizenship to consumption. In this way, the documentary critiques capitalism’s tendency to substitute market choice for moral or political agency.
Although Burp! is often humorous and ironic in tone, its underlying concern is deeply moral. Pilger used satire not to dismiss the issue, but to expose how absurd — and dangerous — it is to confuse prosperity with justice, branding with freedom, and consumption with meaning. At heart, Burp! argued that Capitalism’s greatest triumph is not dominance through force, but through normalisation. When the symbols of a system become part of daily life — when a logo feels more familiar than a flag — power no longer needs to announce itself. This is why Pilger was uninterested in who ‘won’ between Coke and Pepsi. The real winner, he suggests, was the system that made such a contest appear natural, inevitable, and even entertaining.
The documentary remains relevant because it anticipates the rise of global brands as cultural authorities; the merging of politics, marketing, and identity, and the reduction of moral questions to consumer preferences. Seen through this lens, Burp! is not really about soft drinks at all. It is about how a society learns what to desire — and what it forgets to question.
What it forgets to question. The outcome of this is a secular society which has lost the sense of the Transcendent in a secular society. The secular itself is something about which we should not be afraid: it is the domain of civil and political life created on the principles of sound reason. This is why we seek to maintain the separation between government and Church. However, a secularist agenda – which is something different from the secular sphere itself – seeks to banish any reference to the Transcendent in life, in favour of that which is entirely empirical and immediate. It cannot admit of the religious word, the religious gesture, or the religious symbol – even though the most beautiful moments in human history have often been inspired in the flourishing of the religious imagination. And above all, the secularist mind cannot admit of the religious conscience. It asserts the demands of moral responsibility as a higher category of discernment than that of the religious conscience. This is why, just as an example, we see the argument that the protection of children is prior to the confidentiality of the religious confession.
The idea of Truth now becomes entirely internal, something wholly subjective. The idea that Truth exists outside of ourselves, that it is something objective, something we receive, and to which we are accountable, has become increasingly foreign. It is not the collective wisdom forged through the Tradition of a people to which I am now accountable, but to that which I have determined to be personally authentic, according to how I feel.
The religious imagination has become replaced by the technological. We cannot but marvel at the possibilities of technology across so many aspects of our existence. And yet, we can also be unwittingly seduced into a fantasy by technology – the fantasy that everything is possible. And if it is possible, why can’t we do it? And so, possibility and prosecution become thought of as without distinction. If something is possible, I have a right to pursue it, if I feel that it is good to do so. With the banishment of the Transcendent from social consideration, this appeal to rights takes on an absolute character. It is not human rights as such to which we appeal. It is ‘my’ rights that we demand. I have a right to choose; I have a right to decide. I have a right to do anything that I feel to be right for me, so long as it does not adversely affect anyone in a way that is immediately visible.
There is a second fantasy into which we can be seduced by technology. This is the illusion that we are in control, and that life itself can be controlled, that life is a right to be exercised, rather than a Mystery to be served. It translates into what we might call an antiseptic mentality which cannot engage the inevitable reality of human suffering, and which seeks to sedate difficulty and hardship – all that is perceived as negative in life. Worst, life is evaluated primarily through the pleasure principle, through the “feel-good” syndrome. If something does not feel good, then something must be defective, inadequate, wrong. Suffering is not to be redeemed; it must be anaesthetized, literally. As Charlies Taylor observes, subsequently, we have reduced compassion to the ‘therapeutic’, to the ‘feel-good.’ However, then compassion becomes merely a shadow of itself, a justification to limit the intrusion of the negative, of the painful, in our experience. Compassion becomes about the restoration to ‘feeling good’, rather than about living with questions that are raw and relentless, questions that undo us and recreate us. Genuine compassion means suffering with. It is a love that holds the suffering of another, that journeys into the suffering of another, a love that is prepared to enter the suffering of another so that their suffering becomes mine.
Our Catholic Tradition seeks to express itself in this cultural milieu with significant difficulty. To be accountable to a vision of life that we have received from a reality outside ourselves, to be drawn into a field of meaning that we ourselves have not determined, is to set ourselves up for estrangement in a climate that determines the rightness of something from how I feel about it, and which cannot entertain the objectivity of meaning beyond reference to my own personal experience of something. For this reason, the religious voice is considered obsolete in the discussion of social issues. It is deemed as having nothing to offer. The Catholic voice will not be acclaimed; it will be criticised. Our voice will not win us friends; it will draw suspicion. It may even result in our condemnation. For the currents of thought with which we are faced are not without virulence; contrary opinions are summarily dismissed as bigoted, as an affront to compassion and tolerance and inclusion, and, therefore, as offensive – as if the Christian word must be relegated to the limp category of ‘nice’ by which no one might have to contend with uncomfortable or disturbing feelings. It is remarkable how a climate of tolerance breeds intolerance.
We can absorb this cultural current and assume its logic. Then the radical difference of the Gospel becomes dissolved into values of fairness, justice, and equality that become accepting of any and every position. The difficult imperative of Gospel love and our exercise of evangelical hospitality are substituted at the expense of our critical discernment of what is right and wrong. The Gospel’s invitation of mercy to recognize that we are all fail before the possibility that is extended to us in the Kingdom of God, becomes eroded to a frame of thinking that the Christian community is without form, without distinctions, without parameters, even though genuine hospitality can never be exercised in the loss of identity.
The teaching of Jesus calls for a choice. It calls for decision. In his own time, Jesus was faced with the prospect that not everyone could accept the way of life he put before us. As we read in the Gospel of John (6:60ff), “On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” . Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you?” From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve. Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”
Podcast Two: A World of Subjectivity
In our first podcast, we suggested we live in age of re-definition. If the rapidity of change is breathtaking, so, too, are the changes in social attitudes and perspectives. The school is at the very forefront of these changes. It is at the cutting edge, the front-line. Our young people especially, without the advantage of memory, are captive to the current swirl of thinking, not least through the dominance of social media as both a form of communication and of information, and, understandably, are receptive to all the current ways of thinking as simply given. How are they to realise that these patterns of thought are so very recent?
We have most recently lived through a time described by the late Pope Francis as one of “ideological colonization.”[2] What he meant by this term is the demand to subscribe to the prevailing thinking exactly as it is presented, such that not to subscribe means that we are discriminatory, bigoted, and hateful. Equality’ now means ‘sameness’; ‘dignity’ has come to mean ‘remaining in personal control’; ‘diversity and inclusion’ mean the toleration and celebration of any, and all, points of view, so long as they do not contradict the current imperialism. The reaches of this thinking now pervade all our media, and a large sway of the corporate world, as well as sport and entertainment. It is very hard to resist, though we now see a global resistance through powerful right wing political movements that designate these trends as “Woke”. Hence, so called “cultural wars” which mark our time.
Though recent, the drive for equality, inclusion and diversity is one that has gained enormous traction because it powerfully encapsulates the postmodern stance into which we have catapulted in the last fifty years. The mix of focus on personal rights, the dominance of the affective life, and the celebration of difference and otherness all result in the demand that a person’s feelings about their identity must be believed and respected by others. These feelings, entirely subjective. must stand equally alongside all other claims to attention and any discrimination to this claim must be removed. This has now becoming increasingly incorporated into various approaches both in education and in public policy. A recent example of this has been the introduction of pronouns in electronic signatures.
We can forget our recent such themes are. However, they are also the outcome of a long evolution of consciousness in the West. Philosophers such as the Canadian Charles Taylor have traced this unfolding development over the centuries to its current presentation.[3] The outcome of the ‘turn to the subject’ that had its origins in Augustine’s exploration of memory in the fifth century has now developed through various historical manifestations to a point in which meaning now is derived almost entirely from personal experience. One’s personal experience – entirely subjective – is proposed with incontestable authority. The individual ‘self’ has now become regarded as the repository of truth. It is how I feel that determines the rightness of something. Unless I feel something has value, it has none. This we might label ‘the tyranny of affect’. It means that the realm of our feelings assumes dominance over all other perspectives, including our values, and it is particularly endemic in the way that most of us think and speak today. Most of us may not be aware of it. However, if we listen for it, we hear it everywhere. The object is to ‘feel good’ and if we do not then there is something amiss.
We forget that this focus on our feelings is something quite innovative in the history of consciousness. In earlier centuries it was not how we felt that was significant, but how we acted. This is why in classical times the play was the primary form of entertainment. The novel only came into existence once we shifted our focus from the external world to an internal world of emotions and motivations.
In particular, the arrival of the smartphone age—occasioned by the launch of the iPhone in 2007—did more than transform technology. All of us are aware now of Jonathan Haidt’s landmark study from March 2024, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. It outlined the decline of play-based childhood, which began in the 1980s and accelerated in the ‘90s and the rise of the phone-based childhood, which began in the late 2000s and accelerated in the early 2010s. It has amounted to what Haidt call sthe “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” As he suggests, we ended up overprotecting children in the real world while under protecting them in the virtual world.
And weaving its way through has been a reassessment of identity, sexuality, and gender. This shift grew out of several earlier movements—feminism, LGBTQ+ activism, and academic developments in Gender Studies—but it accelerated rapidly in the digital age. The same technological revolution that gave us the iPhone and the social media ecosystem meant that debates about identity could now spread globally within days. Questions that had once belonged largely to universities began to enter schools, workplaces, churches, and families. And so, social media did not simply provide a platform for communication; it reshaped the way identity itself was expressed. Online spaces encouraged individuals to articulate who they were through labels, communities, and narratives of self-definition. Movements advocating gender diversity grew rapidly in this environment. Concepts such as gender fluidity, non-binary identity, and transition became part of public conversation in ways unimaginable twenty years earlier.
Of course, these developments have been highly controversial. Advocates saw them as a necessary expansion of human freedom and dignity; as a community of Catholic Faith, we have argued that forms of gender ideology risk detaching identity from biological embodiment. Nonetheless, debates about gender are not isolated controversies. They are symptoms of a deeper cultural moment. Modern societies are asking: Is identity primarily self-defined, or received? How do body, biology, and personal experience relate to one another? What does it mean to be male and female in a world where social roles are changing? These are not merely political questions. Rather, they are deeply spiritual questions about the meaning of the human person.
It could be claimed, consequently, that the early twenty-first century has become a time when humanity is rediscovering the importance of anthropology—the question of who we are. In our Christian thought, the human person is not a solitary self-inventing identity from nothing. Rather, identity is discovered in a relationship between gift and freedom: the gift of the body; the gift of being created male or female; the freedom to live those gifts in love and responsibility. Seen in that light, the debates about gender ideology are part of a wider cultural struggle to reconcile freedom, identity, embodiment, and dignity.
Of course, this has not only reshaped women’s lives; it has also quietly unsettled and reshaped men’s sense of identity. The cultural shifts affecting women have forced men, themselves, to reconsider what it means to be male in the modern world. For much of the twentieth century, men in many societies lived within relatively stable expectations: provider, protector, authority figure. These roles were never universal, but they offered a recognisable framework for male identity. As women entered public leadership, professions, and higher education in greater numbers, those frameworks began to shift. By the early twenty-first century—particularly in Western societies—many young men have found themselves in a world where the old scripts no longer quite fit, yet no universally accepted new script had replaced them.
Movements such as the MeToo Movement, and even the more recent controversary related to Jeffrey Epstein, have intensified this disruption. These have exposed patterns of behaviour that had long been normalised or ignored. For many men it has been a moment of moral awakening; for others it has produced confusion or defensiveness. But in either case it has compelled men to reflect on power, respect, consent, and responsibility in ways previous generations had rarely been asked to do. The experience of women speaking publicly about violence, exclusion, and inequality forced these questions into the open. In that sense, women’s testimony has acted almost like a mirror held up to male culture. This environment has created both opportunities and confusion. Many men are searching for constructive ways to understand masculinity, while others, especially young males, feel displaced or uncertain about their place.They are recorded as the loneliest group of people in Australia today. Not confident in their sexuality, unsure in the presence of confident women, it is inevitable that young men drift towards those who offer aggressive misogynist masculinity, models of the Alpha male. Combined with a loss of life-long purpose, this then translates into affiliation with social groups that promise exclusion, cohesion and determination. And these groups need not be extreme ideologies. We see intimations in this approach to life in figures such as Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson and the late Charlie Kirk, so popular amongst young men. They can even be found in our own Catholic family, such as with the Sydney men’s Rosary Crusade having originated in Poland and Ireland – men praying the Rosary devoutly yet with clenched fists in reparation of a world regarded as evil.
Early in 2026, Mike Randall, interim Head of Downside School in the UK, writing in London’s, The Tablet, remarked, “We live in an age of fracture – political, cultural and spiritual. Public discourse is increasingly polarised, the pace of change unrelenting and young people, in particular, are confronted with contradictions about identity, morality, purpose and truth.”[4] This is not helped, of course, by the debasement of public leadership in the United States, and the normalisation of both mendacity and vulgarity in public discourse under Donald Trump. As Pope Leo spoke to diplomats at the opening of this year:
We should also note the paradox that this weakening of language is often invoked in the name of freedom of expression itself. However, on closer inspection, the opposite is true, for freedom of speech and expression is guaranteed precisely by the certainty of language and the fact that every term is anchored in the truth. It is painful to see how, especially in the West, the space for genuine freedom of expression is rapidly shrinking. At the same time, a new Orwellian-style language is developing which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fuelling it.[5]
This is where Randall positions the critical contribution of Catholic education. As he wrote, “At the heart of the Catholic vision is the conviction that life is intelligible and relational rather than random or meaningless. Catholicism teaches that faith and reason are not in opposition but mutually illuminating; that truth is not abstract, but embodied – ultimately in the person of Christ. In a world that often feels morally and metaphysically adrift, this synthesis offer clarity without rigidity, and hope without naivety. Catholic education seeks not merely to teach this coherence, but to make it lived and tangible.” He went onto say, then that this means Catholic Education “becomes not a narrow exercise in credential acquisition but a formation in wisdom, conscience and courage . . . [the school] . . . a place where young people glimpse a different kind of life: rooted in tradition yet open to the future, anchored in faith yet attentive to reason, nourished by community yet respectful of individuality.”
Podcast Three: Navigating our Way Through
Welcome to our third podcast. In our first podcast we explored something of the overall culture of individualism in which we discover ourselves. In our second podcast, we developed the implications of these through the various undercurrents that give our time its character.
But how are we to navigate our way through all this? This is the topic of our third podcast.
Some thirty years ago, I was introduced to the work of the late American philosopher of religion, David Tracy. Tracy took the context of postmodernity seriously. He understood it, recognising both its possibility and its limitations. And wondering how one might speak the life-giving word of the Gospel in its midst, he proposed conversation as the theological method best suited to the times. In a postmodern environment, conversation is our only hope, he declared, recognising, however, that Truth manifests itself in conversation – should the conversation be engaged in the fullest way possible.[6] The alternative to conversation was the loss of public theology, and the retreat into what he called, private reservations of the Spirit – in other words, ghettoes and the privatisation of the Gospel.[7] But ghettoes do not bring forth life; people do not grow, they only survive.
So, for Tracy, something different was needed – and what was most critical for him, was the willingness to risk the adventure of conversation, a to and fro between interlocuters – the parties being what he called, the ‘Christian fact’ (which is the term he used to bring together the entire Christian experience) and the context in which we live, which for him, at the time, was the postmodern milieu.[8] And in this, he came to the rather provocative recognition that not everything that is true is Christian, and that not everything that is Christian is true. By this, he meant that, in line with the Church’s own Tradition, truth greets us from many different sources, and that not everything that simply claims to be Christian is true. It is why we must be constantly on the pathway of interpretation, asking what is coming from where and why. Hermeneutics, the art of interpretation, is critically important.
Well, out of this framework he proposed as the outcome of such conversation, a correlational theological method, awake to what he terms, the critical mutual correlations.[9] When the Christian ‘fact’ enters conversation with that which is ‘other’ than ourselves, what are the resonances and where are the dissonances? These are the ‘moments’ for which we are vigilant. And these become the ‘stepping stones’ as it were into the future. And most importantly, these become the doorways, so to speak, for the project of evangelisation, lest we be giving answers to questions no one is asking.
More recently, this perspective of Tracy’s has been taken up in the approach of the Czech theologian, Tomas Halik, and I refer to his recent 2024 publication, The Afternoon of Christianity: The courage to change. Religious aspiration is re-finding itself in young adult’s lives today. There is a momentum afoot. However, one of the features I notice about this is a tendency to create and withdraw into a barricaded social circle defined very much by devotional practice and a dualist theology. Tomas Halik has grapples with this way when he writes,
The invitation to escape from the constant need to take decisions in the demanding conditions of freedom into a ghetto – an artificial folk museum of the past – to flee from the God-ordained task of living in the present, is a very alluring temptation, especially today, and its boosts the attractiveness of sects. The tempest of fear endangers the flame of faith – the courage to continually seek God and more profoundly.”[10] . . . barricaded Christians can hardly be salt and leaven of society. Christians are not to create ghettos, their place is in the midst of the world; they ought not to strive for a parallel society and wage culture wars. Before they received the name of “Christians’ in Antioch, Jesus’ disciples were known as “people of the way”. Today . . . the Church must once again become a community of the way, developing a pilgrim character of faith in order to cross this new threshold. But it also needs to build living spiritual centres, hubs from which to draw courage and inspiration for the journey ahead. Christians need to draw on these centres, but they cannot permanently retreat to them to erect “three tents’ high above the mundane concerns of life and the world as the apostles on Mount Tabor longed to do’[11]
I have only grown more convinced of the timeliness of Tracy’s and Halik’s approach as we seek to bridge the beauty of the Tradition of which we are heirs and a social climate which in different ways is alien in its premises and ideology.
However, let us not think that we are unique in our time or in our experience. For at the very outset of the Christian fact, St Paul was faced with a similar situation, and indeed, he himself adopted a similar strategy. We read in Acts:
While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there.” (Acts 17: 16)
Paul was not mildly concerned with what he witnessed. He was distressed, physically revolted by what he saw. Yet, he does not hide into a corner to whistle in the dark. He stays present. And something happens in the midst of this engagement, as the text goes on to illustrate. Paul’s distress is changed. It changes to recognition and opportunity. And so later in the chapter, we come to this most extraordinary conversion:
Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said, ‘People of Athens! I see that you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with the inscription: to an unknown God. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship – and this what I am going to proclaim to you.’” (Acts 17:22-23)
Paul’s conversion needs be ours too, especially in a post-Christian context. It was well expressed in a Vatican document, now 22 years old, called “Jesus Christ: the Bearer of the Water of Life – A Christian Reflection on the New Age.” In that essay, we read this important injunction,
“If the Church is not to be accused of being deaf to people’s longlining, her members need to do two things: to root themselves ever more firmly in the fundamentals of their faith, and to understand the often silent cry in people’s hearts which leads them elsewhere if they are not satisfied by the Church.” (1.5).
This is why Tracy’s framework, and more recently that of Thomas Halik, is critically important for with this we are holding together the questions of the times and the deepest impulses of our religious tradition. And this ‘holding’ is undertaken in such a way that the deepest movements of our tradition do not simply provide the answers to contemporary questions, but in a manner that respects the Spirit in the correlation, in the meetings, the mutual touching points between human experience, on the one hand, and the religious tradition, on the other. Using the imagery form the ancient Greek legends in which the hero had to steer a midway course between to seductive but alternative alternatives, such a possibility negotiates the steady course between the Scylla of some kind of new age solipsism in which the self remains locked within itself, and the Charybdis of an isolated traditionalism.
The question has to arise: how is the Catholic school, a religious school, to engage this cultural milieu in which it finds itself? How we hold both our distinct Catholic perspective and the diversity of experience in a pluralist and secular society is of special pastoral and evangelical consideration. Our schools, especially, are places where such a tension must be lived with creativity, fidelity, and possibility. It would be an easy, but lazy, option to err on one side of the tension or the other. To live with tension. This is a skill we find to be one of the most difficult. Yet, the future belongs to the artisan of tension. And, especially, our leaders in education need be formed to be artisans of tension, living in the belly of paradox. We must be those who can both name and engage the cultural context in which we discover ourselves and at the same time know and love the Tradition to which we are accountable
At the heart of our strategy, however, must first and foremost be a strategy of encounter of persons. It can never be a celebration of tolerance of every perspective or every ideology. We serve people, not ideas. And therefore, our welcoming is, as the late Pope Francis urged, means “taking persons into our care, listening attentively to them, attending to people’s situation with respect and truth, and accompanying them on their journey of reconciliation.”[12]
This is a most critical methodology:
- We take persons into our care. We can take persons into our care without subscribing to what they think;
- We listen attentively to them. We listen not just with our ears but with our heart, putting ourselves into their shoes, listening to their whole story, to the words that remain silent;
- We attend to their situation with respect and truth. We are ready to situate a person’s story into a larger context. We do not rush to judgement but neither do we abandon our own principles of what is right and wrong;
- We accompany them on their journey of reconciliation. We commit ourselves to being on a journey with them so that they may discover the healthiest way forward, making those decisions for their well-being, not being discouraged when they make choices with which we disagree, but continuing to remain present to them.
For the late Pope Francis this is the foundational quality from which all else follows. As he preached,
A man comes up to Jesus and kneels down before him, asking him a crucial question: “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (v. 17). So important a question requires attention, time, willingness to encounter others and sensitivity to what troubles them. The Lord is not stand aloof; he does not appear annoyed or disturbed. Instead, he is completely present to this person. He is open to encounter. Nothing leaves Jesus indifferent; everything is of concern to him. Encountering faces, meeting eyes, sharing each individual’s history. That is the closeness that Jesus embodies. He knows that someone’s life can be changed by a single encounter. The Gospel is full of such encounters with Christ, encounters that uplift and bring healing. Jesus did not hurry along or keep looking at his watch to get the meeting over. He was always at the service of the person he was with, listening to what he or she had to say.
As we initiate this process, we too are called to become experts in the art of encounter. Not so much by organizing events or theorizing about problems, as in taking time to encounter the Lord and one another . . .Time to look others in the eye and listen to what they have to say, to build rapport, to be sensitive to the questions of our sisters and brothers . . .. Every encounter – as we know – calls for openness, courage, and a willingness to let ourselves be challenged by the presence and the stories of others. . . So often God points out new paths in just this way. He invites us to leave our old habits behind. Everything changes once we are capable of genuine encounters with him and with one another, without formalism or pretence, but simply as we are.”[13]
In the end, it will be the quality of our care of those entrusted to our guidance, not our words that will be transformative and speak of that pathway that is most genuinely human. Let us never forget that salvation never comes through an explanation, but only as an event. It is the depth of our genuine encounter that becomes the moment of salvation for another. As Pope Leo would put it, “Catholic universities and schools are places where questions are not silenced, and doubt is not banished, but accompanied. The heart, there, dialogue with the heart, and the method is that of listening that recognizes the other as an asset, not a threat. Cor ad cor loquitur was Saint John Henry Newman‘s cardinal’s motto, taken from a letter of Saint Francis de Sales: “Sincerity of heart, not abundance of words, touches the hearts of men.”[14]
In the discussion on Catholic Education today we often hear reference to “the value-added possibility” of our systems. That is, our mission is not simply the provision of quality education but about something more. Yes, this is certainly about the formation of our students in faith. However, I want to suggest that it is also about something that must accompany this– the formation to community. For community will always be the hearth of faith. As the Vatican’s then Congregation for Education, wrote in Educating Together in Catholic Schools in 2002
The Catholic educational community is able to educate for communion, which, as a gift that comes from above, animates the project of formation for living together in harmony and being welcoming. Not only does it cultivate in the students the cultural values that derive from the Christian vision of reality, but it also involves each of them in the life of the community, where values are mediated by authentic interpersonal relationships among the various members that from it, and by the individual and community acceptance of them. In this way, the life of communion of the educational community assumes the value of an educational principle, of a paradigm that directs its formational action as a service for the achievement of a culture of communion. Education in the Catholic school, therefore, through the tools of teaching and learning, ‘is not given for the purposes of gaining power but as an aid towards a fuller understanding of, and communion with [others], events and things.’ This principle affects every scholastic activity, the teaching and even all the after-school activities such as sport, theatre and commitment in social work, which promote the creative contribution of the students and their socialization.[15]
May the quality of community in each of our schools therefore become the ground for the new evangelisation to which we are committed in our own time.
Podcast Four: The Role of Catholic Education: Towards a new Pedagogy of Evangelisation
If we had questions about the mission of Catholic Education, doubts about the purpose of why we are return to school for yet another year, the times in which we have discovered ourselves must force us to think again. As never before has Catholic education been as important. It must be not just ‘a still point in a turning world’ to use T. S Eliot’s phrase, but much more: a force of resistance. Resistance to the disintegration of community and the bonds of belonging; resistance to toxic forms of sexual confusion; resistance to the normalisation of capricious and narcissistic public discourse; resistance to narratives of meaninglessness; and most importantly resistance to every apathy in response to all the above.
And yet, our students live in a dichotomy between the world in which they live, and the world proposed by the religious Tradition. As the Australian journalist Nikki Gemmel wrote some time ago:
The late Christopher Hitchens posed quite the question on modern religion: “To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation – is that good for the world?” To which I’d add, is it good for an organisation to preach homophobia and sexism as pillars of a community in this day and age? Religious extremists, you have a problem. It’s called the growing awareness of younger generations. They’re coming for you . . . Many young people look on in bewilderment and revulsion at values not of their world. They champion qualities like kindness, tolerance, equality and fairness . . . Something not associated with fearful reactionaries. Stubborn old people of the church are destroying their institution; leaving it, in the western world in particular, as a fragile movement of its time – that’s not moving with the times. [16]
Gemmel counterposes all this with, as she writes, “Jesus’ example of a voluptuous enveloping of others. That revolutionary man blazed courageous compassion, a sense of tolerance, yet it feels like there’s no exchange of embracing love in these arch conservative religious movements. Just an erecting of walls. To keep people out.”
Of course, what Gemmell did not allude to is that Jesus’ compassion is practiced against a very particular view of the world, of life, and of God. It is this worldview that enables him to be as self-giving as he is. Those who are different are not welcomed into a vacuum. They are welcomed into his understanding of the world to which he refers as the Kingdom of God. His welcome opens people to something more. As for Jesus, so, too, for us. Our schools are to be inclusive. But we are to do more than celebrate tolerance. We welcome people into something. The ‘something’ which we have to welcome people is the view of the world, of life, of gender, of sexuality that we have from our discipleship of Jesus Christ and his view of reality – and most significantly, as it has been interpreted by the long history of our Catholic Tradition. As Chesterton was to write, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
As for Jesus, so, too, for us. Our schools are to be inclusive. But we are to do more than celebrate tolerance. We welcome people into something. As the then Congregation for Catholic Education, wrote in its document, “The Identity of the Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue,” in March 2022:
. . . a Catholic school is endowed with a specific identity: i.e., “its reference to a Christian concept of life centred on Jesus Christ”. The personal relationship with Christ enables the believer to look at the whole of reality in a radically new way, granting the Church an ever-renewed identity, with a view to fostering in the school communities adequate responses to the fundamental questions for every woman and man. Therefore, for all the members of the school community, the “principles of the Gospel in this manner become the educational norms since the school then has them as its internal motivation and final goal”.[17]
The ‘something’ we have to welcome people is the view of the world, of life, of gender, of sexuality that we have from our discipleship of Jesus Christ and his view of reality – and most significantly, as it has been interpreted by the long history of our Catholic Tradition. In other words, what we have to welcome people is not something we create according to our own likes or dislikes, according to our own feelings. At our baptism, we were immersed into the mystery of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We were not baptised into something that felt good. We were not baptised into something that we control, something from which we can pick and choose to make our own. We were not baptised into a narrative without definition, and which is inclusive of every position without boundaries. We were not baptised into a therapeutic mythology in which love is reduced to being nice to everyone, and in which the tortuous project of compassion is reduced to acceptance of everything. We were baptised into a story of renunciation, a story of sacrificial love, a story of resistance. We were baptised into a life that resists everything that would truncate us of our humanity and draw us from the truth of ourselves.
As Pope Leo wrote at the end of 2025 on Catholic education:
We live in a complex, fragmented, digitized educational environment. Precisely for this reason, it is wise to pause and refocus our gaze on the “cosmology of Christian paideia”: a vision that, over the centuries, has been able to renew itself and positively inspire all the multifaceted aspects of education. Since its origins, the Gospel has generated “educational constellations”: experiences that are both humble and powerful, capable of interpreting the times, of preserving the unity between faith and reason, between thought and life, between knowledge and justice. In stormy weather, they have been a lifeline; in calm weather, they have been a sail unfurled. A beacon in the night to guide navigation.[18]
This though demands a new pedagogy. It means a pedagogy particularly on religious and moral issues that presents the current milieu as plainly and as objectively as it can, with as detailed an analysis of its premises as it can provide, and at the same time capable of presenting the Catholic worldview in as faithful and yet as creative way possible. Not to allude to the dominant cultural and social mores in which young people live and breathe is to risk, from their perspective, relegating the religious Tradition to disconnected fantasy. Not to open the Catholic worldview in as invitational way as possible is to abdicate our moral responsibility to share with others their truth. In the midst of this, it would be good for us to take to heart the wisdom of the great 20th century spiritual writer, Thomas Merton when he observed, “There is something wrong with questions that are supposed to be disposed of by answers. That is the trouble with the squares. They think that when you have answers you no longer have questions. And they want the greatest possible number of answers, the smallest number of questions.”[19] In other words, the answers of our Tradition cannot be shared without remaining sensitive to the questions that are not going to go away.
Such a pedagogy is learnt from the Master himself. Jesus himself lived in a society radically antithetical to the vision of life he preached. He preached the inauguration of a civilisation fundamentally at odds with the premises upon which Roman and first century Judaic law was constructed. His methodology was both to name the prevailing expectation and to invite his hearers to something new, something different. “You have heard that it was said . . . But I tell you” is the refrain introducing his teaching (see Matt 5: 38-48). So, we too, are to accompany our students: “You know it is said . . . But here is another way of looking at it.”
Such a pedagogy demands a trust in the truth, beauty, and goodness of that alternative we wish to share – and the recognition that truth, beauty, and goodness are irresistible components in the adventure of evangelisation. Which way will our students decide? The forces of the ideological colonisation in which they are enmeshed may be too great. Research shows that the overwhelming number of students in our Catholic schools have made the decision against being Catholic by the age of fourteen. They enter our secondary schools Catholic and leave us pagan – a very sobering fact. This is not a statement of the quality of our schools as it is of the cultural context in which we journey with our students. We have to be honest with the question as to how can one be Catholic as a young person in any meaningful way in the face of the dominant social current when one’s professional and social life are contingent on subscribing to it? But maybe the alternative perspective we have shared with courage, conviction, and compassion might linger in their memory as a smouldering coal to be fanned into flame when the State religion is, in the end, exposed as an illusory way to human happiness and flourishing.
As artisans of tension, we then become poets of the Kingdom of God. The teaching we are to share cannot be a moralising word or a word which condemns but it must a ‘poetic’ word ‑ a word which seizes people’s imagination because it deeply respects them and evokes in them the desire for something more, something different – that ‘new beginning’ which is the mark of the Spirit. As Paul Ricouer once wrote, “any ethic that demands attention from the will, must first be subject to a poetry that opens up new vistas for the imagination.”[20] In other words, don’t tell me what to do; tell me how it can be. Open a space for me into which I can grow and move. This is the word, offered, as Brueggemann implores, “neither in rage or cheap grace but with the candour born of anguish and passion.”[21]. It is the word which nurtures, which nourishes and always invites: “. . . the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere” (Ja. 3: 17-18). It is the capacity, as we have said earlier, not only “to root [ourselves] ever more firmly in the fundamentals of their faith, [but} to understand the often-silent cry in people’s hearts, which leads them elsewhere if they are not satisfied by the Church.”[22]
The Catholic school is an essential expression of the mission of the Church. It is not simply conducted for the purposes of education, but it is aimed at enabling our students to come and to know Christ, and thus to be those who grow “authentically as persons who gradually learn to open themselves up to life as it is, and to create in themselves a definite attitude to life that will help them to open their views and their hearts to the world that surrounds them, able to see things critically, with a sense of responsibility and a desire for a constructive commitment.”[23] Thus, our Catholic schools have a unique opportunity to develop new paradigms of evangelisation in our complex society, such that both contemporary human experience and the wisdom of our Tradition can enjoy a new dialogue, always in respect to the person who stands before us.
It is incumbent upon us, therefore, to devise strategies of dialogue, embedded in pedagogies, that ensure the tension is maintained and neither dissolved nor resolved. As the 2022 document “The Identity of the Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue” from the then Congregation for Catholic Education, reminds us:
Pope Francis provided three fundamental guidelines to help dialogue, “the duty to respect one’s own identity and that of others, the courage to accept differences, and sincerity of intentions. The duty to respect one’s own identity and that of others, because true dialogue cannot be built on ambiguity or a willingness to sacrifice some good for the sake of pleasing others. The courage to accept differences, because those who are different, either culturally or religiously, should not be seen or treated as enemies, but rather welcomed as fellow-travellers, in the genuine conviction that the good of each resides in the good of all. Sincerity of intentions, because dialogue, as an authentic expression of our humanity, is not a strategy for achieving specific goals, but rather a path to truth, one that deserves to be undertaken patiently, in order to transform competition into cooperation”.[24]
I could propose no better a conclusion to our reflections than that given by Pope Leo XIV in his own document celebratinbg the 60th anniversary of the Vatican Council’s document on education when he reflects on the importance of thinking of Catholic educational constellations as an inspiring image of how tradition and future can intertwine without contradiction: a living tradition that extends towards new forms of presence and service. As he observes:
Constellations are not reduced to neutral and inert concatenations of different experiences. Instead of chains, let us dare to think of constellations, their intertwining full of wonder and awakening. In them lies the ability to navigate challenges with hope, but also with courageous revision, without losing fidelity to the Gospel. We are aware of the difficulties: hyper-digitalization can fragment attention; the crisis of relationships can wound the psyche; social insecurity and inequalities can extinguish desire. Yet, precisely here, Catholic education can be a beacon: not a nostalgic refuge, but a laboratory of discernment, pedagogical innovation and prophetic witness. Drawing new maps of hope: this is the urgency of the mandate.
I ask educational communities: disarm words, raise your eyes, and safeguard the heart. Disarm words, because education does not advance with polemics, but with meekness that knows how to listen. Raise your eyes. As God said to Abraham, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars” ( Gen 15:5): know how to ask yourselves where you are going, and why. Safeguard the heart: relationships come before opinions, people before programmes. Do not waste time and opportunities: “to quote an Augustinian expression: our present is an intuition; a time we live and must take advantage of before it slips through our fingers” . In conclusion, dear brothers and sisters, I make my own the exhortation of the Apostle Paul: you must “shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life” ( Phil 2:15-16).[25]
Thus the school is to be a place in which people are formed, “in such a way as to respect the identity, culture, history, religion and especially the suffering and needs of others, conscious that “we are all really responsible for all.”[26] It is this that provides our schools with their particularly prophetic dimension, appearing “ as a privileged place for the formation of young people in the construction of a world based on dialogue and the search for communion, rather than in contrast; on the mutual acceptance of differences rather than on their opposition. In this way, with its educational project taking inspiration from ecclesial communion and the civilization of love, the Catholic school can contribute considerably to illuminating the minds of many, so that “there will arise a generation of new persons, the moulders of a new humanity.”[27]
[1] Pope Leo XIV, “Drawing New Maps of Hope”, Apostolic Letter on the 60th Anniversary of the Conciliar Declaration Gravissimum educationis (27 October 2025), n 5.2.
[2] Pope Francis, Interview on Return Flight from Georgia and Azerbaijan, 4 October 2016. See http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/02/world/pope-transgender-comments/index.html
[3] See Charles Taylor’s two magisterial works, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989), and A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007).
[4] Mike Randall, “A Still Point in a Turning World” The Tablet (24 January 2026), 16.
[5] Pope Leo XIV, Address to members of the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, 9 January 2026, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2026/january/documents/20260109-corpo-diplomatico.html, accessed 24 January 2026.
[6] See David Tracy, Dialogue with the Other: The inter-religious dialogue, (Louvain: Eedmans/Peeters Press, 1990), 5. See also David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope, (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 28.
[7] See David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism, Crossroad: New York, 1989).
[8] See David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The new pluralism in theology, (New York, Seabury Press, 1975).
[10] Tomas Halik, The Afternoon of Christianity: The courage to change, translated by Gerald Turner, (Notre Dame, IND: University of Notre Dame Press, 2024), 193
[11] Halik, The Afternoon of Christianity, 194.
[12] Pope Francis, Address to the Parish Priests of the Diocese of Rome, 6 March 2014.
[13] Pope Francis, “Homily for the Opening for the Synodal Path,” St Peter’s Basilica, 10 October 2021.
[14] Pope Leo XIV, “Drawing New Maps of Hope”, Apostolic Letter on the 60th Anniversary of the Conciliar Declaration Gravissimum educationis (27 October 2025), n 3.1.
[15] Congregation for Catholic Education, Educating Together in Catholic Schools: A shared mission between consecrated persons and the lay faithful, (8 September 2007), (Strathfield, NSW: St. Pauls Publications, 2008), n. 39.
[16] Nikki Gemmel, “Hard Line Religion? Young People look on in Bewilderment and Revulsion” The Australian, 5 November 2022.
[17] Congregation for Catholic Education, “The Identity of the Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue,” Instruction (29 March 2022), n. 20.
[18] Pope Leo XIV, “Drawing New Maps of Hope”, Apostolic Letter on the 60th Anniversary of the Conciliar Declaration Gravissimum educationis (27 October 2025), n1.2
[19] Thomas Merton, in Striving Towards Being edited by Robert Faggen.
[20] Paul Ricoeur quoted by Frederick Herzog in “Liberation and Imagination,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology Vol 32 (July 1978), 228.
[21] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 50.
[22] Pontifical Councils for InterReligious Dialogue and Culture, “Jesus Christ: The Bearer of the Water of Life – A Christian Reflection on the ‘New Age’,” (2003), 1.5.
[23] Congregation for Catholic Education, Educating Together in Catholic Schools: A shared mission between consecrated persons and the lay faithful, (8 September 2007), (Strathfield, NSW: St. Pauls Publications, 2008), n. 43.
[24] Congregation for Catholic Education, “The Identity of the Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue,” n. 30.
[25] Pope Leo XIV, “Drawing New Maps of Hope”, Apostolic Letter on the 60th Anniversary of the Conciliar Declaration Gravissimum educationis (27 October 2025), n 11.1-2
[26] Congregation for Catholic Education, Educating Together in Catholic Schools, n. 44.
[27] Congregation for Catholic Education, Educating Together in Catholic Schools, n.44.
