The Divine Teacher

Pope Pius XI’s “Divini Illius Magistri” is a manifesto for modern parents seeking to reclaim their rights as the primary educators of their children. Families and educators alike would do well to study and heed the pontiff’s timeless wisdom.

As far back as 1961, English historian Christopher Dawson was diagnosing a “crisis in Western education.”¹ That crisis is now vividly playing out in 21st century headlines. But a papal encyclical from almost 100 years ago speaks to the challenges facing our schools as powerfully as if it were written yesterday. Divini Illius Magistri offers a roadmap for what school was intended by God to be.

Divini Illius Magistri (“That Divine Teacher,” more commonly known as “On Christian Education”) was issued by Pope Pius XI on December 31, 1929.² It was part of a series of encyclicals on various social topics Pius XI issued during his papacy (1922-1939), including treatises on religious liberty, economics, and the threat of communism and fascism, chief among them Quadregesimo Anno, one of the Church’s most important statements of social teaching.

In Divini Illius Magistri, Pope Pius XI describes the purpose of education from a Catholic perspective and lays out the rights and duties of families, the state, and the Church to ensure that every child has an opportunity to be formed “to attain the sublime end for which he was created.” Pius XI built upon ideas about proper social order laid out by his predecessor Leo XIII. Later, the Second Vatican Council’s document on education, Gravissimum Educationis, drew heavily from Pius XI’s encyclical.³

Gravissimum Educationis is best known for articulating the role of parents as the “primary and principal educators” of their children. But the rest of that document is anodyne and largely derivative of Pius XI’s much more direct and powerful statement on the proper purpose of education and how societies should support that goal. Almost 100 years after its writing, Divini Illius Magistri remains a sharp rebuke to today’s secular, government-run monopoly of schooling that disempowers parents, privileges the agendas of professional educators over families, and seeks to indoctrinate students into an ideology of extreme individualism and allegiance to an all-powerful state.

The purpose of Christian education

Pope Pius XI was adamant that the ultimate end of education – the purpose of teaching children grammar, history, the sciences, art, or anything else – is ultimately spiritual. “The proper and immediate end of Christian education is to cooperate with divine grace in forming the true and perfect Christian,” he wrote, “that is, to form Christ Himself in those regenerated by Baptism.”⁴

The encyclical does not quote him on this particular point, but the pope’s words here are consonant with St. Augustine’s idea in The City of God of ordo amoris, or the right ordering of affections. Building on Aristotle, who said that education was about training the child to love the right things, St. Augustine would agree that Christian education is about learning to order our loves according to God’s loves, conforming our will to the Divine will, and thus becoming holy. Sainthood, then, is the primary goal of education. As Pope Pius XI writes, “Hence the true product of Christian education is the supernatural man who thinks, judges and acts constantly and consistently in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of the example and teaching of Christ.”⁵

All academic subjects should further this purpose. The encyclical advocates for the teaching of literature, both “vernacular” and “classical” and especially for the study of Latin, as well as “letters” and “the sciences.” In this way, the pope writes, “Christian education takes in the whole aggregate of human life, physical and spiritual, intellectual and moral, individual, domestic and social, not with a view of reducing it in any way, but in order to elevate, regulate and perfect it, in accordance with the example and teaching of Christ.”⁶ Every subject should be “permeated with Christian piety.”⁷

The pontiff goes on to argue that the survival of civilization itself depends on this form of education:

If we wonder that the Church in all times has been able to gather about her and educate hundreds, thousands, millions of students, no less wonderful is it to bear in mind what she has done not only in the field of education, but in that also of true and genuine erudition. For, if so many treasures of culture, civilization and literature have escaped destruction, this is due to the action by which the Church, even in times long past and uncivilized, has shed so bright a light in the domain of letters, of philosophy, of art and in a special manner of architecture.⁸

Pius XI’s contemporary, G. K. Chesterton, would agree. As he wrote, “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another…. Education is not a subject, and it does not deal in subjects. It is instead the transfer of a way of life.”

Rather than focus on the communication of civilization to future generations, today’s schools and universities (including, sadly, many which are nominally “Catholic”) are obsessed with vocational preparation and generally understand their purpose as making students ready for careers and to be good economic producers. But Divini Illius Magistri does not even acknowledge this purpose of education. Rather, Pius XI points to the achievements of those who have graduated from high-quality Catholic education as evidence of its vocational efficacy as a secondary fruit of the learning process:

Our Catholic institutions, whatever their grade in the educational and scientific world, have no need of apology.The esteem they enjoy, the praise they receive, the learned works which they promote and produce in such abundance, and above all, the men, fully and splendidly equipped, whom they provide for the magistracy, for the professions, for the teaching career, in fact for every walk of life, more than sufficiently testify in their favour.⁹

True Christian education, then, must recognize that vocational preparation is a secondary, or perhaps even tertiary, purpose of schooling.

The rights and duties of parents, the state, and the Church

Based on this divine purpose of education, Pope Pius XI goes on to make a strong statement about the role of family, the state, and the Church in the learning process.

Education is social and not merely individual, the Pope writes. There are three societies into which human beings are born: the family, civil society, and the Church. Families need civil society to help them complete their mission as parents, and both families and civil society need the Church, which is supreme above all. Education belongs to all three societies.¹⁰

Following the principle of subsidiarity Pope Leo XIII laid out in Rerum Novarum (1891), Pius XI argues emphatically that families have the first and core duty of educating children according to their mission “instituted directly by God for its peculiar purpose, the generation and formation of” children.¹¹ To the extent that the state or Church has a purpose to play in education, it is in support of parents, whose rights in this regard may not be usurped. In no way may children ever be properly understood to be the charges, much less the property, of the government:

On this point the common sense of mankind is in such complete accord, that they would be in open contradiction with it who dared maintain that the children belong to the State before they belong to the family, and that the State has an absolute right over their education. Untenable is the reason they adduce, namely that man is born a citizen and hence belongs primarily to the State, not bearing in mind that before being a citizen man must exist; and existence does not come from the State, but from the parents.¹²

The proper function of the state in terms of schooling is to support parents in their role as educators: “The function therefore of the civil authority residing in the State is twofold, to protect and to foster, but by no means to absorb the family and the individual, or to substitute itself for them.”¹³ That said, if parents fail to meet their duties, state officials must be prepared to supplement their efforts, up to and including establishing schools and ensuring that all schools maintain minimum standards of quality and rigor.¹⁴

But Pope Pius makes one of the earliest arguments for a public policy we would today describe as “school choice” based on distributive justice:

Accordingly, unjust and unlawful is any monopoly, educational or scholastic, which, physically or morally, forces families to make use of government schools, contrary to the dictates of their Christian conscience, or contrary even to their legitimate preferences.¹⁵

Pius XI notes the worldwide effort of anti-religious forces to curb the freedom of parents to choose the best means of educating their children, including in faith-based schools, by commending the seminal 1952 U.S. Supreme Court decision Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus, which rebuked the state of Oregon’s attempt to force parents to send their children to government-run schools.¹⁶

In the view of Divini Illius Magistri, governments should honor parents’ rights, never presuming to know better than families the true needs of their children. They should create an education environment that focuses on high standards of excellence, the moral formation of children, and using public resources to foster a wide variety of schooling options so that all parents can successfully carry out their educational duties.

The flaws in contemporary educational theory

Without mentioning his contemporaries like the Progressive John Dewey, whose work by 1929 already had a profound (and now seemingly permanent) impact on education, Pius XI nevertheless acknowledged the fierce interest in various education innovations. But those innovations were doomed to fail, the pope wrote, because they were divorced from education’s true purpose:

Never has there been so much discussion about education as nowadays; never have exponents of new pedagogical theories been so numerous, or so many methods and means devised, proposed and debated, not merely to facilitate education, but to create a new system infallibly efficacious, and capable of preparing the present generations for that earthly happiness.¹⁷

Education had taken on a new importance, Pius XI argued, because people perceive that there is something higher and more satisfying than worldly accomplishments, but too many “pretend to draw education out of human nature itself and evolve it by its own unaided powers. Such easily fall into error, because, instead of fixing their gaze on God, first principle and last end of the whole universe, they fall back upon themselves, becoming attached exclusively to passing things of earth.”¹⁸

Secular humanist education is literally doomed, and Pius XI thoroughly rejected the idea that the formation of children’s intellects can ever be divorced from the formation of their souls:

Since education consists essentially in preparing man for what he must be and for what he must do here below, in order to attain the sublime end for which he was created, it is clear that there can be no true education which is not wholly directed to man’s last end…there can be no ideally perfect education which is not Christian education.¹⁹

Today we see, strange sight indeed, educators and philosophers who spend their lives in searching for a universal moral code of education” (62). Such men are miserably deluded in their claim to emancipate, as they say, the child, while in reality they are making him the slave of his own blind pride and of his disorderly affections.²⁰

Today’s government-run schools are doomed because they fail to meet their core purpose of helping children order their affections to attain eternal salvation. Worse, according to Pope Pius XI, they are infected with a dark and dangerous heresy of naturalism, the tendency to view the world through a materialist, determinist lens:

Every form of pedagogic naturalism which in any way excludes or weakens supernatural Christian formation in the teaching of youth, is false. Every method of education founded, wholly or in part, on the denial or forgetfulness of original sin and of grace, and relying on the sole powers of human nature, is unsound. Such, generally speaking, are those modern systems bearing various names which appeal to a pretended self-government and unrestrained freedom on the part of the child, and which diminish or even suppress the teacher’s authority and action, attributing to the child an exclusive primacy of initiative, and an activity independent of any higher law, natural or divine, in the work of his education.²¹

Far from the “social-emotional learning” rampant in today’s schools, which seeks to affirm the child’s every feeling, Pius XI knows that true education is the formation of the heart. True education forms children in virtue: “Disorderly inclinations … must be corrected, good tendencies encouraged … and the will strengthened by supernatural truth and by the means of grace, without which it is impossible to control evil impulses.”²²

Divini Illus Magistri goes on to warn against secular approaches to “sex education,” “coeducation,” and the dangers of media, in 1929 an emerging force for both good and evil in the world. Pius XI wisely notes that children should not be kept completely from media, but that they must be guided and protected as they navigate the confusing ideas secular society throws at them:

This necessary vigilance does not demand that young people be removed from the society in which they must live and save their souls; but that today more than ever they should be forewarned and forearmed as Christians against the seductions and the errors of the world.²³

Divini Illius Magistri is a manifesto for modern parents seeking to reclaim their rights as the primary educators of their children. Families and educator alike would do well to study and heed Pope Pius XI’s timeless wisdom.

Notes:

1. Christopher Dawson, The Crisis of Western Education (Catholic University of America Press, 2010).
2. Divini Illius Magistri, Vatican website.
3. Gravissimum educationis, Vatican website.
4. Divini Illius Magistri, 94.
5. Ibid., 96.
6. Ibid., 95.
7. Ibid, 80.
8. Ibid., 18.
9. Ibid., 55.
10. Ibid., 11-14.
11. Ibid., 12.
12. Ibid., 35.
13. Ibid., 43.
14. Ibid., 47.
15. Ibid., 48.
16. Ibid., 37.
17. Ibid., 5.
18. Ibid., 6.
19. Ibid., 7.
20. Ibid., 63.
21. Ibid., 60.
22. Ibid., 59.
23. Ibid., 92.

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The featured image is “Figure of Christ” (1884) by German painter Heinrich Hofmann, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.