Education constitutes one of the main commitments of the Catholic Church, which is expressed not only in catechetical action more directly related to personal faith formation, but also in the various forms of formal education promoted by Catholic schools and universities, pastoral care and religious instruction in schools. After all, formal education - from childhood to university - is never neutral, precisely because it is a particular form of education in which personal positions and values are inevitably transmitted along with content. And this is why the educational project of a Catholic school or university constitutes the inescapable background against which to place the instrumental or specialized culture that the Christian perspective goes to inspire.
The Catholic Magisterium has repeatedly spoken on the subject in numerous official documents and occasional interventions; in various ways, Canon Law also regulates the educational initiatives promoted by the Church. Among all these sources, it can be difficult to orient oneself, without prejudice to the relevance of education, for which the Council used the qualification of gravissimum momentum (a topic of extreme importance) while the latest popes have sounded even more dramatic alarms, from the educational emergency felt by Benedict XVI to the educational catastrophe denounced by Pope Francis.
In such a significant and articulated context, therefore, comes the welcome and timely publication of a book that brings together, in orderly synthesis, the magisterial production of the universal Church on the subject of education.
In distinct chapters, the educational mission of the Church, the condition of Catholic schools, the teaching of religion, the role of Catholic universities (in the theological and secular sciences), and several perspectives on school and university pastoral care are presented.
The approach is essentially institutional, basing itself exclusively on Canon Law and the various sources of the Catholic Magisterium (documents of the Council and the Vatican Congregations, pronouncements of the pontiffs), in a horizon that is systematically worldwide and never referred to particular geographical conditions. The scientific, cultural, and political debate on the subject remains excluded, but the merit of this methodological choice is that it offers an overview of unquestionable authority from which one can then develop further reflections and correctly grounded stances. The time horizon ranges from Vatican II to the most recent interventions of Pope Francis, ensuring a sufficiently complete picture despite the brevity of the exposition.
The authors are four professors of the Salesian Pontifical University of Rome, with different skills but linked by a single shared perspective: Fr. Cesare Bissoli, Fr. Sergio Cicatelli, Fr. Guglielmo Malizia and also former Rector Carlo Nanni, whose passing in 2020 temporarily interrupted the project of the volume, but friends and colleagues faithfully wanted to resume it and bring it to completion, to offer the public a practical and up-to-date working tool.
The text is sure to be useful for all those involved in formal education, both inside and outside the Church: educators, teachers, students, pastors, sector leaders, and parents – and especially for the world's 3,300 Salesian centers, with their 6,900 Salesians and 52,000 lay people. This is because the Salesian School is an evangelizing school, a proposal to embody the Gospel in educational centers.
"This publication is intended to be a tool for reflection, analysis of the characteristics of each specific Salesian center, and the definition of objectives in accordance with its Educational-Pastoral Project. It requires a thorough, in-depth reading and dialogue with the people involved in the educational-pastoral action," states Father Miguel Angel Garcia, Councilor for Youth Ministry.
He concludes, "Evangelization is, for the Salesians, a constitutive dimension of the mission and education is the fundamental mediation that takes place, particularly in the school environment. Evangelization proposes to education a model of humanism inspired by the Gospel, and education supports and accompanies the process of evangelization by opening the hearts of children, adolescents, and young people to truth, beauty, compassion, and the meaning of life."
