Catholic Education, the Virtue of Hope and the Primacy of a Trinitarian Theological Anthropology ^†

Abstract

This paper argues that Catholic Education needs to be based on the foundation of Trinitarian theological anthropology. It explains where this fits within the architectonic framework of Catholic systematic theology. Trinitarian theological anthropology is the work of the theological virtues (faith, hope and love), operating upon faculties of the soul (intellect, memory and will) in pursuit of the transcendental properties of being (truth, beauty and goodness). Through the operation of these virtues a person is brought into a relationship with the Holy Trinity. A consideration of these fundamental elements of Catholic systematic theology and their place in Catholic Education is offered as a contribution to the celebrations of the Jubilee Year of 2025, with its title “Pilgrims of Hope”.

1. Introduction

Since the Year 2025 has been declared to be a Jubilee Year of Hope, this paper sets out to do three things: (i) to offer an overview of the theological virtue of hope as it operates within the Catholic intellectual tradition, including its operation in relation to faculties of the soul and transcendental properties of being, forming the foundation of an explicitly Catholic theological anthropology; (ii) with reference to the magisterial teaching of Pope Benedict XVI, explain how this theological virtue has undergone a process of secularist mutation and its consequences for Catholic education; (iii) to argue that an authentically Catholic (i.e., non-secularized) theological anthropology is a much-needed foundation for Catholic education. The methodology is consistent with that of the Communio school of theology, which typically approaches systematic theology by beginning with Trinitarian theology and then working from Trinitarian theology down to theological anthropology and from theological anthropology down to moral theology, sacramental theology, spirituality and catechesis.1

2. The Theological Virtue of Hope and Its Relationship to Key Theological Triads

Hope, as we know, from the writings of St. Paul, especially his First Letter to the Corinthians, is one of the three theological virtues, along with faith and love. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church §1812, all the human virtues are rooted in the theological virtues. These adapt the faculties of the soul for participation in the divine nature and thereby dispose Christians to live in a relationship with the Holy Trinity. This is theological anthropology 101.

Over the Christian centuries many theologians have taken the words of St. Paul as their starting point and have developed accounts of the relationship of the theological virtues to one another and of their role in intellectual development. The biggest names are of course St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, but more recently the theological virtues have been a central theme in the works of the philosopher Josef Pieper and his friend Joseph Ratzinger, who, as Pope Benedict XVI, wrote a trilogy of encyclicals on the theological virtues (See: Augustine 1996; Augustine 2017; St. Thomas Aquinas 2024; Pieper 1991; Pieper 1997). The first, Deus Caritas Est, released in 2005, addressed the virtue of love, the second Spe Salvi, released in 2007, covered the virtue of hope, and the third, Lumen Fidei, drafted by Benedict but finalized and released under the name of Francis in 2013, examined the virtue of faith. In each case the encyclical was focused on explaining how these virtues are commonly understood within both the Catholic intellectual tradition and our contemporary post-modern culture.

When the Catechism of the Catholic Church, released in 1992, spoke of the theological virtues adopting the faculties of the soul for participation in the life of the Holy Trinity, it was referring to the way that the virtues operate upon the intellect, the memory and the will.2 These are the three faculties of the soul found in Augustinian theological anthropology and typically mentioned in the writings of the Church Fathers who compare the Trinity of persons in one divine nature to the presence of three faculties in the one human soul. Other theologians, including and most notably Aquinas, treat the faculty of memory under the category of the intellect. Aquinas retains the tripartite structure, but speaks of the intellect, the will and the passions.

A preliminary theological principle is that all of creation has been marked by the form of the Trinity. This principle was emphasized by Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si at §239 with specific reference made to St. Bonaventure’s interest in the principle (Bonaventure 2020). The fact that all of creation has been marked by the form of the Trinity means that the human person has been marked by this form. Hence theologians speak of the human person having been made in the image of the Trinitarian God to grow into the likeness of Christ.3 This principle is the foundation of all Catholic conceptions of anthropology and especially of human dignity.

When we ask the question, “how are we humans made in God’s image”, we discover a whole network of interconnecting triads. The first is the Holy Trinity itself—God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The relationship between the human person and each of the Persons of the Holy Trinity was the subject of three encyclicals early in the pontificate of John Paul II. Redemptor Hominis, released in 1979, addressed the topic of the human person’s relationship to God the Son, Dives in Misericordia, released in 1980, covered the human person’s relationship to God the Father, and Dominum et vivificantem, released in 1986, offered a study of the human person’s relationship to God the Holy Spirit. These themes were also amplified in a series of general audience addresses delivered by John Paul II from 19 January 2000 to 20 September 2000 (Pope John Paul II 2002. See also: Nachef 1999). This trilogy of encyclicals by John Paul II can be read in conjunction with Benedict XVI’s trilogy on the theological virtues (including Lumen Fidei promulgated by Francis) to explain how the theological virtues connect the human person to the Persons of the Holy Trinity.

Following this primary triad of the Holy Trinity, there is a second triad composed of the three faculties of the human soul—the intellect, the memory and the will—if one follows St. Augustine, or the intellect, will and passions if one follows St. Thomas Aquinas. A third triad is composed of the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, and a fourth triad is composed of what philosophers call the transcendental properties of being, namely truth, beauty and goodness.4 Further, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit—wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, fortitude, piety and fear of the Lord (also called reverence)—can be sub-divided into three categories—those that work primarily upon the intellect, those that work primarily upon the memory and those that work primarily upon the will (John of St. Thomas 2016; Levering 2016). It is these interconnecting sets of triads that provide educators with a specifically Catholic theological anthropology as a foundation for a Catholic approach to the education of a child made in God’s image.

More specifically the faculty of the intellect is correlated to the theological virtue of faith. When the intellect is illuminated by faith, it is led to the transcendental property of truth; and the pursuit of this goal is assisted by the Holy Spirit through the Spirit’s gifts of wisdom, understanding, counsel and knowledge. Similarly, the faculty of the will is correlated to the theological virtue of love, and the operation of this faculty and theological virtue together lead the student in the pursuit of the transcendental property of goodness. The pursuit of this goal is assisted by other gifts of the Holy Spirit, especially the gifts of piety and reverence, or fear of the Lord. Meanwhile, the faculty of memory whose operation was studied in some depth by St. Augustine and St. Albert the Great, may be correlated to the theological virtue of hope and the mutual operation of this faculty and virtue can lead the student to a deeper appreciation of the transcendental property of beauty (Hochschild 2012; Grove 2022; Krause and Taylor 2024; Resnick 2013). The Holy Spirit’s gift of fortitude also operates in conjunction with the theological virtue of hope.

These relationships between faculties of the soul, theological virtues, transcendental properties of being and the gifts of the Holy Spirit do not operate in isolation from one another but in a Trinitarian or perichoretic manner, influencing one another’s movement like partners in a circular dance. The weakness of any one relationship in the ensemble reduces the quality of the performance of the others. Quoting from St. Thomas’s questions on hope, Josef Pieper explains that ‘the theological virtues flow back upon themselves in a sacred circle: one who is led to love by hope has thereafter a more perfect hope, just as he also believes now more strongly than before’.5 Pieper also observes that in the orderly chronological sequence of the active development of these virtues, faith takes precedence over hope and love; hope takes precedence over love, but conversely, in the disorder of their dissolution, love is lost first, then hope, and last of all faith. When it comes to the order of their perfection, love holds first place, with faith last, and hope between them (Pieper 1997, p. 104). Hope is always in the middle position between faith and love and is thus a kind of lynchpin between the two.

While the ensemble of these virtues and other interlocking triads need to play in concert, when it comes to the transcendental properties of truth, beauty and goodness, the late Fr Benedict Groeschel, an American Franciscan priest who was also a professional psychologist and spiritual director, argued that most students will have a primary attraction to one or other of the transcendentals, that is to say, a primary attraction to either truth, beauty or goodness, or sometimes to their unity (Groeschel 1983). This is a little like a Catholic theory of personality types. The transcendentals also need to play in concert, but some people find it easier to “play” one rather than the other. Concretely, the idea is that some children, like St. Thomas Aquinas, will have a strong attraction to truth, others, more like St. Francis of Assisi, will have a strong attraction to goodness, and yet others, like St. Augustine, or in modern times, St. John Henry Newman, will be strongly attracted to beauty.6 Discerning what a child’s primary transcendental is will give a teacher an insight into the child’s spiritual and intellectual strengths and also, possibly, weaknesses. As people mature and grow in holiness all the theological virtues and faculties of the soul will be in pursuit of the true, the beautiful and the good, and not simply targeted on one or other of the transcendental properties.

It is precisely because different students will have different personality types and different primary transcendentals that popular evangelizers like Bishop Robert Barron always approach the presentation of the faith by reference to its truth, its beauty and its goodness, rather than simply focus on its truth as was a common practice in the pre-Conciliar era. In the context of Catholic schools this means that there needs to be sound catechesis (focused on truth) as well as excellent pastoral care (focused on goodness) and beautiful liturgy (O’Shea 2018). If the intellectual presentation of the faith is poor, the truth types will become bored, zone out, and cease to be intellectually engaged; if teachers and other staff members do not showcase goodness in the form of the various virtues, the goodness types will be repelled by the hypocrisy, and if liturgy is banal the beauty types will search for beauty in other places.

When the question is asked about how to present this multi-faceted theological anthropology with its interconnecting sets of conceptual triads to children, one answer is that it can be helpful to approach the theological theory through the lens of literature. For example, Carolyn F Scott, in her essay “Beyond Hope He Saved Us”, sub-titled “Trinitarian Analogies in the Lord of the Rings”, suggests that the three books that comprise The Lord of the Rings correspond to the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, and that the three main characters, Aragorn, Gandalf and Frodo, embody the qualities of the Holy Trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Scott 2015). The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring can be read as a reflection upon faith and fidelity to a mission. The second book, The Twin Towers, can be read as a reflection on hope. Gandalf assures Theoden that though the ‘enemy is strong beyond our reckoning, yet we have a hope at which he has not guessed”. The final volume, The Return of the King, has love as its central theme, including the love of the Hobbits and their fidelity to each other. The study of Tolkien’s classical works may thus provide a gateway to the presentation of the Trinity and the three theological virtues to children in Catholic schools.7

3. Hope in Contemporary Modern and Post-Modern Culture

Turning now from the theological anthropology to Pope Benedict’s pathology report on our contemporary culture as he presented it in his encyclical Spe Salvi, it is important to understand how contemporary culture is hostile to the theological virtue of hope.

In paragraph 5 of Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict wrote that St. Paul reminds the Ephesians that before their encounter with Christ they were without hope and without God in the world. He notes that St. Paul knew that the Ephesians had their gods, but their gods had proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their contradictory myths. The Ephesians therefore found themselves in a dark world facing a dark future. Pope Benedict suggested that we are in a similar predicament today. In an earlier work, The Yes of Jesus Christ, he remarked that many people find themselves torn between the pits of despair and presumption—“Those who despair do not pray anymore because they no longer hope, while those who are sure of themselves and their own power do not pray because they rely only on themselves’ (Ratzinger 1991, p. 67). Moreover a secularist culture that regards itself as post-Christian lowers spiritual horizons and diminishes the opportunities for experiences of the good, the true and the beautiful. As Pope Benedict’s colleague, the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, remarked: “The forms of the tradition have lost the background against which they could be understood and now give the impression of something in a museum, guarded by antiquarians and unthinkingly photographed by tourists” (Balthasar 1989, p. 35).

In various articles, Ratzinger–Benedict traced the rise of the cultures of modernity and post-modernity to false moves made in the late medieval period, followed by the Calvinist attack on sacramentality in the 16th century, Immanuel Kant’s destruction of the symbiotic relationship between faith and reason in the 18th century, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s full-frontal attack on the humanism of the Incarnation in the 19th century.8 The move from modernity to post-modernity could be described as the move from Kant to Nietzsche.

Kant separated faith from reason and then privatized faith (Kant 1934). However he wanted to defend Christian ethics, not by reference to the scriptures or to the virtues of Christ, but by reason alone. Pope Benedict’s first encyclical—Deus Caritas Est—is highly critical of the idea that there can be a Christian ethics without Christ, and the encyclical Lumen Fidei, which he drafted, was similarly critical of the notion that reason, left to its own devices, without the light of faith, could remain targeted on the truth as revealed by Christ.

While Kant wanted to defend Christian ethics and to exalt human reason untainted by faith or theology, Nietzsche had no time for either Kantian reason or Christian ethics. He described Christian ethics as a crime against life itself and a moral framework fit only for members of the herd (Nietzsche 1990; Thiele 1990). He also declared his intention to transvalue the values of the Christian tradition—to launch an assault on the notion of objective truth, goodness and beauty—and to turn these transcendental properties into their opposites.9

In the latter half of the 20th century, especially from the late 1960s onwards, the Nietzschean project has been in the process of realization. Many people do now construct their own moral frameworks without any reference to Christ, or the Ten Commandments, or even the wisdom of the classical Greeks. They no longer believe in objective truth, beauty or goodness, and they regard human nature as something that scientific technology can change and improve. Often the reference points are popular magazines and the behavior of celebrities, and the Christian moral code is regarded as something so restrictive of human creativity as to be a negative social element that should no longer be tolerated. Consequently, many practices regarded by Christians as evil are now regarded as essential elements in any package of human rights.10 This is an illustration of what Nietzsche called the transvaluation of human values.

In Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict noted that within this contemporary culture people still have hope, but it’s a mutated form of hope. It is no longer hope in Christ. Often it is a neo-pagan form of hope that substitutes political leaders, scientists and technocrats for Christ. In short people look for salvation from science and technology and political ideologies take the place of religion. Political ideologies are the new mythologies.11

In his book The Yes of Jesus Christ, sub-titled Spiritual Exercises in Faith, Hope and Love, written as a work of tribute to Josef Pieper, Ratzinger paternally diagnosed the situation of young people who are immersed in this neo-pagan culture. He wrote:

Today we often see in the faces of young people a remarkable bitterness, a resignation that is far removed from the enthusiasm of youthful adventures into the unknown. The deepest root of this sorrow is the lack of any great hope and the unattainability of any great love: everything one can hope for is known, and all love becomes the disappointment of finiteness in a world whose monstrous surrogates are only a pitiful disguise for profound despair.

(Ratzinger 1991)

Given this cultural context, the question arises, how is it possible to foster a genuine virtue of hope in Catholic schools?

First, it is necessary to emphasize that human beings are creatures made in God’s image to grow into the likeness of Christ. So much of the emotional pain of youth is linked to self-identity issues. In the absence of the knowledge that one is a child of God, made in His Image, there is the danger, in such a materialist universe, to think of oneself as simply another commodity whose value is predicated on how many likes are received on a social media page. The fact that such a large number of youths have their bodies tattooed, or one might say branded, is a symptom of a crisis over self-identity (McCandish and Pearson 2023). Baptism too is a kind of branding but in its absence or in a state of ignorance of its meaning for those who were lucky enough to be baptized, there is a tendency for people to go in search of secular analogues for the sacraments; and a tattoo, it would seem, is a popular analogue for baptism (Schwartz 2008).

A second observation would be that once students understand that they are not mere commodities, on the one hand, or their own gods, on the other, but rather are creatures in a relationship with the Holy Trinity, they will begin to realize that truth is not a social construction; it is not something that we humans create for ourselves. It is a reality existing outside us. Indeed, as Benedict XVI emphasized in Caritas in Veritate and elsewhere, truth in its highest manifestation is a Person, and the virtue of faith opens the pathway to truth.12

A third observation is that in order to provide some oxygen for the theological virtues to flourish, students need to develop a prayer life, without which the theological virtues will soon atrophy (Balthasar 1986). Developing a prayer life in turn requires that students have opportunities to experience moments of silence and solitude (Sarah and Diat 2017). The noise of their digital world will need to be blocked out at regular times on a daily basis to create a space for prayer and reflection.

Developing a prayer life also includes participation in the sacramental life of the Church. Students therefore need to understand what sacraments are. They are not mere social milestone markers or mere memorials of things done in biblical times. For children who live in predominately Protestant cultures it helps to understand the difference between a Calvinist understanding of sacramentality and a Catholic understanding of the same. The two are radically, in the sense of foundationally, different. Divergent understandings of sacramentality, including sacramentality’s key concepts of nature and grace, were at the center of the intellectual disputes of the Reformation era. For a Catholic, the Eucharist is no mere memorial of the Last Supper, but the making present of the body and blood of Christ for the faithful’s reception as members of His body. In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, it is ‘a sacred banquet at which Christ is consumed, the memory of the Passion is recalled, our souls are filled with grace, and the pledge of future glory is given to us’.13 The sharpest distinction between Calvinism and Catholicism is the Catholic offer of a sacramental participation in the life of the Holy Trinity. This difference needs to be amplified not muted when seeking to hand on an understanding of the specific difference of the Catholic intellectual tradition, that is, the difference that distinguishes it from other appropriations of the teachings of Christ.

Just as the works of Tolkien may be helpful in introducing students to the notion of the theological virtues, the works of the Scottish writer George Mackay Brown may be a helpful introduction to the distinctions between Calvinist and Catholic conceptions of sacramentality. In theological terms the distinction has been described as Calvinism offering a mnemic account (an emphasis on sacraments as memorials) while the Catholic account is ontological (changing one’s very being). As Cardinal Charles Journet explained in The Primacy of Peter in the mnemic account we have a mere awareness through memory of an important event that took place once and for all in the past, ‘like a meteorite which is consumed and leaves a trace only in the memory’, whereas for the Catholic account there is a ‘real and unbroken repercussion in time of a supremely important event which took place once and for all in the past, like a stone thrown into the water which gives rise to concentric waves which spread indefinitely through time and space’ (Journet 1954, p. 33). Since MacKay Brown was writing from his position in the Orkney Islands his works are suffused with acute observations of the difference between the culture and sacramentality of Calvinism and the culture and sacramentality of Catholicism.14

A fourth and final observation about Catholic education and the virtue of hope as it operates within contemporary culture is that it does well to remember that the faculty of the soul most often correlated to hope is that of the memory and the transcendental most often correlated to hope is beauty. Therefore possibilities for hope to flourish are related to the knowledge of the Catholic intellectual tradition that resides in the memory. The more that a knowledge of the Catholic intellectual tradition is embedded in the memory, the more likely it is that the virtue of hope can lead a child to appreciate the beauty of the faith, or theologians would say, to apprehend the glory of divine revelation. As children grow to maturity this recognition of the beauty of the faith may shield them from doubt and despair and even prepare them for participation in public life.

The fact that the Catholic intellectual tradition is built upon specific conceptions of the nature of the human person, and of truth, beauty and goodness and virtue, means that it can critically assess other systems of thought with reference to where they stand in relation to these baselines. Concretely, someone who has spent twelve or so years in the Catholic education system, should, at the end of this long period of intellectual formation, be able to explain where the Catholic intellectual tradition stands in relation to alternative traditions on the cultural smorgasbord, including Kantianism and Calvinism, and the large assortment of Marxist and post-Nietzschean ideologies. Without having these intellectual capacities developed and the content stored in their memory, graduates of the Catholic education system are likely to flounder when they encounter these alternative traditions at university.

This problem was well understood by Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025). He attributed his philosophical achievements to the fact that in his childhood he had to learn to understand the governing principles of four different cultures—the culture of Catholicism and “Wee Free” Presbyterianism—since one parent was Catholic and one parent Presbyterian, the Gaelic culture of members of his family living on west coast islands, and the English culture of the urban elites he encountered.15 As a youth he observed that every single one of these cultures ran on different theological and philosophical principles. As an adult he concluded that in order to understand any culture one needs to understand the intellectual framework that underpins it, and he also concluded that the only coherent intellectual tradition, in the sense of offering principles for self-development free of contradictions, is that offered by the Catholic faith (MacIntyre 1988, 1990).

Consistent with these insights of MacIntyre, in his Principles of Catholic Theology Joseph Ratzinger, following Josef Pieper, argued that it is not so much reason in general that is the distinguishing hallmark of the human person in contrast to other creatures but the specific capacity for understanding and handing on a tradition (Ratzinger 1987, p. 86). Whatever skills animals may be able to pass on to new generations, they cannot teach their offspring to make judgments about competing systems of meaning. Only a human being can do this, and the Catholic tradition offers an anthropology that explains how this is done with the faculties of the soul, the theological virtues, the transcendental properties of being and the gifts of the Holy Spirit all working in concert.

If done well it supplies students with a stockpile of cultural capital stored in their memory so that they are not marooned within the cultural horizons of their own time. They will be able to transcend all social and cultural limitations in the direction of Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, their hope and their future reward (cf: John 14:6).

4. Application to Catholic Education and Systematic Theology

The repercussion of this analysis is that Catholic education needs to begin with the human person’s relationship to the Holy Trinity and thus the discipline of theological anthropology. This is not only an issue at the core of the Christian kerygma, but it influences how Catholic educators understand the role of the various faculties of the soul in intellectual and more broadly cultural formation. Most educators have come across the concept of Bildung so central to the educational interests of the German Romantics. Bildung is often translated as self-development or self-formation or simply the process of becoming a cultured person (Bruford 1975). The argument presented above is that the Catholic faith is an intellectual tradition which contains within itself a specifically Catholic account of Bildung that is built upon the operation of the theological virtues on the faculties of the human soul and their pursuit of the transcendental properties of being. And since the operation of these virtues is also a work of grace, Catholic educators need at least a rudimentary understanding of the Catholic tradition’s account of sacramentality.

Thus, in the context of systematic theology, a Catholic educator’s theological framework needs to start with Trinitarian theology and from the Trinity move to an explicitly Christocentric Trinitarian theological anthropology which views the child to be educated as a creature made in God’s image to grow into the likeness of Christ. The notion of the imago Dei then needs to be unpacked by reference to the various faculties of the human soul and the operation of the theological virtues upon them. From there the system should be broadened to include an understanding of sacramentality (the operation of grace upon nature) and a study of spirituality (the role of prayer in the development of a child’s spirituality). Catholic teachers also need to be aware of the ways in which the culture(s) in which their students live are either favorable or hostile to the work of the theological virtues. This entails an engagement with the field of practical theology. It also requires some grounding in the discipline of philosophy so that teachers understand the philosophical principles undergirding the cultures of modernity and post-modernity and can readily make judgments about the rationality of different social practices operating within these cultures. Familiarity with recent papal teaching offering a critique of the forces at work within contemporary cultures will also be of assistance.

For particularly talented students in the higher levels of secondary school a comparison of central elements in the Catholic intellectual tradition with those in alternative traditions exercising a powerful influence over the local culture would also be recommended. This might be called the “applied MacIntyre” recommendation. For all Catholic students an exposure to mythopoetic literature such as the works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis would provide a pathway into the consideration of theological topics such as the meaning of the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, the nature of truth, beauty and goodness, and the work of the memory, of the intellect and of the will.16 The treatment of these topics in the sacred scriptures and a study of the life of Christ through the sacred scriptures would also be a necessary component of any systematic theology in the context of Catholic education.

Finally, downstream of an understanding of one’s relationship to the Holy Trinity and the use of one’s faculties to imitate the virtues of Christ there would be an understanding of how to treat other people made in God’s image, and how to treat other creatures made by God and how to be good stewards of God’s creation. In the language of systematic theology this is the territory of moral theology and social teaching.

The problem with many approaches to Catholic education today is that they begin with social teaching and never quite make it upstream to the Trinity. In some schools there is even the approach of teaching free-floating “Catholic values” detached from catechesis. A common attitude is that it is possible to distill “Catholic values” from the core beliefs enumerated in the Creed and market the “values” so that the school somehow retains a Christian ambiance but children in the school who come from non-Catholic families or only nominally Catholic families are not taught anything that might offend the sensibilities of their parents.17 Numerous theologians have argued that when this is done the values themselves quickly become mutated.18 The distilled “values” become correlated to the politically fashionable projects of the day and change their content in a way analogous to the mutation of a healthy cell into a cancerous cell. Yves de Montcheuil SJ, who was a spiritual leader of the French Resistance and who was murdered by the Gestapo in 1944, said the following of strategies to promote the social fruits of Christianity without a strong faith in Jesus Christ, understood as the second person of the Trinity:

It was Christianity that taught humanity how persons deserve to be treated in a truly human society. The paganism of antiquity had no concept of this. Modern paganism has forgotten it. It is the greatest of illusions to imagine that the Church is nothing but a pedagogue who, having once taught humanity what civilization is, can henceforth be dispensed with, as if man could take hold of that heritage and then walk on by himself…It does not take long to squander that heritage. Cut off from the Christian roots out of which it grew, the idea of the human person is rapidly distorted and corrupted.

(Montcheuil 1987, p. 55)

5. Conclusions

The surest way to foster the hope of all the thousands of children in Catholic Education systems is to begin by emphasizing that they are creatures made in the image of a Tri-Personal God. They are likely to find it liberating to learn that they are a child of God and not just another commodity in the marketplace. This means that Catholic educators need to be familiar with the basic principles of Trinitarian theology and how this affects the understanding of the imago Dei (the person made in the image of God) and how it in turn provides the building blocks of a theological anthropology. In other words, Catholic educators need to understand the links between the Trinity and the faculties of the human soul (the intellect, memory and will) and they need to understand how the theological virtues operate upon the faculties of the soul to help students participate in the transcendental properties of being, that is, participate in truth, beauty and goodness. This reception of the theological virtues and participation in the transcendental properties will then have flow-on effects in the field of human relationships, the ethos of Catholic schools, and the care for all of God’s creation. A knowledge of these various components of systematic theology and their relationships to one another is thus a necessary rather than an optional component of the intellectual formation of a Catholic educator.

These recommendations are offered as a contribution to the celebrations surrounding 2025 as the Jubilee Year of Pilgrims of Hope.