Catholic schools opened this month and are teaching students in a new social and political landscape — a post-Roe America. Bishop Barry C. Knestout’s statement following the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade highlighted the need for Catholics to be voices for the sanctity of human life, to offer assistance and comfort to women and families in need, and to engage in charitable and informed dialogue to promote pro-life concerns. With those objectives in mind, I offer five suggestions for Catholic education in the post-Roe era.
Catholic schools should provide opportunities for community service that focus on personal interaction and include structured reflection. Service learning helps us to form the whole person by providing a framework for encountering people in need, developing empathy and solidarity through encounter, and reflecting on moral and ethical questions that these encounters raise.
In support of our call to Christian solidarity, Catholic schools should include civics courses in their curriculum. We can teach government structure, public policy and civic engagement. When schools couple civics curriculum with a strong moral foundation, they graduate informed and engaged citizens interested in the common good and capable of civil dialogue.
As schools consider the moral formation of our students post-Roe, we should examine our human sexuality curricula. A comprehensive and unambiguous education in human sexuality, moral theology and bioethics is a necessity in our 21st century cultural and scientific landscape.
In partnership with parents, Catholic schools must affirm the Church’s teachings on human sexuality, family life and fertility. Teaching human sexuality will prepare our students for healthy relationships and enable them to affirm the human dignity of others.
Education that affirms the value of every human life goes beyond science and theology classes. Catholic educators should compile a pro-life book list tailored to their student body. For younger readers, the books may depict family life as a joyful endeavor worthy of self-sacrifice.
For middle school students, books should provoke discussion about individual conscience and making difficult choices in the face of peer pressure. High school students are ready for books with themes about social and cultural structures that affirm or harm human dignity. The high school list should include the papal encyclicals “Rerum Novarum,” “Humanae Vitae,” “Evangelium Vitae,” and “Caritas in Veritate.”
Finally, schools should examine their mission to Catholic families. This challenge merits a focused, all-hands discussion. In what ways does the culture of the school affirm the value of human life? Is the school providing support to families in ways that affirm the dignity of all human beings?
These discussions may include topics such as maternity and paternity leave, employee health care, mitigating the financial burden of private education on a family, better including persons with special needs into the life of the school, or even reconsidering the burdens of time that homework and extracurricular activities place on students.
Catholic schools are beacons of hope for our students, our faculty and staff, our families and our larger community. Our pro-life vision should be joyful and all-encompassing. The recent Supreme Court decision has offered all Catholic schools an opportunity to show the world what the pro-life, post-Roe generation stands for and how we engage the world with courage, confidence and compassion.
Eileen Lapington, a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, helped found and teaches at Cardinal Newman Academy, Richmond.