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 The Mission
Fr. Dennis Gallagher, A.A. '69, Vice President for Mission
An Education of the Heart (Summer 2006)
A distinguishing trait of a Catholic liberal education is its sacramental character, understood in the most fundamental sense. It begins from the premise that our human experience is never simply self-contained, but opens up to a reality beyond itself, to which in some way it points. Such an education also presupposes that students find within themselves desires whose fulfillment even the most intense satisfactions of this life serve only to foreshadow. One is tempted to say that the more profoundly satisfying the experience—a deep, abiding love or friendship, an attraction to beauty, a participation in moral goodness—the more likely it will present itself as an intimation of something greater, a suggestion of a depth of communion unavailable to us in this life.
The implication here is that Catholic liberal education consists in no small measure in the awakening of desire. The transformation of mind and heart, to which our mission statement refers, is realized through a process whereby the souls of our students are made larger by a broad range of disciplines in the classroom and by opportunities for reflection and growth beyond the classroom. It is an altogether hopeful enterprise in which the desired goal is an appetite for those properly human activities of understanding and love. As such, Catholic liberal education stands its ground against the flattening of aspiration and the shrinking of desire, which marks our contemporary secular landscape.
If all this sounds terminally idealistic, let me invoke the notion of “one heart” dear to Assumption’s Augustinian heritage. The hungry heart of our students is manifested in every aspect of their lives on campus, even those which may seem furthest removed from the ambitious reach of an education to freedom and truth. It is here that the ephemeral and the more lasting satisfactions find common ground.
As an example: put to the test of an Augustinian analysis, the so-called drinking culture is often enough an expression of a desire for solidarity, an inchoate yearning to break through the isolation that can weigh heavily on the lives of students. As Pope Benedict suggests in Deus Caritas Est, it is the challenge of all Catholic education not to sever the links between the higher and lower aspirations of the human heart, but to see in these various longings the attraction toward the One in whose image we have been created and in whose presence we find what author C.S. Lewis refers to in the Weight of Glory as “the healing of that old ache.”
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