Gregory Bycraft

The Benefits of an Authentically Catholic Education

We live in an academically confused world. It would appear that much of academia

dwells in Plato’s Cave analyzing the shadows on the walls in search of a justification for the

nonexistence of truth. The best way for a young mind to break out of the chains keeping his

peers in that shadowed haze: a true and authentic Catholic education. With it young men and

women may shatter the bonds of Descartes’ relativistic tyranny and emerge into the world to see

it in all of its goodness, truth, and beauty, as can only be witnessed in the sunlight of God

Himself. He then has a obligation to return to the cave and preach the good news of life outside

to his peers breaking them from their chains. He will be a leader of tomorrow who bring the

buried masses into the light. Plato would call him a philosopher, we call him a saint.

An authentic Catholic education allows a young mind to enter into the role of the hero in

the Cave and escape from his chains. The academic world today is much like the Cave. One is

taught that Truth is relative and must be determined on an individual basis. However, when one

attends an authentic Catholic university he may be given the wisdom and curiosity to escape this

shallow grave, and by the introduction to great thinkers he finds the strength to break his chains

and flee. The wisdom of a real Truth stuns him as he looks back at his peers and sees them as

humans made in the image and likeness of God, not merely bodiless identities. As our hero

ascends up the stairs he sees the fire producing the light for the shadows. He is stunned to see

that the object he thought was true is really just a cutout being held up by Descartes and

Rousseau, Nietzsche and Kant in the dim light of the Enlightenment. With a final glare of

renunciation he flees up the steps toward the voices of the truly enlightened.
 Eventually, he reaches the mouth of the cave. His professors have guided him with the

ironic laughter of Chesterton, the pastoral love of Ratzinger, and the all consuming curiosity of

Albertus. The light of Truth Itself shining down from the sun is infinitely more powerful than

the dim light of individual “truth” down in the cave tended by the “Enlightened.”

Next he is brought to a pond. He sees the reflections of the Forms as his eyes adjust. A

mathematician holds a tablet containing a right triangle in the mirrored waters and tells our hero

of Pythagoras's theorem. He knew this, but for the first time it becomes a testament to the

universality of Truth, not a rote equation to be parroted back at the teacher. More of the

academics from his university approach him and present the good, true, and beautiful of their

studies so he understands therm in a way that it really is, not as a grade on a test but as an elegant

piece of reality.

Finally he who has truly sought Him is approached by Christ Himself. He turns his head

gently upwards to the sun and the mystery of Creation and all of its facets stream into his retinas

and he understands the primacy of God: that it was He who made the heavens and the Earth.

Christ hands him, a torch of that Light and like Prometheus he charges as a warrior into battle to

free his countrymen from a tyrant.

That is the true benefit of an authentically Catholic education, it frees a young and

impressionable mind form the passing fancies and fallacies of the day and immerses it in the

eternal Truths of the many studies and facets of reality. It provides him with the battle cry of

freedom to shout from the rooftops of our fallen world’s flawed academia to turn the world back

towards the good, true and beautiful. It guides him toward Christ and He in turn toward the
New Jerusalem where he will experience the Beatific Vision, for that is the ultimate goal of any

life well lived.

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