Books That Should Be Assigned Reading in Catholic Schools

Catholic schools aren’t Catholic enough. One often hears the complaint, and I believe that it applies to most Catholic schools. Among the deficiencies is a canonical one, a tendency to overlook a crucial learning outcome that all high school graduates ought to have realized: a rich sense of the Catholic heritage instilled by coursework in the arts, sciences, and theology. If we want eighteen-year-olds to have a sufficient Catholic formation, teachers should assign more readings that foster a historical understanding of the faith, a “Big Picture” or “Grand Narrative” of the Catholic past. 

It is true, of course, that we find in the curriculum works of Scripture, passages from St. Augustine, the Divine Comedy, some Cardinal Newman, Chesterton, and so forth. Those Catholic classics should be supplemented, however, with other Catholic classics rather than with secular works. To that end, here are some recommendations.

1. Lives of the Saints, by Fr. Alban Butler. This modernized version of Butler’s eighteenth-century compilation is suitable for older students. (There are many saints’ lives suitable for middle school students.) Some teachers may also wish to single out one saint for extensive study, selecting something like St. Athanasius’s Life of St. Anthony.

2. A volume of actions and words of the Desert Fathers, in some form. I have an inexpensive volume issued by Cistercian Publications entitled The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which is filled with anecdotes and dicta by 132 of those austere figures of the fourth and fifth centuries. Is there any instruction, apart from Scripture, more needed by our screen-fixated, peer-connected youth than that of these solitaries and ascetics?

3. The Rise of Christianity, by Rodney Stark. I presume readers of First Things are familiar with this volume, which opens with an essential question: “How did a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization?” It’s a remarkable story, one that all Catholics should remember. Stark treats it as an empirical matter, assembling facts such as the “arithmetic of growth” of the faith in the first centuries, but he has no desire to pull down the faith or deny miracles. “No sacrilege is entailed in the search to understand human actions in human terms,” he insists. I believe the worldly chronicle of the rise of Christianity reflects its truth. I expect students who’ve read some Scripture and the entries above will feel the same way.

4. Pensées, by Blaise Pascal. It’s a sad fact that when young Americans reach their mid-teens, a flood of cynicism and vulgarity fills their “feeds” and pulls them away from the transcendent. Pascal’s famous ruminations, written by a genius who believed the Roman Catholic Church was the only route to salvation, are an effective rescue from the inundation. He knows the anguish and solitude of human life, which afflict many youths, and he raises the condition to cosmic scope. He gazes at the night sky and admits, “The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.” The section “Against the Indifference of the Atheists” opens with a pertinent rejoinder to the New Atheists and their adolescent conception of faith (“Let them at least learn what the religion is which they oppose before they oppose it”). Don’t assign the whole thing—it’s too much for high schoolers. Pick an excerpt and let students debate it. Most of all, show them a Catholic thinker exploring a world of veiled entities, who asks why he exists at this time and place and not another, while holding that it’s best not to think or speak too much of oneself.

5. Essay on Man, Epistle I, by Alexander Pope. Pope is one of the great versifiers of English literary history and the second most quoted poet after Shakespeare (“A little learning,” “Fools rush in,” “Hope springs eternal”). He was also a lifelong Catholic. Catholics in early eighteenth-century England paid higher taxes, couldn’t own property in certain areas, and had to avoid political controversies. None of that shook Pope’s faith. Essay on Man is his philosophic worldview, stated in elegant heroic couplets. Epistle I sets man at his proper place in God’s universe, proposing the same aim Milton put forward in Paradise Lost: “Laugh where we must, be candid where we can; / But vindicate the ways of God to man.” Catholic doctrine appears in the poem only indirectly. We have, instead, stern warnings against pride, faith in the ultimate rational order of history, and layouts of the “vast chain of being.” Have students read it, memorize and recite passages, and ponder the message of the final lines:

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony, not understood;

All partial evil, universal good:

And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

Mark Bauerlein is a contributing editor at First Things.

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Image by Gerrit Dou, from Wikimedia Commons, via the public domain. Image cropped.