He is truly risen from the dead! Alleluia! The Tomb is empty & the world will never be the same again! The Easter Triduum (from the evening of Holy Thursday to the evening of Easter Sunday) is the summit, the apex, of the entire Church year. Throughout these three chronological days there is, liturgically, one day where the unity of Christ’s Paschal Mystery is unfolded for the People of God. Lent can be a challenging season as we struggle to become holier, but, just like with many things in life, the more you put into something, the more you get out of it! We now begin 50 days of the Easter season, where we, as an “Easter people,” walk with the Risen Christ, living and sharing the good news! Pray for our 3rd Graders, who will soon be making their First Holy Communion, and pray for our 9th Graders who are also preparing to receive Confirmation from +Bishop Persico. We now enter the Easter Octave, which concludes next Sunday with Divine Mercy Sunday! On behalf of Deacon Hannah, Principal Tiefenthal, and the staff, we wish you a blessed Easter Season with the Crucified and Risen Christ!

On March 18, 2025, Randall Smith, writing for The Catholic Thing, penned an interesting article on Catholic education, and education in general. (At the end, I omitted the part where he is offering a course on this writing.) Here is the article: Saint Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind into God

One of the hardest goals to achieve in Catholic education is an embodiment in practice of the vision Pope John Paul II laid out in Ex corde ecclesiae and in his encyclical Fides et Ratio: an education animated both by the truths of faith and the truths of reason. As John Paul II expressed beautifully at the beginning of Fides et Ratio: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth – in a word, to know Himself – so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”

In the modern world, we seem to be fans of divorce: separating things meant to be kept together in a fruitful communion. In education, we depend on disciplinary divisions and teach our students to compartmentalize their minds as well as their lives. Contemporary education teaches them about work and little or nothing about marriage and family. It teaches them technical knowledge without imparting wisdom about its use in a full, flourishing human life lived in communion with others.

As T. S. Eliot warns in The Waste Land:

“Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images.”

Catholic education is not immune from this fragmentation. And to the common fragmentation between the academic disciplines, it often adds its own divorce between the life of the mind and the life of the soul, between the truths of faith and the truths of reason.

For some, a Catholic education is about “getting young people to Heaven,” and so the focus is on piety rather than on educational excellence. Others view a “Catholic” education as essentially no different from a non-Catholic or secular education, directed primarily at “success” as the secular world understands that term, involving some combination of wealth, power, status, in the realization of one’s creative self-expressive individualism.

What both approaches to education miss is that a Catholic education could be of the highest quality and lead people to God, and vice versa, that an education leading people to God could produce the highest quality education.

If we need to be reminded of this, we can turn to the great Fathers and Doctors of the Church, such as Sts. Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzen in the East, and St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Bonaventure in the West, men who combined great intellect with great faith and devotion to God.

A profound example of the marriage of intellect and faith, academic learning and creative imagination, can be found in St. Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind into God. The Latin title is Itinerarium mentis in deum, and that little word mens, mentis can be translated either as “mind” or “soul.” Itinerarium is obviously the precursor to our word “itinerary.” It is a guide for the journey.

Bonaventure’s itinerary of the ascent of the mind into God was inspired, he tells us, by St. Francis’s vision of a six-winged seraphic angel with two wings covering its feet, two in the middle of its body, and two over its head. In its center, Francis saw a vision of the crucified Christ that imparted to him the stigmata, the wounds of Christ in his own flesh.

Bonaventure associates the two wings of the angel pointing downward with the vision of God we get from our contemplation of creation. The two in the middle of the angel’s body, he associates with the vision of God we get from looking within ourselves. And the top two wings pointing above, he associates with the glimpses we get of God from reflecting on God as the Source of all Being, on the one hand, and the Source of all Goodness, on the other.

But what is above all that? Remember that at the center of the six-winged creature is the crucified Christ. What completely transcends the mind? What goodness and love is so great that we cannot even begin to grasp it by our intellect alone?

The fact that God has become flesh and died on a Cross for us.

The one thing man knows about God is that gods do not die. The Source of all Being and Life cannot experience death. But God’s love was so great, He did just that. This is a love so great that we must, with Mary, simply say “yes” to it, even though we cannot understand it.

Though a classic of “mysticism,” Bonaventure’s text is not divorced from learning. Bonaventure believed, rather, that the heights of all learning should be lifted up to the glory of God. To the “spiritual” Franciscans – those who thought that, by pursuing the life of the mind, Franciscans like Alexander of Hales and Bonaventure were destroying the spiritual purity and simplicity of Francis’s order – Bonaventure’s message was that the life of the mind can lead to God.

Indeed, in the spirit of St. Francis, who viewed all of creation as his “brother” and “sister,” that vision would find its fullest realization in the study of Creation. So too, his message to the brothers devoted to study at the University of Paris was the same: our studies must begin, as Francis showed us, in humility, and they must lead us in the end into God, or they will be lost in vanity, emptiness, and illusion.

Bonaventure believed, as did John Paul II, that “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” Bonaventure, as a faithful son of St. Francis, felt he needed six wings rather than just two. Why? (Hint: He is called “the seraphic doctor.”)

Saint Anselm of Canterbury (who famously defined, nine centuries ago, theology as “fides quaerens intellectum,” faith seeking understanding), pray for us.

Father Miller