Community Life

St. Gregory’s Academy is more than a school; it is a community, and one of the things that best defines a community is the manner in which it uses its leisure time. For what one does in his “time off,” when not constrained by the necessities of life, is sometimes the best sign of one’s mental attitude and condition of soul. This is an important measure of our school’s success in forming the sensibility of boys. Therefore, education must go on outside the classroom, and in fact the extracurricular life of the school may have the most profound influence in developing the tastes and tendencies of young men.

One of these extracurricular factors which does much for the formation of boys is to give a them the real experience of a community: of belonging to something greater than oneself and become ennobled by being a part of a greater thing that transcends the sum of its parts. To borrow an example from Saint-Exupéry, this is why many miners will risk their lives to save the life of only one of their comrades. They struggle to save the principle: humanity and its intrinsic value. The experience of this fundamental phenomenon is, unfortunately, a very rare occurrence in the world today. Men are meant to live in close-knit communities and the students of St. Gregory’s tangibly experience that which transcends and ennobles the sum of its parts, be it community, the Church, or a family.

A Conspiracy of Friendship (Read More)

A vital element in any community is friendship. C. S. Lewis wrote in his book The Four Loves that friendship is the most intellectual type of love. It is as much a matter of the mind as the heart, for friendship is a relation among a number of people who love the same thing or share a common interest or insight. This object that is held in common is of great importance. It is the catalyst for the friendship. The fitting position of friends is side by side with their focus on the same object, as contrasted with romantic love where the parties, necessarily two, focus only on each other.

Another characteristic of this type of love is that friendship is not jealous. Friendship will allow any number of parties to join in; numbers make no difference to the mutual bonds it creates so long as they still focus on a common object. Of all the things lost to the modern world, there is perhaps none more sorely missed than the common accord of heart, mind, and hand that is true friendship. This virtue, so prized by the ancients, in which men step outside themselves into the light of a shared endeavor, offers a higher life, but only at the price of that modern independence which is really only a deadly isolation of the soul. Friendship is central to the life of St. Gregory’s Academy. Without forgetting the need for healthy opposition and competition, we work within the Salesian ethos that seeks to assume all relationships into the higher unity of divine charity in “a conspiracy of all heavenly and earthly things.” The word conspiracy has a second definition that is closer to the literal meaning of the verb con-spire which is “to breathe together.” A conspiracy in this sense means “cooperation” or “harmonious action.” When men work in concurrence toward a single end they may be understood as “conspirators.” The “conspiracy” between students and faculty brings them together in a way that is hard to achieve otherwise. The endeavors of St. Gregory’s Academy provide many objects for true friendships to grow around: the Faith, poetry, music, athletics, etc. Without such common loves, the faculty would not be unified in their vision, (which is the essence of a school), nor would the students be able to unite themselves to that vision and prosper in healthy friendships.

The students of St. Gregory’s live together, wonder together, discover together, learn together, suffer together, and rejoice together. Upon graduation, most boys leave thinking that St. Gregory’s is a good place because of the camaraderie they share with their friends, and indeed it is a deep and wholesome one. They, however, mistake the early manifestation for the reality. They have only comprehended the surface. The reality is that they have been given a small taste of what it means to live a rich spiritual life. They have been given a small taste of what it is to open one’s mind to the great accomplishments of our Western culture and everything that it stands for. They have been given a small taste of true friendship and what that word really means.

Community Life at SGA

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