St. Gregory’s Academy was established in 1993 by the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter to offer a classical liberal arts education within the Catholic intellectual and spiritual tradition.
We are a boarding school for boys grades 9-12 and provide a formation where a young man can learn virtue, deepen his faith, sharpen his intellect, and cultivate his taste according to the perennial wisdom and faith of the Church.
The object of St. Gregory’s Academy is taken from Pope Pius XI’s Divini Illius Magistri:
“The specific and immediate purpose of Christian education is to cooperate with divine grace in forming the true and perfect Christian… the true Christian, the product of Christian education, is simply the supernatural man: the man who feels, judges and acts always and consistently in accordance with right reason enlightened by the example and teaching of Jesus Christ.”/em>
By emphasizing the supernatural man the Holy Father did not mean to relegate the natural order to a position of unimportance. On the contrary, as he says, “the true Christian does not renounce the activities of this life; he does not stunt his natural faculties; but he develops and perfects them by coordinating them with the supernatural.” To achieve this coordination, Christian education must be ordered to the whole person: it mustconsider his capacity for faith and participation in grace, for imaginative and emotional appreciation of reality and the arts, for a sense of history, as well as for analytic and scientific habits of mind. But above all, schools must understand that their mission is not the mere purveyance of information, but rather the formation of character.
Formation of Character (Read More)
Often it has been justly remarked that one of the defects of modern education is that although students are offered a large quantity of information taken from a wide range of subjects, they are seldom taught to think and to express their thoughts clearly. Presented with a new fact, they are unable to assimilate it or to refer it to what is already known, thereby giving their knowledge the unity of a coherent whole. Upon turning their consideration to a new subject they are unable to perform an elementary division of its parts or to distinguish a necessary demonstration from one that is merely probable, or detect an argument that is fallacious.
This defect in mental formation is attributable to the simple fact that such formation is not a serious concern of modern education. An unreasonable profusion of subjects weakens and distracts the intellect. The methods of defining, distinguishing, arguing, and expressing oneself clearly and richly have been left by the wayside, to be picked up by the student himself, if at all. But true education is more than the mere learning of subjects or the assimilation of facts. It is a cultivation of mind that, as Cardinal Newman says, “implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character.”
Perhaps the greatest obstacle in restoring the traditional goals of education is the distorted and underdeveloped imagination so indicative of the modern mind. There is a tendency among good-willed Catholic educators, those who are concerned about correcting the intellectual errors of the day, to seek an intellectual development through the concentrated study of the more advanced areas of mathematics and science, including the supreme sciences of philosophy and theology. While this effort is laudable, it rarely is able to achieve the desired end without a prior concern for the imagination. We cannot correct a diseased imagination by the direct study of philosophy and theology, because anyone with a diseased imagination is incapable of studying philosophy or theology. We have all experienced the truth of this, if only because of those things to which we are involuntarily exposed. The more our minds are filled with imaginative abominations, the less we are able to contemplate God.
St. Gregory’s provides a necessary retreat from the distractions of the world and many of its temptation in an environment where both the moral and intellectual virtues can grow, so that boys may leave St. Gregory’s prepared to enter the world as men. Education addresses not the mind alone, but the whole man. Without the support of the moral virtues the intelligence and the imagination shrink or swell, warping the person, and often introducing errors and deviations. By contrast, in a well-formed character the constellation of moral and intellectual virtues bestows on the whole a beauty and splendor that is the mark of a certain perfection. St. Gregory’s offers every student the opportunity to work on perfecting himself in virtue, while remembering that we live in an imperfect world, and that nothing is accomplished without God’s grace.
At St. Gregory’s Academy our primary concern is the mental and moral formation of character so neglected to the detriment of both our nation and our Faith. Subjects we must certainly have, for the mind cannot develop in a vacuum, and the students need to gain information about the world. But those subjects are always viewed in a subordinate relation to the mental and moral development which is our true end. To attain this end our teaching is directed by traditional principles concerning the proper order of learning and the integration of knowledge.
Order (Read More)
One of the great treasures of our Catholic intellectual heritage is a profound philosophical and theological tradition based on sound realist principles. This tradition has been greatly undermined by the influence of skepticism and idealism which have reached the very fortress of Christendom. It is therefore important to reestablish the realist principles that uphold right reason. Yet this cannot be done by the direct study of philosophy or theology alone, for that study itself presupposes a great deal of prior emotional, imaginative and intellectual development following a proper order.
The intellectual life of man is perfected in truth: the conformance of the mind to what is—to reality. But our first, our most intimate, and indeed our only contact with things in their concrete existence is through the senses. The sensible presence of external reality first awakens man’s cognitive power, and our experience is the root of all subsequent conceptual understanding. One of the primary truths of learning maintained by the best of the scholastics is that nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses. What this tells us is that there is an order of learning, beginning with the direct experience of reality. An orderly intellectual development, however, entails not only the direct experience of things through the senses but the development of the imagination and memory, facilitated by the study of poetry, music, literature, and history – subjects which, if properly taught, can provide a real though indirect experience of reality, both natural and supernatural. In order for these subjects to provide that needed cultivation of the imagination they must not be taught using an analytic method which inordinately isolates a certain element from the whole in order to give it detailed consideration. Specialized consideration has its place, but the rule is: no reflective analysis until the students are in firm possession of some real thing upon which to reflect.
The intellect of man is accordingly grounded in the senses and the imagination, which latter faculty preserves, correlates, and orders the impressions of the external world received through sensation. Without this grounding the higher rational faculties are grievously impaired. We may learn the languages of philosophy or science, and may learn to manipulate their words with dexterity and grammatical correctness, but it will be with little true insight into the reality that those words express. As a healthy imagination must be rooted in reality, we place great emphasis on direct contact with the reality of things towards the cultivation of experience and imaginative development and the very inclinations of the heart.
In our day this ground has been seriously undermined by a technology and lifestyle that removes us in large measure from direct contact with the elemental things of creation. Add to that the distorting influence of television, video games, and popular music, and the result is a retarded and deformed imagination, inclined more to the world of bizarre fantasy than to the world of the real. On the one hand we are flooded as never before, with a vast amount and variety of powerful and often, subversive images; on the other hand, education gives little attention to the importance of images, concentrating rather on the commercial possibilities of a calculating and manipulative reason. Yet as Catholics, we believe that we were made in the image and likeness of Him who is the image of the invisible God, and therefore we cannot deny the importance of the imagination. Contrary to popular opinion, the imagination is a faculty ordered not to fantasy but to reality. The only way to correct this deformation, then, is by placing children in an environment that is open to reality, and where the influences on the imagination are such that they become receptive to reality in all its goodness and beauty.
A fundamental goal of St. Gregory’s Academy is to work within the venerable Catholic tradition which cultivates the imagination as an indispensable means to the knowledge of the highest truths and to its communication. This was the prime reason we sought a location in the country, where boys can roam the fields and woods far removed from the mind-numbing influence of popular media. The mediations of communications technology are a two-edged sword; they bring the world to us, but on their own terms; terms that too often flatter and belie. You can not fit an oak tree in a laptop, or the sounds of a spring evening in an iPod. Whether in the reading of whole works instead of adaptations, or in the priority given to the experience of nature over the experiment in the laboratory, St. Gregory’s seeks to challenge students to make even greater lived contact with the Real. This contact with things has been incorporated into our academic program since no amount of reading or formal studies can substitute for its experience. We must, as Wordsworth says, “come forth into the light of things.” Yet through our participation in the creative arts such as poetry, music, and literature we become sensitized to that light. Out imagination is raised to a genuinely human state whereby we become receptive to the hidden mystery of being and are thereby led to wonder, the beginning and sustaining principle of wisdom.
Integration (Read More)
The educational methods of St. Gregory’s Academy suppose that all knowledge must be constitutive elements that direct and rightly integrate the various faculties of a person to share a single vision of all things in one God. Human beings possess a hierarchy of physical, sensitive, emotional, volitional and intellectual powers. In order to educate the complete man we must not ignore any aspect of this hierarchy. However, a school has as its special mission the development of intellect, which attains to its highest realization in the possession of an integrated vision of God and the world. This is the ultimate goal of a liberal education, an education that has as its object what Cardinal Newman called an enlightened or illuminative reason, which he described as “the power of viewing many things at once as a whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values and determining their mutual dependence.” Ultimately, parts only make sense in view of the whole, and every whole is just another part in view of God. But contemporary education is obsessed with finding the ultimate answers in pieces of pieces. St. Gregory’s seeks to give its students an integrated vision of the world and history centered on Christ, and the tools to expand that vision as they grow in learning and faith.
The art of education could be understood as the act of pointing to wondrous things, identifying them as such, and rendering to them the esteem that is their due. As one cannot teach what he himself does not have, one of our primary academic requirements for our teachers has been that they themselves have this integral vision of things. When a teacher has this vision the same will be reflected in his teaching. Without this prior grounding in just sentiments for the reality of truth and goodness, as manifested in creation, teachers end up robbing their students of the driving force which makes them thirst for learning.
Teaching as a Species of Friendship (Read More)
At St. Gregory’s we place great importance on the teaching relationship as a species of friendship. Thus the teachers observe and willingly work with the strengths and weaknesses of the students in their care, and the students likewise, in charity and respect for their teachers, are moved to cooperate in learning. In our students, therefore, we wish for good hearts as much as good minds. The disciplinary approach at St. Gregory’s is Salesian in spirit. Order and authority are necessary, but we hold with St. John Bosco that love and prevention are better motives to good behavior than fear and punishment.
A relationship between a student and his teacher that is marked by harmony, accord, or affinity, must reign freely in a school, according to the writings of Don Bosco. Otherwise, a fatal barrier of distrust develops, hindering any real influence for the good the teacher possesses. Being in a position of respected and friendly authority, the teachers at St. Gregory’s Academy have the potential to teach much more than their respective discipline in the classroom. They can teach virtue in all aspects of life through their example on a social or communal level. Until fairly recently, societies placed great importance on boys learning from men as mentors guiding them through the rites of passage into manhood. St. Gregory’s hearkens to such traditions, and we hope the boys in our care will follow in the footsteps of their teachers in living the Faith, pursuing wisdom, and refining their tastes. This sense of togetherness, which is the essence of teaching, is the fruit of the friendly approach. “A master who is only seen in the master’s chair,” writes the St. John Bosco, “is just a master and nothing more. But if he goes into recreation with the boys he becomes their brother.” By joining them in their moments of leisure, sharing their laughter and conversation, the bonds of friendship are formed that bind for years to come.
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