Catholic Education in the Wake of Vatican II ed. by Rosa Bruno-Jofré, Jon Igelmo Zaldivar (review)

This edited collection is the product of one of numerous small conferences held around the world focusing on Catholic education fifty years after Vatican Council II. This particular symposium was held in 2015 in the Basque country and was entitled “Catholicism and Education: Fifty Years after Vatican II.” It was sponsored largely by Canadian support, and despite delegates from Spain, France, and Chile the volume is largely dominated by Canadian perspectives; much of it is seen through the lens of Canadian issues, particularly issues that were faced by female religious involved in running schools after Vatican II. There are two or three very good chapters on Catholic schools in Spain and France detailing and providing us with valuable historical expositions. The book also addresses some key issues challenging Catholic education and provides some interesting insights. However, it is difficult to see who the audience is for this book or what the rationale is for it.

The collection claims to discuss the Declaration on Christian Education (Gravissimum Educationis, 1966) and its implications for Catholic education, but the contributors largely ignore any discussion of this Declaration because they claim it is limited, vague, and problematic. Instead, they focus almost entirely on the other documents of Vatican II and on subsequent discussions of them inspired by the “spirit of Vatican II.” The Declaration is of course one of the more traditionally minded documents of Vatican II and largely re-states what Catholic education aims to achieve in fairly conservative terms. There is very little in this document that justifies the progressive perspectives advocated in this volume.

Most chapters revolve around the themes of change, progressive education, anti-elitist ideology, secularization, liberal political advocacy, democracy, and pluralism. While all of these are legitimate concerns, none are adequately outlined or given a theoretical basis for discussion—they are largely assumed in discussion and represent the largely negative stance of the authors to the institutional Church and its running of Catholic educational institutions. In chapter 8 we are told how teaching congregations “recalibrated their goals in terms of their own understanding of reality, charism, and priorities within a gendered situational context.” This chapter and others detail how the sisters in these congregations were treated with disrespect by priests, bishops, and government bodies and how they decided to abandon some schools in favor of political advocacy, but without telling us which documents of Vatican II encouraged their understandings of reality. The chapters fail to mention the laity except in how the sisters sought to “encourage” them, and yet the story of the last fifty years since Vatican II has been the story of the laity dominating not only the teaching workforce but the leadership positions in Catholic schools. Not to hear their voice in this collection is a major omission.

The book has a limited understanding of the forces of secularization, and apart from advocating for largely progressive or liberal secular positions in education, the chapters do not address or identify any central issues. Some chapters make a valuable contribution to the debate if incoherent as an overall collection. The concluding chapter summarizes what the book is trying to achieve, but the collection in my view fails to address the implications of Vatican II for Catholic schools today.