Children Learn What They Live: On the Role of Domestic Monasticism for the Catholic
University
Christina M. Strafaci
University of Mary – Tempe
The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed
in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. This
evil is even more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order. To this
disintegration planned at times by atheistic ideologies, we must oppose…a kind
of ‘recapitulation’ of the inviolable mystery of the person.
Archbishop Karol Wojtyła, Letter to Henri de Lubac
…tens of thousands of Christian men and women flocked to the desert, to create a new culture,
with its own language and art, its own stories and songs, its own work and worship. And the
culture that was born there changed the world. And its that culture, the monastic culture of the
desert…that is the native culture of Christian mission, and the native culture of the Christian
family… despite the very real differences, there is in fact an underlying connection between the
ancient monastic culture born in the desert, and the culture desperately in need of recovery in and
through Christian families today.
Adam Cooper
Since the pontificate of St. John Paul II, the Christian family is recognized more frequently in ecclesial
and missionary terms, affirming its iconic value and participatory role in the Church’s sanctification of
persons and culture. Remarkably, however, this crucial responsibility of the domestic church takes the
family’s interior life for granted. Idealizations of the “daily rhythms of the home” as “first school” fail to
acknowledge modern families’ near-inability to create “a space of virtue, peace, and security” amidst
today’s anti-contemplative society. Indeed, the ever-increasing frequency of disordered American
households enslaved by technology, consumerism, and frenetic individualized lifestyles reveal an
interiorized chaos disguised as “liberty”, striking at the heart of the family’s communio personarum and
the flourishing of authentic freedom. Consequently, children emerge not merely malformed in virtue but
more seriously, deformed in personhood, resulting in their objectifying, fragmented, instrumentalist
vision of reality and of themselves. It should be unsurprising, then, that these dispositions – inherited
from home and continued through pre-university school settings – shape their professional aspirations
and expectations of post-secondary education, motivating their singular pursuit of technical
competencies and employability skills to the detriment of the liberal arts. Wherein lies the remedy?
This paper will begin with an examination of the modern family’s prioritization of doing over being and
its instrumentalist consequences in the Catholic educational identity crisis. Without arguing
systematically for the merits of asceticism, I will then propose re-envisioning the domestic church in
more monastic terms as the solution enabling parents to accomplish their mission to form a communion
of persons interiorly shaped by gratitude and reverence for the gift and wholeness of being. Indeed, the
“profound rehabilitation of a contemplative order of thought and life” needed to heal the schism between
leisure and labor begins by reclaiming a liturgical-sacramental understanding of time and space within
the original cell of society. As this “little monastery” becomes more a conservatory of faith, learning,
and civilization for future students and less a school of confusion, the Catholic university – inspired by
its own monastic tradition – will need to safeguard more willingly the integral relationship between the
liberal arts and the professions.