The Declaration on Christian Education, Gravissimum Educationis

Abstract

Abstract In his overview of Gravissimum educationis, Bishop Johannes Pohlschneider argued that the declaration demonstrated both continuity and progress in relation to earlier Church teaching on the role of religious education within the Church and civil society. In a later review of the declaration, Ulrich Gunzer asserted that ‘‘Gravissimum educationis is an important step between the rather dark, apodictic-sounding encyclical on education by Pius XI in 1929 and the two communications by the Apostolic See in 1977 and 1982.’’ Despite the implicit critique of the earlier encyclical, Gunzer is certainly correct in arguing that the council’s declaration drew upon Pius XI’s 1929 encyclical, Divini Illius Magistri. The declaration presupposed, Gunzer maintained, a fundamental continuity with a long series of papal affirmations of the Church’s commitment to the religious education of the young. He asserted that it was equally insistent in its condemnations (which extended throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) of tendencies toward a state monopoly in education, the violation of parents’ primary rights in their children’s education, and the Church’s central role not only in the moral and religious education of the young but also in their wider educational formation for life in the world and their preparation for the next. There is, nonetheless, a good deal that is new in Gravissimum educationis, much of which reflects a rather more optimistic anthropology and a positive evaluation of emerging technology that marks the council’s reflections as a whole.