One enters the oasis through a side door just off one of the busiest roads in the concrete jungle of Imrieħel. Immediately you find yourself floating above a sprawling garden. It’s a fusion of Mediterranean trees and Zen minimalism, modernist cloisters and meditative islets, with glimpses of liturgical pink and purple and celestial blue amid the greenery and stone.
It turns out you’ve entered straight onto a bridge, which makes sense since you’re leaving one world to cross over to another. It is Dar il-Ħanin Samaritan, a conference centre and retreat house owned by MUSEUM, the institute of lay catechists founded by St George Preca.
The Richard England building feels like a second skin. You can feel the sunlight wherever you go. There is no sharp distinction between inside and out; rooms morph into terraces and a corridor changes into a staircase taking you down to the garden.
As you descend, you enter more deeply into the garden’s mystery. It beckons you to look up at the unfiltered sky and, as you do, the truth seeps in: sky, trees and stone are home.
I was at Dar il-Ħanin Samaritan two weeks ago to attend a seminar on the future of Church schools. Between us – school heads, directors and trustees, members of religious orders, diocesan secretariat – all the schools, with their 17,000 pupils and 3,000 staff members, were represented.
We were there to pool experiences in managing a critical transition. Schools hitherto run by religious orders must now, or soon, be run by the laity.
The issue is not just administrative – it’s a matter of identity. How is each school to preserve and develop its personality?
The patrimony of each school includes property originally acquired to maintain vibrant religious congregations. With dwindling numbers, how should such property be used?
Dar il-Ħanin Samaritan itself shows how creative design can offer a vision of the redeemed world for a Malta in ecological crisis. For generations of children being raised in a plundered, desecrated environment, the future of Church schools lies in offering a vision of more responsible forms of conviviality.
Getting there begins with avoiding some pitfalls. Archbishop Charles Scicluna urged looking at the experience of Church schools elsewhere. Some European schools, handed over to the laity, ended up indistinguishable from lay private schools.
As Bishop Anton Teuma observed, it’s just as bad to become, effectively, a State school on Church property.
A second temptation is to offer a ‘religious education’ while accepting a definition of religion that the Church itself rejects. We must produce critical thinkers, said Scicluna, taking it for granted that faith and rationality go together.
A third temptation is to believe that parents, whatever their beliefs, can be excluded from their children’s education. State arrogance increasingly presumes that it can indoctrinate children and marginalise parents. Church schools must distinguish themselves by standing up for responsible freedom.
The seminar was not the first discussion of its kind. The Church’s research institute, Discern, presented the results of a wide consultation covering what the characteristics of Church schools ought to be in society.
Clearly, a lot of thought has gone into the answers but (in my strictly personal view) some red herrings could prove an obstacle to reaching practical answers.
A Christian education should be like a Montessori school of the spirit. You don’t describe values to children; you show them how they’re lived- Ranier Fsadni
One is that there is such a thing as a Catholic system of values, as distinct from a humanistic system. There’s a double misunderstanding here.
The first is that there is a neat distinction between Catholic values and humanistic ones. Really? So why do bishops, not least the pope, make a point of addressing all people of goodwill, not just the faithful?
Wherever it has spread, Christianity has absorbed the values, feasts and insights it has found, even if it usually transformed them by making them its own.
It has borrowed the pagan Aristotle’s idea of the virtues almost wholesale. The Catechism claims much of the art of living can be discovered using reason alone. Only faith, hope and charity are deemed impossible to acquire without God’s help.
Second, it’s a mistake to think of Catholicism as a ‘system’. That is a secular understanding based on the idea that Catholicism is a closed set of values.
But what kind of system produces a crucified man or waves of martyrs? If that’s a systemic result, we should change the system.
A religion based on love cannot have a system. Love is too unstable, disruptive and unruly. It keeps pulling the rug from under your feet; it breaks the shackles of all systems; it opens your mind wide. Lived to the full, it attracts abuse and brutality.
Romano Guardini, a favourite theologian of the last three popes, once said that a Christian education should be like a Montessori school of the spirit. You don’t describe values to children; you show them how they’re lived.
A school is a society unto itself. It is there that children should be taught that courage means accepting yourself, facing life with confident joie de vivre and being ready to stand your ground, knowing that in you there lives something that cannot be destroyed.
It’s in school that the first lesson of Christian morality is imparted: that all your classmates deserve justice and that all of them, not just your friends, need to be taken into account.
And it’s in such a school that you learn what is the alpha and omega of a person: someone with a continuing, unfolding identity, rooted in the archaic past and converting toward a pioneering future.
Any school that instills a rational, confident, convivial love for the future will secure a future for itself. If its spaces are themselves a model of the art of living, it will even offer glimpses of a new Jerusalem.