Don’t Apologize for Your Catholic Identity, Catholic Teachers, Formators in Kenya Urged to Promote Christian Education

He underscored the importance of having Catechism, prayer life, and the presence of Crucifixes at entry points as some of the ways catholic identity can be maintained in Catholic learning institutions.

“A Catholic school must provide for the possibility of Priests to come to the institution,” Archbishop Muhatia said.

In his presentation titled, “Role of Catholic Schools in Creating Hope and Resilience – pilgrims of Hope, the Catholic Church's Commitment to Human Self-realization”, the Kenyan Archbishop also underlined the role of Catholic education in keeping hope alive in communities.

He said that the Catholic Church has consistently sought to improve society by guiding individuals toward self-realization and by fostering their capacities through its active involvement in education.

“Our involvement in education focuses on the development of individuals and their talents and stands out as the most important basic contribution to the success and growth of societies,” he said.

The Kenyan Catholic Archbishop, who started his Episcopal Ministry in February 2010 as Bishop of Kenya’s Nakuru warned that until the capacities of individuals are built, societies will forever remain impoverished.

“One of the most sustainable ways of keeping hope and resilience alive in impoverished communities is through education,” he said, and added, “In effect, education becomes an irreplaceable component, not just in these communities alone, but for the whole of humanity.”

He further explained that in any given society, education is fundamental for the growth of individuals and for the general development and organization of that particular society.

Archbishop Muhatia emphasized that, from the onset, it must be recognized that education is essential for self-fulfillment, as a society without education is inevitably a hopeless one.

The Kenyan Archbishop said that besides fostering hope and growth in society, education should also “ultimately direct us to communion with God in whose image and likeness we are created.”

“Education has the goal of affirming the dignity of the human person by bringing her/him to full realization,” he said, and added, “The human subject cannot be fully realized without reference to his origin or his destiny.”

He explained that Christian tradition places man’s origin and destiny of man in God, “For we are created in His image and likeness.”

“It is impossible to talk about Catholic education and Catholic identity in schools without this understanding of who the human person is—created in the image and likeness of God,” he said.

He added, “Education should have reference to God as the ultimate source of wisdom, and the human search for the truth is also the concern of the Church.”

Archbishop Muhatia explained that even the earlier missionaries invested heavily in education because they understood its purpose. For them, he said, “education meant everything because it was key to fulfilling the mandate given to the Church by Christ: Go and make disciples of all nations.”

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“The desire for education is embedded in our nature as human beings. To say that the human person is his artificer is to reveal how he is capable of carrying himself to perfection by faithfully cultivating and transforming himself/herself,” he said.

He called out those who ignore the value of Christian education in the development of the youths, saying, “This includes government policies that are openly hostile to the involvement of the Church in educational institutions.”

“We need to stress, my dear friends, that a Catholic school cannot relinquish its freedom to proclaim the Gospel and to offer a formation based on the values to be found in a Christian education,” Archbishop Muhatia said.