Education: How Old The New

by James J. Walsh

Spain, too, had its women of the Renaissance. One of the first of them was Isabella of Castile, whose assistance to Columbus was no mere accident, nor due so much to personal influence exerted on her, as to her own broad interest in the things of the mind in her time. Her daughter Catherine, who became Queen of England, was deeply educated, while her daughter, Queen Mary of England, knew the classics and especially Latin very well. During her time in England many of the nobility of the higher classes were distinguished for education. Lady Jane Grey preferred to study Greek to going to balls and routs, and sacrificed hunting parties for her lessons under Roger Ascham, in the great Greek authors. Queen Elizabeth knew Greek and Latin very well. The famous Countess of Arundell at this time was a distinguished scholar. Margaret More is a bright example of opportunities for the higher education given and taken in the lower classes of [{286}] the nobility of the England of her time. One thing we can be sure of in the England of that time, if the Queen and the highest nobility were interested in education and devoted their time to it so sedulously and successfully, then without doubt those beneath them in rank did so likewise. The upper classes are not alone imitated in things unworthy, but also in what is best if they only provide the good example.

To anyone who knows the history of the Church, however, these incidents in feminine education will not be surprising. Every time, as a rule, that there has been a great new awakening in education, women, too, have demanded the right to have their share in it, and the Church, far from discouraging, has always helped to provide educational opportunities. When in the ninth century Charlemagne reorganized the education of Europe, or, at least, reinstituted it for his people, the women of the Palace had their opportunities to attend the Palace school as well as the men. That Palace school was a very wonderful travelling university, wandering wherever the Court went. It was at Aix, it was probably at Paris for a time; when Charlemagne went down to Italy it went with him and seems to have held some sessions even while he was in Rome; there is a tradition of its existence while he stayed one winter in Verona. Though the teachers in it were monks, for Charlemagne and Alfred, the great, broad-minded rulers, who did so much for [{287}] their people, had no illusions about the high place that the monks held in life in their time, women were taught at the schools as well as men. Charlemagne and Alfred were in the best possible position to know who were the best teachers in their time, and they turned with confidence to the monks. People generally, and, above all, their great rulers, knew nothing of the condemnation of the monks in the Dark Ages which came a thousand years after their time; from people who knew nothing about them and who had even less sympathy with them. They both knew them and sympathized with all they were doing, therefore their cordial encouragement of them. Their attitude was eminently justified by the fact that the monks were broad enough, in spite of their monastic habits and their supposed lack of appreciation for women, to take up to a great extent even the teaching of women. There are letters from the women of the court of Charlemagne written to Alcuin and to other teachers of the time, which show how interested were the women in the school work.

This is not surprising if we recall that, when Benedict founded the monks of the west, who were to provide the homes where culture was to be maintained and the classics preserved for us and education gradually diffused, his sister St. Scholastica did the same thing for the women as her brother was doing for the men. Anyone who knows the story of the Benedictine convents for [{288}] women and the books there produced, plays, stories, even works on medicine and other sciences, will realize how much was accomplished for the higher education of women in these institutions in unpromising times. The women who wanted to follow the intellectual life were given the opportunity and many of them did excellent work. Within the last year I have written and published sketches of the lives of St. Hildegarde, who wrote books on medicine in the twelfth century, and of Hroswitha, the nun of Gandersheim, who wrote Latin comedies in imitation of Terence in the tenth century. These serious literary and scientific writings by women in what is usually presumed to be the darkest period of the so-called Dark Ages, and preserved for us out of the wreck and ruin that came down on nearly everything produced in those times, shows us very clearly how much more than we have been accustomed to think these women of the Middle Ages were interested in the intellectual life. Books are written only when there are readers and appreciation for them, and the interest of contemporaries and the hope of future interest as an incentive.

Of course, even before the foundation of the Benedictines we have a great living example of the encouragement of the Church for the higher education of women. It came at a time and under circumstances that furnish abundant evidence of how much the Church appreciates and is ready to encourage education and how precious she realizes [{289}] it is for her children. When the first nation was converted as a whole to Christianity, when the Irish people came over under the Apostolic Patrick's wonderful missionary zeal, the first thing that was done in this first Christian nation was to found schools. Ireland became the Island of Saints and of Scholars. While the barbarians had overrun Europe and destroyed the schools there, Ireland became the home of the best teachers in the world and men flocked to her from all over Europe.

These schools, however, were not reserved for the men, but abundant opportunities were also afforded women for scholarship and for culture of every kind. Only second in importance to St. Patrick's great school at Armagh during the first century in the history of Ireland as a Christian nation was St. Brigid's school at Kildare. We know from Giraldus Cambrensis, now better known as Gerald the Welshman, that, in his travels in Ireland centuries afterwards, but before the destruction of Kildare, he saw many wonderful evidences of the intellectual life of that institution. Above all, he saw a famous copy of the Holy Scripture so beautifully illuminated that he thought it the finest book in the world. His description would show us that if this copy of the Scriptures which Gerald saw was not the book of Kells as some have ventured to suggest, it was at least a copy not unlike that famous illuminated volume which is, perhaps, the most [{290}] beautiful book that ever came from the hand of man. The arts and the crafts evidently were studied and practised as well as book-learning at Kildare, and Brigid's influence brought to her at her college of Kildare, literally thousands of the daughters of the nobility of Ireland, of England and of portions of the Continent, attracted by her sanctity and her scholarship and the wonderful intellectual and artistic work that was being accomplished there.

With these facts in mind it is easy to see that the Church, far from opposing in any way the higher education for women, has not only encouraged but actually patronized it whenever there is a demand for it on the part of any generation in history. Feminine education comes and goes, so though in less markedly cyclical fashion does masculine education. Just what the law behind these cycles is we do not know as yet. One thing is sure, now that another cycle of interest has come to feminine education in the world, the Church is not only willing but anxious to give her children the benefit of it, and the growth of the higher education among Catholics for Catholic young women in America in the last decade is the best evidence of this. Our teaching Sisterhoods in this country have nobly lifted themselves up to the occasion demanded, and we may well be proud of our Catholic colleges for women. Personally I know what is being done at some half a dozen of them, and I have no hesitation [{291}] in saying that they are giving a better, solider, though perhaps, a less showy education than their secular rivals. Of your work at St. Elizabeth's I have had such personal information as makes me realize how thorough are the efforts to provide every possible opportunity for higher feminine education and how successful they are.

Only less absurd than the notion that the Church is in any way opposed to feminine education is the thought that seems to be in many people's minds in our day, that the Church would prefer to keep woman in the background and does not want her to do great influential things when those are demanded of her. The feeling seems to be that only modern evolution has brought such opportunities for women to exert the precious humanitarian influence that is sometimes possible for her. How much those who talk thus forget the history of the Church if they ever knew it, but also of feminine influence in the world, is very clear from even a short resume of feminine achievements in Christian times. Whenever there has been a great movement in the Church that meant much for the men and women of a time, beside the man who initiated it, if she was not, indeed, the initiator herself, stood a great woman only a little less significant in influence, as a rule, and sometimes even greater than he. In the conversion of the first people to Christianity, beside St. Patrick stood St. Brigid. In the foundation of the monks of the west that [{292}] great institution that meant so much for the Church and for Europe, beside St. Benedict stood St. Scholastica, his sister, doing and organizing for the women of her time and succeeding generations, what her brother did for the men. When, in the newer dispensation of the foundation of the Mendicant Religious Orders, St. Francis came to bring a great new message to the world, beside him and only a little less influential than he in his lifetime, and saving his work for its genuine mission after his death, came St. Clare. When the tide of the religious revolt spreading down from Germany, was pushed back in Spain, beside St. Teresa, for here the greater protagonist of the movement was a woman, stood St. John of God. When St. Francis De Sales came to do his great work for education and for the uplift of the better classes, beside him and scarcely less influential than he in every way, was St. Jane Frances De Chantal. In the great new organization of modern charity under St. Vincent De Paul beside that wonderful friend of the poor whose work is the underlying impulse of all modern organized charity in the best sense of that much abused term, stood the modest and humble but strongly beautiful woman, the foundress of the Sisters of Charity, Madame Le Gras. Even in the nineteenth century with the newer organizations of education demanded by changed conditions, when such foundations as those of the Sacred Heart and of the Sisters of Notre Dame [{293}] came into existence, men and women co-operated in these works and only now are we realizing to the full the sanctity of such women as Blessed Madame Barat or the Venerable Julie Billiart and their adviser and friend, Father Varin, the Jesuit.

Nor was it only in connection with work accomplished by men or initiated by them that we find women doing great work. It must not be forgotten that many of the religious orders which are accomplishing fine work in every line of helpful endeavor, often hundreds of years after their foundations, in conditions very different from those in which they were established, originated in the minds of women and had their constitutions worked out practically without any help from men, and often, indeed, against the judgment of men. The world of our day is not prone to appreciate at its proper worth these great works of women who took for an aim in life unselfish purpose, rather than any more personal ambition. It must not be forgotten, then, that the first settlement worker of modern times, the dear St. Elizabeth of Hungary, is one of the great influences that will never die. The cathedral erected in her honor within a few years after her death is the most beautiful monument to woman anywhere in the world. What St. Elizabeth was to the thirteenth century, St. Catherine of Sienna was to the fourteenth. Without her influence and her place in it, it would be impossible to [{294}] understand the history of that century, though sometimes history has been written without a mention of her. In the fifteenth century came Joan of Arc, in the sixteenth and seventeenth some of the brave women who founded great humanitarian works in connection with the early missionaries in this country. Everywhere in history you find Catholic women accomplishing great things.

After all, this is only what is to be anticipated from what is symbolized and prefigured in the story of the foundation of the Church. When the Son of God came as the Redeemer of Mankind, beside Him in His life and mission, the highest of mortals in the influence that she was to have over all succeeding generations, stood the Woman, whose seed was to crush the serpent's head, the Mother from whom He had chosen to take His human flesh. The Mother of the Messiah became the Mother of the infant Church and the Mother of all Christians ever since. Surely this was given for a sign not to be contradicted in the after-time. As the Mother beside the Son, so was woman ever to stand as the most precious influence in the work of Christianity. As the great scheme of redemption was dependent on her consent, so ever was woman to be God's greatest auxiliary in the accomplishment of good for humanity.

You can understand, then, that when I say to you graduates of St. Elizabeth's, go out and fulfill your missions, whatever they may be, I mean [{295}] that you shall be ready to take up any work for which your education and your training fit you, and God grant it may bring you such opportunities for good as have been exemplified in the lives of so many Catholic women all down the ages. There is nothing more than this that I could say to you. Our mother Church, far from wanting to keep women in the background, has always accorded them full and equal rights in their own domains and, above all, has given them absolute independence in the religious organizations as far as that is compatible with effective co-operation in good work. You may be sure, then, that any work that you find to do worthy of you, and that you take up whole-heartedly, will have not only her blessing but you shall find every encouragement. The glorious examples of the Catholic women of the past, educated, intellectual women, some of whom like St. Teresa, St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Jane Frances De Chantal and St. Brigid are high among the greatest intellectual women that ever lived, will be your guiding stars, and if you keep them in mind you shall not go wrong. Remember that we expect much and we have a right to expect much of the women graduates of our Catholic Women's Colleges--you have a great mission, you have put your hand to the plow, do not look back,--onward and upward. God's in his world and all's well. Only our co-operation is needed.