The 10 best phrases to understand Leo XIV’s new document on Catholic education

With the apostolic letter Drawing new maps of hope, Leo XIV updates the conciliar declaration The most important education and updates the vision of the world of Catholic education. Read here the 10 most important phrases to understand this new pontifical document.

1. Catholic education cannot remain silent: it must unite social justice and environmental justice, promote sobriety and sustainable lifestyles, form consciences capable of choosing not only what is convenient, but also what is right.

2. When educational communities allow themselves to be guided by the word of Christ, they do not go backwards, but are renewed; They don’t build walls, they build bridges. They respond with creativity, opening new possibilities for the transmission of knowledge and meaning in schools, universities, professional and civic training, in school and youth ministry, and in research, because the Gospel does not age.

3. Given the millions of children in the world who still do not have access to primary education, how can we stop acting? Faced with the dramatic educational emergency situations caused by wars, migration, inequalities and various forms of poverty, how can we not feel the urgency to renew our commitment?

4. Evangelical gratuity is not rhetoric: it is a style of relationship, a method and an objective. Where access to education continues to be a privilege, the Church must open doors and invent paths, because “losing the poor” is equivalent to losing the school itself.

5. Catholic universities and schools are places where questions are not silenced, and doubt is not banished, but accompanied. There, the heart dialogues with the heart, and the method is that of listening, which recognizes the other as an asset, not as a threat.

6. Education does not measure its value solely in terms of efficiency: it measures it in terms of dignity, justice and the ability to serve the common good.

7. Any reduction of education to functional training or an economic tool: a person is not a ‘skills profile’, not reduced to a predictable algorithm, but to a face, a story, a vocation.

8. Catholic education has the task of rebuilding trust in a world marked by conflicts and fears, remembering that we are children and not orphans: from this awareness fraternity is born.

9. Disarm the words, raise your gaze, guard the heart. Dismantle the words, because education does not advance with controversy, but with the meekness that listens.

10. Catholic universities have a decisive task: to offer diakonia of culture, fewer professorships and more tables where we can sit together, without unnecessary hierarchies, to touch the wounds of history and seek, in the Spirit, wisdom that is born from the life of people.