Today’s Guest Blogger is Dr. Kevin Baxter, the guest on this week’s Church Documents podcast.

 

This is the third podcast I have done with Tim and I do very much enjoy the conversation. The challenge, and I don’t know if this is my fault, Tim’s, or both of us, is that we can get off topic easily as we digress into discussion about innovative ways to approach Catholic schools for today’s world. I thought the conversation on the 1990 USCCB document, “In Support of Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools” had some of the same aspects and it actually caused me to think about a more recent document that Tim actually spoke with Dave Faber about earlier this year, The Joy of the Gospel. That document is all about innovation and looking at the Church with freshness and newness. In paragraph 11 Pope Francis writes, “Whenever we make the effort to return to the source and to recover the original freshness of the Gospel, new avenues arise, new paths of creativity open up, with different forms of expression, more eloquent signs and words with new meaning for today’s world. Every form of authentic evangelization is always ‘new’.”

 

We should continually try to bring the Gospel to today’s world with freshness and creativity. Our obligation as Catholic school educators is to ensure that these treasures that we have inherited from the saints who preceded us are vibrant and healthy for many generations to come. In order to meet that obligation we have to let go of old approaches and bring the freshness of the Gospel to the families and students in our Catholic schools today.