A Message About Our Catholic Schools Serving African American Students
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May 27, 2026
Address to the Teachers, Administrators, and the Extra Mile Foundation by Fr. Matthew Hawkins on March 28, 2026 
Thank you for the work you do and for the sacrifices you make for our schools. I want to speak plainly today about the direction Catholic K–8 education should take in our setting, where most of the students in our schools are Black and non-Catholic. That fact should not embarrass us. It should clarify our mission.
It forces a deeper question: What is a Catholic school for?
If we are not careful, we fall into one of two traps. The first is to become defensive and inward-looking—as though a Catholic school exists only to serve members of the Catholic Church. That temptation is understandable. But it is too small, too anxious, and in the end, not truly Catholic.
The second trap is the opposite: to become so vague, so eager to offend no one, that Catholic identity becomes little more than a logo on the wall and a few floating values like kindness and respect. A school like that may be pleasant enough. But it will have lost the nerve of its own existence. It will become replaceable.
So we reject both temptations.
Our schools must be unmistakably Catholic in vision and radically generous in mission.
We do not serve non-Catholic children despite being Catholic schools. We serve them because we are Catholic schools.
A Catholic school is not a bunker. It is a mission. The Church believes she has something precious to offer the human person—not only information, not only skills, not only social mobility, but formation in truth, goodness, beauty, discipline, freedom, and hope. And that is not something to be hoarded. It is something to be given.
So while most of our students are non-Catholic, the question is not whether Catholic education still makes sense. The question is whether we still believe it has something distinctive and life-giving to offer them. I believe it does.
Catholic identity cannot mean a thin religious coating spread over an otherwise generic educational model. It cannot mean a few moral slogans or an atmosphere of vague uplift. That is not Catholic education. That is sentimentality in a uniform.
If Catholic identity becomes thin, the school becomes replaceable. If Catholic identity becomes deep, the school becomes indispensable to the families and communities we serve.
And what makes Catholic identity deep is this: we understand education as character formation, not merely information.
Too much of modern education operates like a factory—it measures outputs, manages behavior, produces data, and moves children through a system as efficiently as possible. It knows how to count, but it has forgotten how to form. We must reject the notion of reducing Catholic education to a service-provider model that merely delivers academic products. Test scores and college preparation matter. But Catholic education rests on a deeper foundation: the conviction that every child bears God’s image and is called to develop virtues—self-discipline, perseverance, courage, humility, honesty, and gratitude.
A Catholic school does not ask only, “How will this child perform?” It asks, “Who is this child becoming?”
And this demands an emphasis on personal agency. In a culture that often promotes narratives of powerlessness, our schools must offer a counter-witness: that through grace, effort, and integrity, young people can shape their own futures. They are not defined by their circumstances. They deserve mentors and teachers who call them to greatness—not adults who settle for mediocrity out of misplaced compassion.
A Catholic education must begin with dignity—with the conviction that every child is a mystery, a gift, a bearer of intelligence, memory, possibility, and promise. This does not mean romanticizing anything. It means refusing condescension. It means refusing the hidden savior mentality that treats children as raw material for uplift while quietly expecting little of them.
Our schools must be places of disciplined hope. High expectations joined to deep care. Schools where order is not oppressive but healing, where discipline is not humiliation but apprenticeship in freedom, where excellence is expected of everyone.
Character formation also requires historically grounded learning. Our students must learn authentic African American history—not as fuel for grievance, but as a source of moral imagination, resilience, and hope. History must neither be weaponized to create division nor sanitized to erase injustice. It requires nuanced, courageous teaching that forms citizens who are simultaneously grateful and discerning, hopeful and clear-sighted. Our students must understand themselves not as passive victims of history, but as inheritors of a rich legacy and responsible stewards of the future.
And no school forms character in isolation from families. Strong families are the first schools of virtue, the primary communities of meaning. Many of the families we serve are not Catholic. But they come to us because they want what the wider culture struggles to provide: moral seriousness, order, accountability, and purpose. Catholic schools must partner with families—never replacing them—and support both the child and the household that sends that child to us each morning.
If we are serious about formation, we must also speak about beauty. Beauty is not a luxury for the already secure. It is part of how character takes shape. Beauty in liturgy, in music, in language, in the care of space—these things tell a child that life is more than survival. Beauty lifts the eyes. It trains attention. It civilizes desire. It gives form to hope.
Now let me say a word directly to donors. When you invest in Catholic education in this setting, you are not simply helping to keep institutions open. You are investing in moral and spiritual infrastructure—rare institutions capable of integrating truth, responsibility, virtue, community, and hope. You are investing in places that bridge our Church and a wounded culture in ways few other institutions can—places that can interrupt cycles of fragmentation and renew neighborhoods one child, one family, one generation at a time.
Not everything most important can be measured quickly or neatly. The deepest fruits of Catholic education are seen in the adults students become—in their resilience, their habits, their capacity for responsibility, and their refusal to reduce themselves to the categories the world hands them. That is long work. It is more like planting an orchard in an age addicted to vending machines.
So what direction should Catholic K–8 education take in our schools? It should become more deeply Catholic, not less. More intentional in forming character, not just conveying content. More serious about beauty, discipline, and hope. More grounded in history that forms rather than divides. More committed to partnering with families. More confident that Catholic education is not a relic for members of the Catholic Church, but a gift for the world.
Societal renewal begins not in political chambers or policy institutes, but with personal transformation, family strength, and the rebuilding of formative institutions—especially our schools. If we do this well, we are not merely preserving buildings. We are forming human beings. We are helping children discover that they are persons, that they are called, and that their lives mean something.
And if our schools can communicate that—not only in mission statements, but in culture, curriculum, expectations, worship, and daily practice—then they will not merely survive. They will matter.
And in a time like ours, to build schools that truly matter is no small thing. It is an act of faith. It is an act of hope. And it is an act of love.
Thank you.