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Sunday, February 26, 2012

Rick Santorum's idea of "indoctrination" in education...

comes with a copy of The Way




Despite Rick Santorum's sanctimonious pothering about "indoctrination" in education - and despite his claims of homeschooling his children - two of his sons attended (or still attend) The Heights School. The Heights is an Opus Dei affiliated Catholic prep school in Potomac Maryland for grades 3-12. Here is a link to a NY Times story about it from January of this year:
NY Times / Jan 12, 2012
POTOMAC, Md. — “Are your jackets on, boys?” Joe Cardenas inspects his charges in a first-period freshman humanities class, sees that they are all appropriately blazered and standing tall, bows his head and begins the morning Hail Mary: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee ...” Only when they have finished the prayer do they take their jackets off. They sit and open copies of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” the 14th-century English romance.

Mr. Cardenas teaches at the Heights School, a suburban Washington boys’ school affiliated with Opus Dei, the Catholic organization of which he is a member. By the standards of more famous Washington private schools, like Sidwell Friends or Georgetown Preparatory, the Heights is poor, little known and young — it was founded in 1969. But since then it has become the popular school for a small clique of Washingtonians: conservative Catholics.

Although he has made being a home-schooling dad part of his identity, the Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has sent two sons to the Heights. The school, for boys in Grades 3-12, has also educated the sons of the Republican Senators Mel Martinez and Chuck Hagel; former F.B.I. Director Louis J. Freeh; Maggie Gallagher, founder of the National Organization for Marriage; and Kate O’Beirne, an editor at National Review.





The Heights School: Wiki link
The Heights School is a preparatory school for boys in grades 3-12 in Potomac, Maryland, USA. Its mission is to assist parents in the intellectual, spiritual, and physical education of their sons. It is located in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington. The school's Christian orientation and spiritual formation are entrusted to Opus Dei, a personal prelature of the Catholic Church founded in 1928.

[...]

A group of Catholic laymen, many belonging to the Prelature of Opus Dei ("Work of God"), founded The Heights School in 1969.





photo: Blue blazers, red ties, khaki pants. The Heights School.

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As a side note there is also this:

The Pope of K-Street Catholicizes The Newt - via Wiki:
C. John McCloskey, III is a Catholic priest and member of Opus Dei. He is the former director of the Catholic Information Center of the Archdiocese of Washington. He worked on Wall Street - Citibank and Merrill Lynch - for some years before becoming a priest, being ordained in 1981 by Cardinal Roger Etchegaray.

Fr. McCloskey is perhaps best known for having helped many people convert to Catholicism, including Newt Gingrich...


From Slate dot com - 2002
...McCloskey has become one of the nation's most prominent priestly pundits, espousing his doctrinaire conservatism (in matters of faith, not politics) on Meet the Press, The O'Reilly Factor, Crossfire, NPR's All Things Considered, and Tim Russert's hourlong CNBC show. He chats on television with Greta Van Susteren, Paula Zahn, and Tony Snow and is quoted by USA Today, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Like all good advocates, he's relentlessly on-message: The Catholic Church, he says, will be revitalized by a traditionalist return to its roots, not through liberalization.

It's a two-pronged strategy: Bring in conservative evangelical Protestants like Brownback while at the same time casting out liberal Catholics of all stripes. McCloskey is the anti-Garry Wills, telling American Catholics who dissent from some church teachings why you aren't a Catholic. "A liberal Catholic is oxymoronic," he says. "The definition of a person who disagrees with what the Catholic Church is teaching is called a Protestant." The Catholic Information Center, which McCloskey calls D.C.'s "downtown center of evangelization" for Catholicism, features a chapel and a bookstore that promotes McCloskey's views. Displayed prominently in the window at 1501 K St. is Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church, Michael S. Rose's controversial book on homosexuality in Catholic seminaries.

McCloskey is a native Washingtonian, an Ivy Leaguer who graduated from Columbia and a former Wall Streeter who worked at Citibank and Merrill Lynch. As a result, he travels comfortably in elite circles, and his ministry is focused on them: on young priests and seminarians (the intellectual elite in many Catholic communities), on college students at elite universities and "strong countercultural" Catholic institutions, and on "opinion-makers and people of influence." The self-described supply-sider has a top-down strategy to transform the culture, too. He wants to turn Blue America into Red. As McCloskey wrote in an essay last year for Catholic World Report, "[I]n the first several centuries of Christianity the Gospel was most successfully preached not to the poor and the outcasts, but rather to the prosperous middle classes and educated upper classes in the cities."

That focus on elites is a hallmark of Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic society to which McCloskey belongs. [...]


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1 comment:

pansypoo said...

the catholic church doesn't indoctrinate?

opus dunce.