Teaching is a lay, secular profession

Teaching, I repeat, is a profession, a lay, secular activity. Therefore, what we have to do is something very different from the praiseworthy work which religious Orders and Congregations – including those founded with the specific aim of doing apostolate in the field of teaching – have been carrying out for centuries, because theirs is an ecclesiastical task, even though, in many cases, it is exercised in secular subjects. “The religious devote themselves chiefly to the study of doctrine in regard to piety,” the Angelic Doctor states. “It is not for religious (whose whole life is devoted to the service of God), to seek for other learning, except insofar as it refers to sacred doctrine.”⁹

Teaching by religious: an ecclesiastical task to fill a gap

These religious, when doing their work of teaching, never claim to practise a profession; nor does their teaching work mean that they have a proper function to fulfil in the civil order. If they have often done so, beyond what their religious vocation demanded – with much fruit for the Church, and for civil society itself – it has generally been to fill an almost total vacuum, as in the Middle Ages, or to raise a barrier against the de-Christianisation of culture, as in the Modern Age and even in our own times. In other words, they have had to make up in some way for the absence of Christian faithful capable of handling this very delicate, transcendental aspect of the life of society professionally, competently and with good religious training. And so they are carrying out, not a civil profession – a job – but a meritorious religious apostolate.