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LAURA VICUÑA

 

My latest book is a biography of a Chilean schoolgirl Laura Vicuña (1891-1904). Her life serves as a great inspiration to all Catholics, both children and adults. Being a teacher in a Catholic school (of St. Gertrude the Great Roman Catholic Church), I have seen how essential it is to give a child Catholic education.

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After Laura's father died when she was three, her family moved to Argentina to attend a Catholic school, which was taken care of the Salesian Sisters of St. John Bosco. It was a big sacrifice for her because she had to board at the school, away from her dear mother. But the presence of the Sisters, a solid education and especially the daily sacrifice of the Mass made her a follower of Christ every child and adult should admire. To save her mother from sin, Laura also made the greatest act of charity, and offered her life to save the soul of another. The book is meant to show what a blessing a Catholic school is to a child. The sales go to support Oblates of the Holy Face at West Chester, OH.

Our children, then, are not the children of the State. The State has no children, and never had, nor will. The State does not own them, nor their fathers nor mothers, nor anybody else in this country, thank God! We have not got that far yet on the road to civil slavery, and I hope we never shall. We are not Pagans, nor Mahometans, nor Russians. We have not sold out, and don’t intend to! It is not on the State, but on parents, that God imposed the duty to educate their children, a duty from which no State can dispense, nor can fathers and mothers relieve themselves of this duty by the vicarious assumption of the State. They have to give a severe account of their children on the Day of Judgment, and they cannot allow any power to disturb them in insisting upon their rights and making free use of them.

- Fr. Michael Muller: Public School Education (1872)

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History bears witness how, particularly in modern times, the State has violated and does violate rights conferred by God on the family. At the same time it shows magnificently how the Church has ever protected and defended these rights, a fact proved by the special confidence which parents have in Catholic schools. The family has instinctively understood this to be so, and from the earliest days of Christianity down to our own times, fathers and mothers, even those of little or no faith, have been sending or bringing their children in millions to places of education under the direction of the Church.

- Pope Pius XI - Divini Illius Magistri (1929)          

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