Sydney Catholic Schools has launched its new strategic plan, Magis 2033, following a process of consultation and discernment led by executive director Danielle Cronin. Source: The Catholic Weekly.
Its title, drawn from the Latin for “the more” or “the greater,” signals not bureaucratic ambition but a renewed attentiveness to the deeper purpose of Catholic education in our time.
The Catholic Church has long held that Catholic education introduces young people to the fullness of reality: widening the horizons of reason, holding faith and intellect together, and forming hearts open to truth, goodness, and beauty – grounded in an encounter with the living Christ.
Education, like a compass, is never neutral. It either orients young people towards what is true and good, or leaves them confidently heading in the wrong direction.
Here, Catholic education reveals both its promise and its risk. When faith is treated as an add-on rather than the integrative centre of learning, schools can quietly absorb secular assumptions about what education is for.
Success becomes measured in skills and outcomes, while questions of meaning, character and vocation recede. Fulfilment is framed in terms of self-expression or achievement, rather than self-gift and relationship.
Yet, as the Church reminds us, “the light of faith is unique, since it is capable of illuminating every aspect of human existence” (Lumen Fidei, 4). Faith matters because it shapes lives and destiny – informing the choices students make, the goals they pursue, and the resilience with which they navigate life.
The urgency of this task is evident in the world young people now inhabit. They are growing up amid the trauma of war, streamed daily into their homes, and cultural narratives that promise liberation yet often deliver confusion and isolation.
In such a landscape, education that merely mirrors the prevailing culture does not liberate; it amplifies confusion. What young people need instead is a compass: an education grounded in a Christian vision of the human person – one that names their dignity, orders their freedom, and directs their lives towards a fulfilment they do not have to invent.
In an age marked by confusion and pressure, Magis 2033 offers a timely reminder that Catholic education is inherently countercultural.
It seeks not simply to inform minds, but to form lives; not merely to prepare students for work, but for the fullness of life in Christ; and not just to graduate young people, but to form disciples capable of truth, hope and love in a world that urgently needs all three.
Daniel Ang is the director of the Sydney Centre for Evangelisation.
FULL STORY
Why Catholic education still matters (By Daniel Ang, The Catholic Weekly)
