Religious Formation

     The center of life at St. Gregory’s is our Catholic Faith; our aim is the formation of Catholic gentlemen. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is offered daily in the traditional Latin rite by priests of the Fraternity of St. Peter, with the permission of the bishop of Scranton . The Rosary, prayers before meals, and access to Confession are a daily part of these young men’s lives. They also participate in Compline twice a week, days of recollection each semester, and all night Adoration quarterly. Underscoring all activities at the Academy is a spirit of reflection upon God, the Source of all that is good and true. Students are given full instruction in the doctrines and moral teachings of the Church, stressing orthodoxy and obedience to the Magisterium. The community life of the school gives the boys a unique opportunity to exercise the social virtues and to serve God through love of neighbor.

     The students of St. Gregory’s become skilled altar servers while at the Academy, and have been invited to serve pontifical and other special Masses throughout the East Coast. The boys participate in singing Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony at High Masses and at other traditional liturgical activities such as Compline, Benediction, and processions of the Blessed Sacrament.

     Through these means, St. Gregory’s makes a real contribution to the liturgical life of the Catholic Church in North America , and trains a new generation to participate with knowledge and devotion in the traditional Sacraments and ceremonies of the Church.

Educational Formation

The vision of education that informs St. Gregory’s Academy can appear at once familiar and strange, because although it is traditional it sometimes disappoints the expectations and received categories by which traditional education is evaluated in our day. At St. Gregory’s we seek to recover the fullness of meaning of these educational categories so as to overcome the false oppositions that can prevent students from really loving and appropriating the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. For example, much of the movement to recover traditional education is concerned with the recovery and perfection of reason. In the face of an epidemic of sloppy and addled thinking, teachers apply the remedy of logic.  We too prescribe this remedy, but we believe that logic is not enough and that left to itself, or overemphasis of it produces more disease. Man does not live by reason alone, not even reason perfected by logic. Bourne aloft by music and poetry, reason learns new steps that introduce it to a dance in which it moves beyond itself, and becomes a fit partner for the Divine Word.     

Here are ten adjectives that characterize education at the Academy. It is not an exhaustive list, and the categories do not exclude one another, rather each offers a significant perspective on our education approach.

• Liturgical. Pride of place in the life of the Academy is given to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the prayers and devotions that flow from it and lead up to it. Every way of life has a rhythm, whether it is set by the school bell, the time clock or the TV guide. At the Academy, the day, the week and the year move to the tempo of the Divine Liturgy which is the life of Christ as it unfolds in time.
• Experiential. In our day many students have lost the inexpressible benefit that comes from lived contact with the realities they study. The mediations of communications technology are a two-edge sword, they bring the world to us, but on their own terms, terms that too often flatter and belie. You can’t fit an oak tree in a laptop, or the sounds of a spring evening in an ipod. Whether in the reading of whole works rather than adaptations, or the priority given to the experience of nature over the experiment in the laboratory, the Academy seeks to challenge students to make ever greater contact with the Real.
• Integrated. Ultimately, parts only make sense in view of the whole, and every whole is just another part in view of God. But contemporary education is obsessed with finding the ultimate answers in pieces of pieces. St. Gregory’s seeks to give its students an integrated vision of the world and history centred on Christ, and the tools to expand that vision as they grow in learning and faith.
• Musical. St. Augustine tells us that God is a symphonic conductor coordinating the beauty of the cosmos as one grand ineffable song. When we realize this we see that music and poetry are not decorations on the edges of life’s serious matters, but a participation in the very love that moves the stars. The Academy gives a large place to music and poetry in its program of formation. These arts of the muses, which in our day too often lead the young away from God, should awaken and inform the soul of the student so the he can take his place in the universal chorus of divine praise.
• Brotherly. Of all the things lost to the modern world, there is perhaps none more sorely missed than the common accord of heart, mind, and hand that is true friendship. This virtue, so prized by the ancients, in which men step outside themselves into the light of a shared endeavour, offers a higher life, but only at the price of that modern independence which is really only a deadly isolation of the soul. Friendship is central to the life of St. Gregory’s Academy. Without forgetting the need for healthy opposition and competition, we work within a Salesian ethos that seeks to assume all relationships into the higher unity of divine charity.
• Imaginative. The imagination has fallen on strange times lately. On the one hand we are flooded as never before, with a vast amount and variety of powerful and often, subversive images; on the other hand, education gives little attention to the importance of images, concentrating rather on the commercial possibilities of a calculating and manipulative reason. Yet as Catholics, we believe that we were made in the image and likeness of Him who is the image of the invisible God, and therefore we cannot deny the importance of the imagination. At St. Gregory’s we work within the venerable Catholic tradition which cultivates the imagination as an indispensable means to the knowledge of the highest truths and to its communication.
• Amateur. G.K. Chesterton tells us that anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Too many activities are too delightful to be left solely to the professionals. According to the etymology, an amateur is a lover, and just as charity covers a multitude of sins, so the love of an activity excuses our initial blunders and opens up the road to our eventual proficiency. The true amateur says not that any old job is good enough, but rather that although no job is ever good enough, no job at all is worse.  At St. Gregory’s we encourage everyone to try everything so that each boy will become someone.
• Character Forming. Education addresses not the mind alone, but the whole man. Without the support of the moral virtues the intelligence and the imagination shrink or swell, warping the person, and often introducing errors and deviations.  By contrast, in a well-formed character the constellation of moral and intellectual virtues bestows on the whole a beauty and splendour that is the mark of a certain perfection. St. Gregory’s offers every student the opportunity to work on perfecting himself in virtue, while remembering that we live in an imperfect world, and that nothing is accomplished without God’s grace.
• Small. In every domain of activity nature decrees a certain scale of operation which must be obeyed if we would succeed. Human beings cannot be educated with the techniques of mass production. In the art of education, where a personal touch and repeated effort are essential, the small-scale operation is superior. With a teacher to student ratio of one to four, St. Gregory’s is able to give each student the attention he needs to grow well.
• Festive. Scripture tells us that Wisdom was with God from the beginning, playing in his presence and in the world. From this we see that play is not to be dismissed as a frivolity, but is central to wisdom, the highest goal of education. A well established virtue, even intellectual virtue, is characterized not by strain, but by the ease, virtuosity, and freedom of play. Education should aim for this virtuosity, and even anticipate it just as we practice in order to play well in a game.  At St. Gregory’s we take play seriously, and strive (with due playfulness) to always rejoice with charity in the good things God gives us.