St. Thomas More Fellowship and the Witness of Teachers

For many young students in the school system of the Archdiocese of Boston, their teacher will be their primary (if not the only, in many cases) encounter with a faithful Christian. For those now growing up, the devotion of that teacher might be almost as much of a decisive factor as their family’s.

What kind of teachers does the Archdiocese seek to cultivate, then? Peter Nguyen, Executive Director of the St. Thomas More Teaching Fellows, came to Boston College on Monday, December 2nd to give a vision.

Nguyen is an alumnus of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, a former FOCUS missionary at Harvard, and now directs the Fellows and works closely with individual teachers in the Archdiocese.

The St. Thomas More Teaching Fellowship is a two-year program that trains prospective teachers in Catholic education, supports them with a community of like-minded peers, and places them in Archdiocese schools, which the program itself calls “one of the many battlegrounds that are vulnerable, yet possess so much potential for healing and transformation.”

Nguyen himself cited an 86% loss of faith among students in Catholic schools, and spoke of a desperate need to “reinvigorate the Gospel message in every classroom.” The Fellowship was formed to address this issue.

Nguyen’s speech to BC concerned not the nitty-gritty details such as salary, but rather his vision of the spirit of the teachers that the Fellowship seeks to cultivate.

Setting a high ideal, he held up St. Thomas More and the North American Jesuit martyrs, particularly Sts. Isaac Jogues and Jean de Brébeuf, as models for the spirit of his teachers. He outlined five principles of Christian discipleship for teachers and illustrated them through the lives of these saints.

The first principle is that discipleship begins with understanding one’s own calling and purpose, which he described as putting “first things first.” This principle, he said, calls for a total abandonment to God’s will and even, as St. Ignatius puts it, an indifference to all created things in favor of the Creator.

What this principle entails, Nguyen argued, is first the desire for personal sanctity, and then the duty to make disciples of all nations. He offered Isaac Jogues and Thomas More as men who surrendered everything, even their own dignity, in order to become saints, serve God, and convert souls. They embodied a dramatic perception of discipleship which Nguyen noted is so far from our own, yet so badly needed.

The second principle is that prayer, a living relationship with Christ, is the bedrock of the disciple’s life, and thus the Catholic teacher’s. To this point he offered Thomas More’s four years as a Carthusian monk and Isaac Jogues’s devout recitation of prayer and Scripture amidst extreme suffering.

Trusting in the strength of his examples, Nguyen quickly elucidated three final principles for disciples and especially for Boston’s teaching Fellows: that suffering is integral to the Christian life, that discipleship is lived by ministering to and truly loving other people, and that Christians must stand true to their faith no matter the circumstances.

Although he admitted the gap between the towering example of the martyrs and the St. Thomas More Fellows, Nguyen insisted that the discipleship they lived out applies equally to his teachers, whom he called “our unsung heroes,” as possibly their students’ only evangelists.