Bearers of Diverse Ecclesiologies: Imagining Catholic School Students as Informing a Broader Articulation of Catholic School Aims

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive-although not exhaustive-picture of the kinds of real concerns and concurrently inferred ecclesiological perspectives practicing Catholic students have. It reports findings from an interview study with 16 students at a private Catholic high school in Canada who self-identify as Catholic. With these findings, I seek to demonstrate that it is in a Catholic school's best interest not to rely on narrow or singular definitions of Catholic identity, especially insofar as these are tied to minimal and external markers of institutional affiliation. While the sample's size and particularity do not generalize to a larger population of Catholic adolescents or to all Catholic schools, they nonetheless validly contribute to a modest theoretical claim about the unity and diversity of student experiences, and how they conceptually inform a Catholic school's aims. In the conclusion, I hypothesize that student spirituality will be optimized if it is conceptualized and discussed in explicit, pluralistic terms. (English) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]