This week, I joined the Atonement community as your new Head of School. As anyone who has ever been a newcomer has surely experienced, it will take time for me to understand my new setting and get to know each of you. Yet I am not completely in the dark. Given that the Academy is Catholic, classical, and a work of The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, I already have quite a bit to go on.
I don’t know what brought each of you to Atonement, but I do know that when we choose a school for our children, we are not engaging in just another consumer choice. More is at stake than status, style, or convenience. At no other time do we so succinctly declare our position on what is of ultimate value. Long after we have passed beyond the mortal coil, the consequences of our educational choices will reverberate down through our family tree and echo among generations who know us only from photographs.
Visionary parents who see family as their primary field of labor in life understand this. And so do we. The Atonement Academy is a community of parents, teachers, and clergy that strives day by day to more perfectly embody the beauty of life with God, so that a vibrant Catholic faith emerges as the most attractive and lasting impression of a young person’s educational journey.
How do we go about this work?
First, Atonement affirms that the human person is designed for a life-long relationship with truth. To persevere in this relationship over the course of a lifetime requires that we deliberately organize our priorities, emotions, and habits in the service of discerning and delighting in the truth. This underlying “life order” is known as virtue. Together, truth and virtue comprise the fundamental aims of all true education.
Second, as a distinctly “classical” school, Atonement seeks to initiate our young scholars into the means by which humankind has learned to orient itself to the truth over the course of millennia—a liberal arts education. “Liberal,” meaning free, because a living, growing relationship with truth is the only foundation of real freedom; “arts,” because learning to see and live in reality is a lifelong pursuit. At such a school, the core subjects—math, music, history, science, etc.—are seen not only as sources of information, but, more importantly, as the tools of formation.
Third, Atonement’s approach to Catholic liberal arts education is guided by our unique position as The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter’s first and oldest school. Our work of formation is enriched by the patrimony of English Christianity, lost to the Church since the Protestant Reformation, but the cultivation of which is now the Ordinariate’s special charge and gift. All of us, but young people especially, are most readily converted to the true and the good through the evangelism of beauty. The Atonement Academy “does” beauty better than any school I know of. The campus is in many ways a place set apart where a sacramental worldview and the beauty of holiness find tangible expression in our special attention to art, architecture, music, and patterns of prayer, as well a rigorous academic life spurred on by faith and reason.
On a personal note, I am myself a graduate of a small K-12 school closely linked to the life of an active parish. The opportunity to be mentored, to learn, and to lead in an intimate, Christ-centered context shifted the trajectory of my life, as it did for many of my peers.
I look forward to living out the Atonement difference with you and your family in the coming school year. Please keep me in your prayers.
Your servant,
Matthew David Watson
Head of School
The Atonement Academy