Dear Academy Family, When so many Catholic schools hold Mass once a week or even once a month, why is daily Mass a part of life at the Academy? This is a big question and was the focus of a recent conversation among faculty and staff as we met for our latest discussion of Stratford Caldecott’s Beauty in the Word, a treatment of classical Catholic education that we have been working through over the course of the school year. We had read Caldecott’s chapter on the “rhetoric stage” of a classical education, that point where students—both beginners and advanced—begin to apply the tradition in which they have been nurtured to the new and novel conditions of their own lives and era. We were struck by the powerful way the author teased out how the Mass is uniquely the “source and summit” of the life of a Catholic school. In Caldecott’s words (pp. 97-98): The Mass takes place in sacred time: it is a kind of Time Machine that overcomes the boundaries between past, present, and future. The Mass is a personal encounter with the Invisible—with Jesus Christ risen from the dead. The Mass is a marriage, a consummation of the relationship between God and Man, between Christ and his Church. Every Mass is different because we bring different experiences and concerns to it each day. The Mass comes alive when it is used as a prayer. This means it requires to be filled with our own attention, own self-gift, moment by moment. Our own interior offering is supposed to be made at the same time and as part of the priest’s offertory. This makes us, too, “priests” in a sense—priests of creation. The Mass is cosmic: it connects every part and element and dimension of the universe. This fact is reflected in the liturgical seasons and vestments. The Mass is constructed in symbolic code, drawn partly from Scripture. In fact it offers a way to discover the inner meaning of the Bible. Every element of the Mass, every gesture made by the priest or ourselves, as well as the way we arrange the space and the furnishings of the church, not to mention the images we use, has a variety of meanings (moral, historical, mystical, etc.). Consider this—every scheme of education takes its inspiration from some vision of what the human person is ultimately for. In contemporary K-12 education, therefore, we will sometimes hear humanity’s ultimate purpose sloganized as “college and career readiness,” or maybe “citizenship” or “leadership.” And these are good things, yet on their own not enough; man was not created for college, or to get a job, or for the nation state, but for union with God. In the Eucharist this becomes a reality. So, daily Mass isn’t just a part of life at the Academy, but the thing itself being played out, first, in the church building, but then also in the classrooms and carlines, lunch tables and playing fields, and especially in our relationships with each other. Of course, we do this imperfectly, but it is our aim, and we return daily to Christ in the Eucharist for the grace to persevere. Let us continue to pray for one another. Our Lady of The Atonement—pray for us! Your servant, Matthew David Watson Head of School