The Ideal and Principles

The ideal of MSC Education of the Heart is to learn to love as Jesus asked: ‘love one another as I have loved you’ (John 15:12).  This is central to the full growth of the learner, created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26). Mother Cabrini identified three inter-related aspects of this growth: the cognitive, the creative and the moral. In the 1881 aim for schools, she expressed this simply:

‘The aim of the Institute in these schools is to furnish the mind of the pupils with cognitive and ornamental competencies in  order to have the opportunity to form their hearts to the love of Religion and the practice of virtue. The teaching will be adjusted to meet the needs of those being taught’ (Regola dell’Istituto, p.25).

Three fundamental principles of MSC Education of the Heart are evident:

1 Activities to promote cognitive and ornamental or creative development are opportunities for moral formation in love and virtue.

2 This moral formation is inseparable from spirituality. By ‘the love of Religion’ Mother Cabrini means the love of God, known in the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

3 Teaching is learner-centred, adjusted to the needs of the individual.

Education of the Heart also needs ‘gentleness and strength’ as Mother Cabrini identified these as virtues necessary for all MSC work:

‘Do all this with gentleness and strength as the Sacred Heart would want and our Patron Saint Francis de Sales taught’
(Regola dell’Istituto, p.3).

A Lived Tradition of Practice

Mother Cabrini did not write a treatise explaining how to practise Education of the Heart. With the early MSC sisters, she commenced a lived tradition of practice. It was their way to bring the love they had received from the Sacred Heart of Jesus to the world. Their ideal and principles were ancient. The urban contexts in which they applied them were new. This was a significant contribution to Catholic educational practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, MSC Sisters and laity continue to educate the heart, finding contemporary applications of these principles, often using the latest ‘apps’!         

~ by Dr Maria Williams, with thanks to Sister Giuditta Pala MSC, General Archive, Rome

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