What Will Pope Leo Say About Education?

Epoch Times

20-05-2025

Commentary
When the white smoke cleared and the name 'Leo XIV' was announced, most commentators missed the point. They speculated about political balance, factionalism, and the American angle. But the real clue is the name. By choosing Leo, the new Pope placed himself in a part of Catholic tradition—notably represented by Pope Leo XIII—that insists the family, not the state, is the basic unit of society.
In contrast to this, parents across the West have woken up to a chilling reality. Whether it's activist teachers pushing gender ideology in class, education bureaucrats enforcing secrecy around 'preferred pronouns,' or governments insisting they—not you—decide what's best for your child, the message is clear: Your family is no longer in charge.
Schools used to help parents. Now, they try to replace them. How did we get here?
Leo may tell us that it's not just bad policy. The culprit is bad philosophy, and both sides of the political spectrum are guilty.
On the left,
Progressives
see children as clay to mold into the latest ideology. They think they can remake human nature itself—erase sex, family, and tradition—and build something 'better' in its place. That's not progress. That's a revival of ancient Gnosticism: the belief that salvation comes through secret knowledge and that the restrictions of the body, family, and tradition are prisons to escape.
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On the
Libertarian
right, the problem is different—but also dangerous. Libertarians don't attack families—they ignore their importance. Parents are treated as consumers. Schools become marketplaces of ideology, with no shared sense of truth, purpose, or virtue. The result is ancient
Cynicism
, denying the need for family, virtue, or belonging. Children grow up rootless, unformed, and ultimately defenseless against the louder voices of state and culture.
Both ideologies deny the most fundamental truth: children are not products of the state or the market. They are persons—born into families, not institutions.
Offering a powerful correction to both ideologies is one of the most significant documents in Catholic history:
Leo XIII's legacy is bound up in
Rerum Novarum
as much as Oppenheimer's is with the nuclear bomb. By taking the name, the new Pope signals his intent to teach in the
The heart of the document is encapsulated in one single sentence: 'The family, the 'society' of a man's house [is] a society very small, one must admit, but none the less a true society, and one older than any State.'
This means the family comes
before
the government, not just in time, but in
authority
. Parents have natural rights—not rights granted by the state—to raise and educate their children. The state's role is to support families, not to control them.
Later popes were just as clear.
For Catholics, this is not a negotiable opinion. It's official Church teaching and speaks directly to today's battles over pronouns, sex education, religious schools, and parental consent.
It's not just Catholics. In 1976, Western countries signed and ratified two treaties. The
To say that this is what the new Pope is about is, of course, speculative. But it is well-founded speculation: The choice of name is an
unmistakable
signal. We can expect him to denounce current attempts to sever children from their families and remake them in the image of the bureaucratic state. And, in the style of
Rerum Novarum
, he will likely say that both progressive social engineers and libertarian relativists are complicit in eroding natural parental rights..
His solution, too, is likely to be drawn from
Rerum Novarum
. That solution is not simply 'school choice,' though that helps. The solution is to reassert the family's natural authority—to 'build a wall' around the family, so to speak.
That means:
Enshrining parental rights in law—especially in education.
Refusing to fund institutions that undermine the family's moral authority.
Supporting schools—public, private, and religious—that see the parent as the first teacher.
Teaching our children that freedom is not about doing whatever you want— it's for pursuing what is good, in line with natural law.
Ultimately, education isn't 'just' about test scores or credentials. It's about forming the soul. And no one—no bureaucrat, activist, or expert—has the right to do that in place of the parent.
The culture war over education isn't just about policy—it's about the nature of man and the purpose of freedom. Pope Leo XIII saw this over a century ago, and Leo XIV is likely to see it even more clearly.
And he will probably tell us what the Church has always known: A society that attacks the family, or ignores it, is building on sand.
It's time we started building on rock.
John Hilton-O'Brien is the Executive Director of Parents for Choice in Education,
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.