Abstract
This paper, written for the Buckfast Catholic educational leadership conference, 2026, examines Catholic education as a vehicle for peacemaking, drawing on British and international scholarship, magisterial teaching, and historical and contemporary evidence. It establishes the theological and philosophical foundations of Catholic education’s orientation towards peace — from the imago Dei doctrine and natural law tradition to the central magisterial documents of the modern Church — and examines the mechanisms through which schooling promotes peace: the curriculum, the extra-curriculum, teachers as moral exemplars, the development of character, and three further dimensions addressed in this paper: trauma-informed practice, pedagogy centred on human formation (including Rosenshine), and talking therapies. Case studies include the Jesuit and Lasallian traditions, the Northern Ireland experience, post-genocide Rwanda, and the work of Pax Christi. The paper argues that the Catholic educational tradition, at its best, offers a coherent paradigm for peacemaking — though its shadow history of complicity in colonial division and ethnic violence must be honestly confronted if this tradition is to speak with integrity to the contemporary world.
Keywords: Catholic education, peacemaking, Catholic social teaching, magisterial documents, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Pax Christi, curriculum, character education, restorative practices
Introduction
The Catholic Church is the largest single non-governmental provider of education in the world, operating more than 200,000 schools, universities, and colleges across every continent (Hawksley, 2023). In England and Wales alone, the Church maintains over 2,000 schools educating nearly one million children within the state-funded system, operating as voluntary aided schools or academies under agreements first established by the Education Act 1944 (Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, 2021, https://www.cbcew.org.uk/catholic-education/). This scale of provision places Catholic education at the intersection of two of the most persistent questions of our time: what role can education play in building peace, and what kind of formation do young people require to sustain peaceful communities in an era of intensifying division?
This paper argues that Catholic education, grounded in a theological vision of the human person and the common good, carries both the aspiration and the institutional capacity to be a significant agent of peacemaking. The paper moves from theological and magisterial foundations to practical pedagogical applications, with sustained attention to British examples and the international scholarly record.
Theological and philosophical foundations of Catholic education for peace
The Imago Dei and human dignity
The bedrock of Catholic education’s orientation towards peace is its theological anthropology. The claim, rooted in Genesis, that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God (imago Dei) carries a radical implication: that human dignity is not conferred by the state or community membership, but is inherent and inalienable. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, the dignity of the human person is the foundation of a moral vision for society (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1700, https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P5E.HTM). This grounding provides the normative basis for Catholic education’s commitments to inclusion, care for the poor, and the recognition of each student as irreducibly valuable.
Kleindienst (2021) found that students in Catholic schools showed a more comprehensive understanding of human dignity and a more developed capacity to detect its violation than peers in public schools — suggesting that the imago Dei doctrine, when institutionally embedded, shapes the actual moral formation of students (Kleindienst, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1080/01416200.2021.1918059).
The Natural Law tradition and Positive Peace
Alongside the imago Dei, the natural law tradition provides Catholic education with a framework for engaging the structural dimensions of peace. Johan Galtung’s (2011) distinction between negative peace (the absence of direct violence) and positive peace (the establishment of just structures) maps closely onto the Catholic distinction between the mere absence of conflict and the active pursuit of justice (Galtung, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470672532.wbepp189). Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) declared that peace on earth is founded on truth, built upon justice, nurtured by love, and brought into effect under the auspices of freedom, and included the right to education among the fundamental human rights whose protection is a precondition of peace (John XXIII, 1963, §1, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_11041963_pacem.html).
Magisterial teaching on education and peace
Gaudium et Spes and the work of justice
Gaudium et Spes (1965) broke decisively with any equation of peace with the absence of armed conflict. Paragraph 78 declares that peace is not the absence of war nor the balance of power, but a work of justice — the product of order implanted in human society, realised in practice as men and women hunger and thirst for ever more perfect justice (Second Vatican Council, 1965, Gaudium et Spes §78, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html). If peace is a work of justice, education for peace cannot confine itself to conflict resolution skills: it must address structural injustice and the cultural formations that make violence seem inevitable.
Gravissimum Educationis and the Catholic school
Gravissimum Educationis (1965) articulated the Catholic school’s distinctive purpose: a community animated by an evangelical spirit of freedom and charity, where students develop harmoniously their physical, moral, and intellectual endowments, remaining open to dialogue with others and devoted to the promotion of the common good (Second Vatican Council, 1965, §8, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_gravissimum-educationis_en.html). This language was cited by the Northern Ireland Bishops’ Council for Catholic Schools as foundational to their vision of education for reconciliation in a divided society (Catholic Schools Trustee Service NI, https://catholiceducation-ni.org/role-2/the-role-of-catholic-schools-in-promoting-peace-and-reconciliation-in-northern-ireland-2/).
The Catholic social teaching tradition further develops this framework through the preferential option for the poor. Catholic schools established in nineteenth-century Britain had an explicit mission to poor Catholic immigrants; this historical commitment to those on the margins is itself a form of peacemaking, since educational exclusion and poverty are structural antecedents of conflict (McKinney, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/1474225X.2023.2175531).
Ex Corde Ecclesiae and the Catholic university
Pope John Paul II’s apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990) explicitly assigned the promotion of peace and justice as a core institutional responsibility of Catholic universities. Pyter (2026) has noted that Catholic universities have been positioned since Vatican II as vital partners to the Holy See in the study and promotion of global peace, whilst acknowledging a persistent gap between institutional aspiration and research practice (Pyter, 2026, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel17020227).
Fratelli Tutti and universal fraternity
Pope Francis’s 2020 encyclical, Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity and Social Friendship), grounds its vision of peace in the concept of universal fraternity — the recognition that all human beings are sisters and brothers, bound in solidarity that transcends national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. Piscos (2021) has analysed Fratelli Tutti’s implications for Catholic education, finding that its themes of human dignity, common good, and solidarity are essential building blocks of a curriculum oriented towards peace (Piscos, 2021, https://doi.org/10.58870/berj.v6i1.29). The three virtues the encyclical foregrounds — freedom, mutual respect, and solidarity — are precisely the virtues that education for peace most requires of teachers and students alike (Partnership Schools, 2022, https://thepartnershipschools.org/pope-francis-fratelli-tutti-for-educators/).
Historical development of Catholic education for peace
The teaching Orders: Jesuit and Lasallian traditions
The history of Catholic education for peace cannot be understood without the teaching religious orders. The Society of Jesus (Jesuits), founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540, established schools distinctive in their commitment to the formation of the whole person through the Ignatian tradition of cura personalis (care for the whole person). The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599 placed moral formation alongside intellectual development, treating the education of each student as an act of service to the wider human community — a vision that anticipates the comprehensive peace education model articulated by Reardon (1988), with its insistence that peace education must address the full range of personal, relational, and structural dimensions of violence.
The Lasallian tradition, founded by Jean-Baptiste de La Salle in 1680, directed its educational energies specifically towards the poor and marginalised. De La Salle established what is considered the first normal school in France and developed a spirituality of teaching in which the educator was called to be a minister of God’s providence towards the young. The five core Lasallian principles — concern for the poor and social justice, faith in the presence of God, quality education, respect for all persons, and inclusive community — articulate a vision of Catholic schooling as an inherently peacemaking enterprise (De La Salle North Catholic High School, https://delasallenorth.org/lasallian-education/). By 2021, the Lasallian mission was present in 80 countries serving more than one million young people.
Pax Christi and peace education in British Catholic schools
In England and Wales, the most sustained organised effort to connect Catholic education with peacemaking has been the work of Pax Christi, the international Catholic peace movement, whose educational programmes have operated in schools, parishes, and youth settings since the post-war period. Pax Christi’s peace education work in British Catholic schools covers GCSE and A-level curriculum resources on war and peace, workshops for secondary pupils on conflict resolution and nonviolence, assemblies and liturgies that make space for peace in the everyday life of the school, and school speaker programmes on issues including Israel-Palestine, global conflict, and the arms trade (Pax Christi England and Wales, https://paxchristi.org.uk/peace-education/). The organisation has identified a Christian vocation to peacemaking at the heart of Catholic school identity, arguing that creating space for critical reflection on what it means to follow the nonviolent Christ is central to the Catholic educational mission (Pax Christi England and Wales, 2017, https://paxchristi.org.uk/2017/11/17/reflecting-on-pax-christis-peace-education-work/).
Northern Ireland: Catholic Education in a Divided Society
Catholic education’s contribution to peacemaking is nowhere more contested than in Northern Ireland, where schooling has historically been organised along sectarian lines. Approximately 96 per cent of Northern Irish children are educated in either Catholic maintained or predominantly Protestant state schools (ASCD, 1999, https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/-schools-of-reconciliation) — a structural separation that some see as an important reflection of parents’ right to choose denominational provision, and others see as the cause and consequence of three decades of political violence, generating a substantial body of scholarship on whether Catholic schools contribute to peace or to the reproduction of division.
The Northern Ireland Bishops’ 2001 document Building Peace, Shaping the Future articulates a vision of Catholic schools as sites not of sectarian isolation but of active engagement with surrounding communities (Catholic Bishops of Northern Ireland, 2001, https://www.catholicbishops.ie/wpcontent/uploads/images/docs/buildingpeace_october.pdf), grounding this commitment in Gravissimum Educationis’ call for students to be open to dialogue with others and to devote themselves to the promotion of the common good — as the theological ground of their commitment to reconciliation education (Catholic Schools Trustee Service NI, https://catholiceducation-ni.org/role-2/the-role-of-catholic-schools-in-promoting-peace-and-reconciliation-in-northern-ireland-2/).
Some scholarship supports the view that integrated schooling produces more durable attitudinal change than brief inter-community contact schemes (Hansson et al., 2016, https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/integrated-education-in-northern-ireland-education-for-peace/). The Shared Education Programme, launched in 2007, enabled sustained curriculum-based contact without requiring the structural dismantling of faith school identity. Conversely, research by Parkin (2026) found that Catholic educational institutions play a key post-conflict role in hosting forums for dialogue and maintaining communities of remembrance (Parkin, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1177/15423166251414984). In the 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement, Catholic education in Northern Ireland has been both a site of genuine peacemaking effort and a reminder that institutional separation can inhibit the contact on which reconciliation depends.
Education as a force for conflict and evil: The shadow of the tradition
Any honest account of Catholic education for peacemaking must confront the tradition’s shadow history. Education, as Paulo Freire (1970) argued, is never neutral: it either liberates or domesticates (Takona, 2025, https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1351&context=jger). Two instructive cases illuminate what happens when education is placed in the service of ideological violence.
Nazi Germany: the corruption of education
The most thoroughly documented example of the systematic corruption of education in the service of violence is National Socialist Germany. The Nazi regime subordinated every dimension of schooling to its ideology: biology was reconstituted as racial science, history taught through nationalist grievance, and even mathematics pressed into racial calculation (Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/education/Nazi-Germany). Pope Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge condemned Nazi racial ideology, yet the Church’s institutional capacity to resist was compromised by the Concordat of 1933. The Nazi case illustrates, in its most extreme form, that educational institutions are morally neutral instruments whose character is entirely determined by the ends they serve.
Israeli educational psychologist Haim Ginott writes about a letter that teachers would receive from their principal each year:
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot by high school and college graduates.
So, I am suspicious of education.
My request is this: Help your children become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.
(https://teachinghistorymatters.com/2012/04/02/so-i-am-suspicious-of-education)
Rwanda: education, the Church, and genocide
The Rwandan genocide of 1994 represents the most sobering example of the tradition’s capacity for moral failure. Rwanda was the most Christianised country in Africa, with the Catholic Church its most dominant social institution and the majority of the population Catholic (Carney, 2014). During the colonial period, the Church played a constitutive role in racialising the categories of Hutu and Tutsi — categories that had previously been fluid social distinctions — hardening them into fixed ethnic identities through educational practice, census classifications, and the racialised ideology promoted by Catholic missionaries (Carney, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1177/0040563915605269). King (2011) has documented how the colonial-era education system in Rwanda was itself a divisive instrument, stressing differences between Hutu and Tutsi pupils and embedding them in categories in and out of school (King, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-011-9193-7).
The genocide claimed approximately 800,000 lives in 100 days. Several Catholic priests and nuns were convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda; others sheltered victims at great personal risk. The Rwandan government under President Kagame explicitly accused the Church of having participated fully in establishing the colonial ideology that created the divide between Hutu and Tutsi (Al Jazeera, 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/3/20/pope-apologises-for-churchs-role-in-rwanda-genocide). Pope Francis offered an apology to Rwanda in 2017. Carney (2015) documents genuine post-genocide Catholic reconciliation work involving ritual, dialogue, and forgiveness, whilst insisting that deep ambiguities remain concerning the institutional Church’s need to repent for corporate complicity (Carney, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1177/0040563915605269). The Rwanda case demonstrates that even the most pervasively Catholic society can commit mass violence when the Church’s educational influence serves ethnic division rather than human dignity.
Colonial education and cultural suppression
Beyond Rwanda, the broader history of Catholic missionary education raises questions the tradition must confront. Catholic schools across sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia were frequently vehicles through which colonial powers and the Church together suppressed indigenous languages and identities, replacing them with European frameworks — a cultural violence in Galtung’s sense that was embedded in the very educational mission presented as a service to the poor. Contemporary Catholic educational institutions must engage honestly with this tension if their peace credentials are to be credible (McKinney, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/1474225X.2023.2175531).
Education and peacemaking: mechanisms and practice in the Catholic Tradition
The curriculum as peace making
The formal curriculum is the most legible channel through which schools communicate values relevant to peace. In Catholic schools, curriculum peacemaking is not confined to religious education: the embedding of Catholic social teaching — with its principles of human dignity, the common good, solidarity, and the preferential option for the poor — across subjects provides a framework that orients moral formation throughout the school day. The Catholic Bishops of Northern Ireland called for the curriculum to address mutual understanding and cultural heritage, reflecting the principle that curriculum peacemaking requires not merely new content but a reshaping of how knowledge is taught and whose perspectives are honoured (Duffy, 2000, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02754044). Evidence from conflict resolution curricula confirms that experiential learning — dialogue, negotiation, and structured encounter — produces more durable attitudinal change than passive reception of information (Tan et al., 2025, https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2025.2553004).
Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach offers a secular counterpart to the Catholic tradition’s emphasis on holistic formation. Her argument that education must cultivate narrative empathy — the imaginative capacity to understand the experience of others — grounds peacemaking in the affective dimensions of learning (Nussbaum, 1997, as cited in Zembylas et al., 2021, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-021-09907-9), aligning with Catholic schools’ traditional emphasis on literature, drama, and the visual arts as instruments of human formation.
The Extra-Curriculum and restorative practice
If the formal curriculum carries the explicit intentions of peacemaking, the extra-curriculum carries much of its practice. Catholic schools’ traditions of retreat, community service, liturgy, and structured reflection provide spaces for students to engage with questions of meaning, justice, and vocation outside academic competition. Pax Christi’s work in British Catholic schools — peace days, assemblies on peacemakers from Oscar Romero to Mairead Corrigan Maguire, and workshops on nonviolent conflict resolution — exemplifies this (Pax Christi England and Wales, https://paxchristi.org.uk/peace-education/schools-working-for-peace/).
Restorative practices — community-building circles, peer mediation, harm-repair conferences — represent a well-evidenced form of extra-curricular peacemaking that aligns with Catholic principles of reconciliation (Darling-Hammond, 2023, https://doi.org/10.54300/169.703). Research in Frontiers in Education found restorative practices reduced school violence, improved emotional wellbeing, and developed empathy and self-regulation (Frontiers in Education, 2025, https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2025.1520137) — capacities that are, in the Catholic tradition, what reconciliation enacted in community looks like in practice.
Teachers as Moral Exemplars
Catholic educational tradition has always understood the teacher not merely as a conveyor of curriculum but as a moral presence — what the Lasallian tradition calls a minister of God’s providence towards the young. McKinney et al. (2023) have explored how the image of Jesus as an emotionally intelligent leader provides a model for Catholic school leadership that prioritises relational attentiveness and empathy over institutional authority (McKinney et al., 2023, https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/education/research/ted/publications/). Research by the UNICEF-funded Research Consortium on Education and Peacebuilding has argued that teachers are both potential perpetrators and victims of violence as well as powerful agents of peacebuilding — requiring that they be understood as moral actors in specific social contexts rather than neutral technicians (Global Partnership for Education, 2015, https://www.globalpartnership.org/blog/crucial-role-teachers-peacebuilding).
The specific competencies identified in the peacebuilding literature as essential for the teacher-as-peacebuilder — critical thinking, empathy and solidarity, skills in conflict transformation, and participatory democratic engagement (IntechOpen, 2025, https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/1212680) — map closely onto what Catholic teacher education at its best seeks to provide. The lesson of Northern Ireland, where separate teacher training reproduced the sectarian divisions of the school system, is that teacher education must itself embody the values of dialogue, encounter, and mutual understanding if teachers are to model these values in their schools (Connelly & Troyna, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2008.11.001).
Character development and Catholic moral formation
The development of character — the formation of stable moral dispositions that guide behaviour consistently — is central to the Catholic educational mission. Berkowitz (2007) identifies four practices with strong empirical support: promoting student autonomy and influence; student participation, discussion, and collaboration; social skills training; and helping and service behaviour (Berkowitz, 2007, https://doi.org/10.1108/CE-02-2007-0002) — each mapping onto the Catholic school’s aspiration to form persons who are not merely academically accomplished but capable of peaceful engagement with those different from themselves. Osewska and Stala (2024) identify a personalistic vision of peace rooted in the dignity of the human person that extends into educational institutions, treating the formation of peacemakers as inseparable from the formation of persons of faith (Osewska & Stala, 2024, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15020175).
This personalistic vision, connecting interior moral formation with structural engagement with injustice, captures the distinctiveness of Catholic character education as a contribution to peacemaking.
Three further dimensions of Catholic peacemaking practice
Trauma-informed practice as a foundation for peace
Catholic education cannot make peace in communities where students arrive carrying unresolved harm. Research consistently demonstrates that around two-thirds of children will be exposed to at least one adverse childhood experience (ACE) by age sixteen — including domestic violence, abuse, bereavement, or community conflict — with lasting consequences for cognitive development, emotional regulation, and capacity for trust (Mullin & Sharkey, 2024, https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2024.1346933). A trauma-informed school does not treat distressing behaviour as a disciplinary problem but as a symptom of unmet need, organising its relationships, routines, and environment around the six principles identified by NHS England and Ofsted: safety, trust, choice, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural consideration (St Gregory the Great Catholic School, https://www.st-gregorygreat.gloucs.sch.uk/trauma-informed-relational-practice/). This framework maps directly onto the Catholic anthropological conviction that every child is made in the image of God and that the school exists to honour, not merely manage, that dignity. The Catholic Children’s Society’s Connect-Ed programme, operating in more than eighty Catholic primary, secondary, and special schools across London, demonstrates what this looks like in practice: trained counsellors and therapists embedded on-site, offering individual and group therapeutic support alongside staff training in trauma recognition (Catholic Children’s Society, https://www.cathchild.org.uk/school-counselling-and-therapy/). Dombo and Sabatino (2019), writing from the National Catholic School of Social Service at the Catholic University of America, argue that the three pillars of a trauma-informed school — safety, connection, and emotional regulation — create the conditions without which no curriculum, however well-designed, can achieve its aims (Dombo & Sabatino, 2019, https://www.aft.org/ae/summer2019/dombo_sabatino). For Catholic schools aspiring to be agents of peacemaking, trauma-informed practice is not an add-on: it is the precondition for all the other work.
Pedagogy centred on the human person: the contribution of Rosenshine
The recovery of an explicitly humanising pedagogy is a second dimension that Catholic peacemaking schools must attend to. Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, first published in their developed form in the American Educator in 2012 and grounded in decades of cognitive science research and direct observation of effective teachers, provide an evidence-based framework for the kind of structured, relationship-attentive teaching that supports all learners and that has particular resonance for students whose capacity for learning has been disrupted by trauma or conflict (Rosenshine, 2012, https://www.aft.org/ae/spring2012/rosenshine). Rosenshine identified ten core practices — including reviewing prior learning, presenting new material in small steps, asking high volumes of questions, providing guided practice, and checking for understanding — that together create a classroom environment characterised by clarity, predictability, and the experience of incremental success. For students from communities marked by instability, these are not merely pedagogical niceties: they are conditions of human flourishing. A classroom in which students consistently experience themselves as capable learners, met with patience and clear instruction by a teacher who knows their starting point, is a classroom that makes human dignity tangible rather than merely proclaimed. Tom Sherrington’s widely-used synthesis of Rosenshine’s work, Rosenshine’s Principles in Action (2019), has introduced these ideas to a generation of British teachers and school leaders, making them increasingly accessible within the Catholic school context (Sherrington, 2019, https://cirl.etoncollege.com/barak-rosenshines-principles-of-instruction/). The convergence between Rosenshine’s empirical findings and the Catholic tradition’s emphasis on cura personalis — care for the whole person, including their intellectual formation — is striking: both insist that good teaching is inseparable from genuine regard for the learner as a person, not merely a recipient of content.
Talking therapies in Catholic schools
The third dimension concerns the deliberate integration of talking therapies into the pastoral infrastructure of Catholic schools. One in five children in England currently meets the threshold for a probable mental health problem, and poor mental health is among the most significant barriers to the experience of belonging, trust, and capacity for relationship that peacemaking requires (Catholic Children’s Society, https://www.cathchild.org.uk/school-counselling-and-therapy/). Catholic Care in the Diocese of Leeds offers school-based counselling as a one-to-one supportive therapy, typically referred through pastoral staff, addressing bereavement, eating disorders, anger, bullying, and emotional and social difficulties — recognising that these are not merely individual problems but conditions that fracture school community (Catholic Care, https://catholic-care.org.uk/services/schools-children-and-family-wellbeing-services/counselling-service/). The Archdiocese of San Antonio’s Comprehensive Developmental School Counselling Model for Catholic Schools frames this work in explicitly theological terms: the mission of the Catholic school counsellor is to translate the mission of Catholic education into a programme of effective counselling services that promotes the academic, social, emotional, moral, and spiritual development of every child (Archdiocese of San Antonio, https://sacatholicschools.org/counseling). This integration of the spiritual and the therapeutic is not a dilution of Catholic identity but its expression: the tradition’s insistence that the person is a unity of body, mind, and spirit means that the school that neglects the mental health of its students also neglects their capacity for the relational depth that peacemaking demands. Research consistently shows that students who receive therapeutic support develop greater resilience, improved emotional regulation, and stronger capacity for empathy — precisely the dispositions that enable them to encounter difference without fear and to contribute to communities of peace (Catholic Children’s Society, https://www.cathchild.org.uk/school-counselling-and-therapy/).
Catholic education, polarisation, and the contemporary challenge
The challenge of Catholic education for peacemaking is rendered more acute in the contemporary British context by intensifying polarisation: rising antisemitism and Islamophobia, post-Brexit social fragmentation, and proliferating online echo chambers. A House of Commons debate in March 2026 on the government’s Social Cohesion Action Plan acknowledged that polarisation now constitutes a direct threat to the social fabric of British communities (Hansard, 2026, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-03-09/debates/7675E154-5277-444E-B837-D34D7495F562/SocialCohesionActionPlan). Research published in the British Educational Research Journal has found that ideological polarisation increases with education levels in most OECD countries — indicating that more education alone, without the orientation toward dialogue that peace pedagogy requires, is insufficient (Lee et al., 2025, https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.4081).
For opponents of schools with a religious character, research on ethnic clustering in English secondary schools has raised questions about whether schools with a religious character may increase ethnic concentration and thereby limit the meaningful intergroup contact that promotes peaceful coexistence (Gao et al., 2025, https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.70026). Research by Balazard and Peace (2023) found that the Prevent Duty had the paradoxical effect of stigmatising Muslim students, hardening the very communal identities it aimed to soften (Balazard & Peace, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968221088016). For Catholic schools whose tradition emphasises solidarity across religious and cultural lines, this creates both an obligation to refuse the equation of Muslim identity with extremist risk and an opportunity to model the culture of encounter that Fratelli Tutti calls for.
Research by Van Praag et al. (2023) argues that schools which create genuine discursive spaces — where students with different views can speak and be heard across lines of difference — can address polarisation more effectively than those that enforce consensus (Van Praag et al., 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2023.2237986). What the Catholic tradition offers is a way of holding conviction and openness together: committed to particular truths whilst remaining genuinely curious about the truth that others carry — a disposition grounded in the theology of universal fraternity articulated in Fratelli Tutti.
Conclusion
This paper has argued that Catholic education carries both the aspiration and the institutional capacity to be a significant agent of peacemaking, grounded in a theological vision of the human person that is, at its best, radically committed to the dignity of every individual and the justice of the communities in which they live. From the imago Dei to Fratelli Tutti, from the Jesuit cura personalis to the Lasallian preferential option for the poor, from Pax Christi’s work in British Catholic schools to the Northern Ireland Bishops’ commitment to reconciliation, the tradition offers a paradigm case of faith-based education oriented towards peace.
It has also argued that this claim must be held in tension with an honest reckoning with the tradition’s failures. The Catholic Church’s complicity in the racialisation of Hutu and Tutsi identity in colonial Rwanda and the broader pattern of cultural suppression in colonial mission education are constitutive of the tradition’s history and must inform its self-understanding. This double reality is not a reason to abandon the tradition’s peace aspirations, but it is a reason to hold them with moral seriousness and institutional humility.
The mechanisms through which Catholic education works for peace — the formal curriculum embedding Catholic social teaching, restorative practice, the teacher as moral exemplar, the development of character, and the therapeutic and pedagogical practices explored in the foregoing section — are not uniquely Catholic, but what is distinctive is the theological grounding that connects them to a vision of the human person before God: a vision that insists, with every document from Pacem in Terris to Fratelli Tutti, that peace is not a policy preference but a work of justice, and that education in its service is not an optional extra but a vocation.
In an era when British and international communities face the erosion of the civic bonds on which democratic life depends, this Catholic educational tradition — with its institutional scale, its theological depth, and its accumulated historical experience — has a distinctive contribution to make. Making that contribution with integrity requires neither pretending that the tradition is without blemish nor abandoning the aspiration that, at its core, has always driven it: the conviction that every person is made in the image of God, and that education worthy of that conviction is education for peace.
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