Mindfulness as praeparatio evangelica in the Irish Catholic Primary School

Abstract

Mindfulness has exploded in popularity across several elements of Irish society, including Catholic primary schools. This growth of the practice is set against the backdrop of a secularized and detraditionalized Irish society. This changed context for religious belief, as explored by Michael Paul Gallagher, Charles Taylor and Lieven Boeve, has challenged the Irish Church’s mission of evangelization. The challenges faced by Irish Catholic schools, as ecclesial entities, in living out this evangelizing mission highlight the growing necessity for pre-evangelization. These issues include a breakdown in the home, school and parish partnership model for faith formation and development, and a contemporary ‘educational emergency.’ This article examines the contribution of mindfulness as praeparatio evangelica in Catholic schools, focusing on it as a contemplative practice and as a means of enflaming sacramental imagination.

The phenomenon of mindfulness has grown exponentially in popularity over recent decades across many sectors of society, including education. Mindfulness practice in schools is supported by an increasing body of research, arguing that its benefits for students include reduced anxiety and improvements in emotional regulation and academic performance. ¹ However, while typically practised in Irish Catholic primary schools as a secular activity, mindfulness traces its origins to Buddhism. This has raised questions over the possible incoherence of mindfulness and the Catholic ethos of the many Irish primary schools in the State. This was exemplified by one Irish bishop, who in a 2019 letter to all Catholic schools in his diocese, warned that mindfulness and yoga were not Christian activities and therefore not suitable for practice during religious education classes. ² In response, this article argues that rather than being a threat to Catholic schools, mindfulness represents a potentially invaluable resource to the ethos and mission of these schools in terms of praeparatio evangelica ³ or pre-evangelization.

To this end, the article will first map out how the Church’s mission of evangelization in Ireland has been challenged by the social processes of secularization and detraditionalization, drawing upon the insights of Michael Paul Gallagher, Charles Taylor and Lieven Boeve. Second, it will highlight the challenges faced by Irish Catholic schools in living out their evangelizing mission, and the growing necessity for pre-evangelization. Third, the development and evolution of mindfulness from Buddhist practice to its contemporary secularized form will be outlined, with particular reference to its role in Irish primary schools via the vehicle of wellbeing promotion. Finally, the contribution of mindfulness as praeparatio evangelica in Catholic schools will be proposed, focusing on the concepts of sacramentality and contemplative education.

A Secularized and Detraditionalized Ireland

In their recent book on reform in Irish primary education, McCraw and Tierney revisit the celebratory scenes at Dublin Castle in 2018 as the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution was repealed by referendum, thus legalizing abortion. This followed the 2015 referendum which legalized same-sex marriage, another sign of a growing liberalization and secularization in Irish society. The irony of these referenda is that so many people who celebrated the results were themselves former students of Catholic education. ⁴ The decision of these graduates, in many cases, baptized Catholics, to vote for such societal reform signifies how the Irish Church’s moral authority on social issues has been eroded. ⁵ The moral outrage at the perpetration and mishandling of clerical child sex abuse and the Mother and Baby Home scandals have contributed to this, further marginalizing the role of the Church in public life, and greatly harming its ability to credibly share the Good News. In addition, the social processes of secularization and detraditionalization in Ireland have exacerbated the challenges facing the Church’s mission of evangelization. Consequently, the landscape of Irish faith has radically changed, with the Irish population increasingly holding a diversity of religious and non-religious perspectives. ⁶

However, for Michael Paul Gallagher, the content of faith or the ‘what people believe’ aspect, while important, does not give the reader a full picture of the transformation in Ireland’s religious climate. Rather, an exploration of the process of faith, or the ‘how people believe’ provides a more accurate mapping. ⁷ Gallagher’s thought echoes that of philosopher Charles Taylor, whose influential book, A Secular Age, explores the relationship between religion and modernity and its implications for how people construct identity and meaning. Like Gallagher, Taylor is particularly interested in what he categorizes as Secular 3, namely the altered contemporary conditions of belief, ⁸ rather than on expressions of belief. In terms of Secular 3, Smith posits that ‘. . . philosophically, Taylor is working from the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology, an heir to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. So he equates the “conditions” of belief with the “background” we bring to our perception of reality.’ ⁹ Smith’s characterization of Taylor’s philosophical influences is informative as he is highlighting Taylor’s view that these altered conditions of belief are not necessarily on the cognitive or intellectual level. Rather, these changes operate on a deeper, imaginative level, which Taylor calls the ‘social imaginary.’ ¹⁰ For Taylor, it is this foundational realm of symbols and meaning-making that has become secularized. Gallagher echoes this point in his writing, where the possibility of religious faith has become trivialized in the public sphere through a secularization of attitudes rather than ideas or concepts:

Our receptivity for revelation is more shaped by culture than by philosophical clarities. We seldom live by ideologies but rather by images of life communicated by our surrounding worlds. Hence the cultural wavelength is central for understanding the shifting currents within religious commitment now. ¹¹

Gallagher is arguing that our spiritual imagination exists on a deeper level of images and symbols which provide us with values and meaning. As such, it is now possible to envision a conception of human flourishing with no reference to the sacred, where God is no longer thought of as the ultimate source of meaning and fullness of life. This is what Taylor calls ‘the immanent frame,’ ¹² a mode of living within which each person operates, where cosmic, ethical and social orders do not need explanation or meaning from any transcendent reality. Such a self-sufficient way of living allows for the possibility of exclusive humanism where human flourishing is understood as a goal without a transcendent aspect. This framing of reality and meaning points to the fading of a religious or sacramental imagination. Moreover, this secularization of imagination entails an anthropological concern for how we discern ultimate meaning and our place in the world.

This represents a profound challenge for evangelization. Moreover, in reflecting upon Taylor’s work, Gallagher identifies the changed pastoral priorities for our contemporary context, including a shift from evangelization to pre-evangelization. ¹³ While many younger baptized generations in Ireland have attended Catholic schools, receiving faith formation and the sacraments as rites of initiation, their experience of religion or Church is extremely weak. The question of God becomes irrelevant as basic attitudes and assumptions have become less attuned to the wavelengths of Christian faith or even the possibility of an experience of the transcendent in their lives. Speaking from the highly secularized Belgian context, Lieven Boeve has categorized this situation as ‘post-Christian.’ ¹⁴ The term ‘post’ is not to be understood as something that has occurred after an event, nor have the traditions and embodiments of Christianity vanished. Rather, in the same way that postmodernity does not mean the end of modernity but its transformation, the context for Christian faith is changed and not ended. ¹⁵

Boeve identifies the processes of detraditionalization as a significant contributor to this post-Christian context, which interrupt the intergenerational transmission of traditions and values, ¹⁶ meaning the Christian tradition can no longer be passed down to the next generation as the unchallenged and axiomatic basis for identity development and source of overarching meaning. Detraditionalization has significant implications for Catholic education ¹⁷ but also the Irish Church more generally, where younger generations inherit what Gallagher calls a deracinated faith with little connection to the Christian narrative. ¹⁸ In particular, there exists for many younger Catholics a religious illiteracy which renders the experience and ritual of Christian faith alien. As such, the transmission of Catholic faith from parent to child in Ireland is increasingly a minority position. These younger generations may have heard the story of the Gospel in school but for many, this language is strange and unintelligible due to a secularized imagination. This is the reality of Taylor’s immanent frame and what Gallagher calls cultural unbelief. ¹⁹

Catholic Schools and Evangelization

Having identified the implications of a secularized imagination on the Church’s mission to proclaim the Good News, it is important to examine the role of evangelization in Catholic primary schools and the challenges this presents. According to Gareth Byrne, the corpus of 16 documents from the Second Vatican Council offers a coherent understanding of the centrality of evangelization in the Church’s self-understanding. ²⁰ The Council’s Declaration on Christian Education, Gravissimum Educationis (1965), begins by locating Catholic education within the Church’s mission to spread the Good News to all peoples. ²¹ The Declaration also highlights the ‘special importance’ ²² of the Catholic school as a site of evangelization as part of its educational mission. Like other schools, Catholic schools are committed to human formation, but the life of the Catholic school is underpinned by ‘. . . a special atmosphere animated by the Gospel spirit of freedom . . . to help youth grow . . . and to let knowledge acquired be illuminated by faith.’ ²³ There is also a re-affirmation of the role of parents and family as primary educators, where the children are raised in the faith and taught how to love God and their neighbour. ²⁴

Church documents have consistently upheld Catholic schools as ecclesial entities, an extension of the teaching Church, where education and evangelization are radically connected. ²⁵ As such, they participate ‘. . . in the evangelising mission of the Church and [represent] the privileged environment in which Christian education is carried out.’ ²⁶ Due to the social processes of secularization and detraditionalization which have been explored already, Catholic schools inhabit a missionary role, bearing witness in countries even with historically strong links to the Christian faith. ²⁷ This witness by Catholic schools also provides a setting for pre-evangelization, inviting students to consider the deepest questions of life and encounter mystery before coming to know Christ. ²⁸ Catholic primary schools in Ireland face many challenges in living out their mission of evangelization. These include the existing tensions in collaboration between home, school and parish in faith formation and development, and the emergence of what Pope Benedict XVI termed the present ‘educational emergency.’

First, Catholic schools in many cases are the only place in which children learn about the Christian faith into which they have been baptized. Teachers are expected to take on the role of religious educator of the child instead of the parents, who as Gravissimum Educationis states, ought to have primary responsibility for this, albeit with the support of the parish community. However, in the Irish context, many parents are not practising Catholics, as evidenced by dwindling Mass attendance numbers in recent decades. Parishes and dioceses are facing a reduction in the number of priests and religious, and historically parishes have had few resources for adult faith development beyond the school system. ²⁹ Teachers in Catholic schools are thus faced with balancing time for faith formation and sacramental preparation with an overloaded curriculum. A further difficulty lies in the fact that many student teachers have not been religiously socialized and encounter difficulty articulating Christian belief, ³⁰ causing them to feel ‘. . . ambivalent, hesitant and insecure when teaching confessional Religious Education to others.’ ³¹ Questions concerning a teacher’s own religious socialization or religiosity, ³² coupled with a lack of parental and parish support, means the school’s evangelizing mission will not be accomplished. ³³

This also raises the issue of sacramental integrity when Catholic children who have no relationship to their faith via family or parish nevertheless receive the sacraments by virtue of attending a Catholic school. ³⁴ Consequently, there is a danger of the sacraments being reduced to a ‘day out’ for non-practising families rather than being understood as solemn and efficacious signs of grace in the life of the Church. Such a scenario amounts to a failure of evangelization, where the Catholic school has been left with the sole responsibility of faith formation for the child, replacing parents as primary educators. Indeed, the fact that many parents themselves are graduates of a Catholic education and yet possess such a tenuous relationship to their faith indicates that the challenges facing Catholic schools today are not new. This highlights the need for pre-evangelization to play a more significant part in Catholic schools. In a post-Christian Ireland, evangelization may in many cases be an unrealistic starting point in presenting the Christian faith to children in Catholic schools.

The secularized imagination proposed by Gallagher and altered conditions of belief as argued by Taylor mean that pre-evangelization is necessary as a way to the possibility of faith for pupils in Catholic schools, given that many parents may have no relationship with the Christian faith. This finds expression in the National Directory for Catechesis in Ireland, which states ‘Pre-evangelization can be relevant for people of all ages and stages of life, including children in Catholic schools. We should never presume that the soil has already been prepared when we seek to plant a precious seed.’ ³⁵ This point is also recognized in the Irish Pre-school and Primary Religious Education Curriculum. ³⁶ Indeed, several of the faith formation goals for pre-school level children in the curriculum might serve as meaningful pre-evangelization aims for older children, such as ‘recognising God’s presence and action in their lives and giving thanks, developing a sense of wonder and awe in the created world . . . and recognising God’s presence in their own family.’ ³⁷ Such aims would seek to open the child’s imagination to an awareness of the presence of God in their lives which is a prerequisite to developing a loving relationship with God. Without these initial steps, the seed of faith will flounder rather than flourish.

The rise of a neoliberal educational system in Ireland also poses a risk to the mission of Catholic schools. ³⁸ McChesney calls neoliberalism ‘. . . the defining political economic paradigm of our time,’ relating to ‘. . . the policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximise their personal profit.’ ³⁹ In an educational context, efficiency, productivity and performance become the currency of success, where schools are essentially factories supplying human capital for the market economy. Alasdair McIntyre highlights this conflict within the university sector, which can also be applied to primary and secondary education, where the operative anthropology appears to be the acquisition of skills that best serve the market. ⁴⁰

This neoliberal educational model is radically at odds with a Catholic educational vision, which is undergirded by a Christian anthropology in which each child is nurtured into reaching their full potential and contributing to the common good. The Catholic school’s evangelizing mission is connected to this in the person of Jesus Christ, who as the human par excellence offers his followers a life that is authentic and abundant. ⁴¹ Evangelization thus cannot be separated from education in that both present a distinctive conception of what it is to be human and what constitutes human flourishing. In the subject of religious education, evangelization finds its explicit expression in the Catholic school.

According to Hession, children are enabled ‘to immerse themselves in Christian religious beliefs, practices and values, inviting them to live inside the Christian vision of the good life. The goal, in the schooling context, is religious understanding and promotion of belonging and commitment to the Catholic religious tradition and to the Church community.’ ⁴² The goal that Hession highlights is to instil a Christian understanding of human flourishing that is rooted in community, promoting a view of life as having ultimate meaning and destiny in God. Education in a Christian sense becomes a continuing process of humanization, inviting each person to see themselves as reflections of God, revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. In living out their evangelizing mission, Catholic schools risk clashing with the reductive anthropology of a neoliberal education system, which views education not as a process of human development but merely as training for the jobs market. There is an irony here in that Catholic schools have faced accusations of being sites of indoctrination due to their kerygmatic mission. As Sean Whittle rightly argues, such an approach is anathema to Catholic schooling and Catholic education more generally, ⁴³ a view expressed across several Church documents ⁴⁴ and in writers including D’Souza ⁴⁵ and Evans. ⁴⁶ However, the instrumentalization of education at the service of the market is itself a form of indoctrination, where academic performance becomes the definition of flourishing and exam results the metric of success. As Antony Seldon writes:

A liberal education has too often been replaced by an indoctrination of the young in the answers they need to memorise and regurgitate for exams. It is so all-pervasive that we simply do not see any longer what has happened, and the education establishment—teachers, academics, administrators and those in the quango penumbra—does not acknowledge the impoverishment rather than the flowering of the lives of our young people. ⁴⁷

The diminished conception of human flourishing of a neoliberal educational system is a significant challenge to the evangelizing and educational mission of the Catholic school, which views the person as reflections of God, possessing an innate dignity and capacity for good. ⁴⁸ When education is reduced to information acquisition, success is also reduced to information retention. As such, the Catholic school’s view of the human person that is proclaimed in the Gospel risks being washed away by the tides of technocratic progress and performance, shorn of any sense of the sacred.

For Catholic schools, pre-evangelization is then a necessity in responding to this disenchanted outlook by enflaming a sacramental imagination. This means challenging notions of a sacred/secular binary to life and proposing that each moment reveals something of God’s grace. Sullivan argues that through a sacramental lens, ‘Every subject in the curriculum has the potential . . . to allow us to see some feature of the world as a way into appreciating at least part of God’s nature, purpose, call and presence.’ ⁴⁹ This signifies that Catholic education can never be diminished to mere information transfer. Rather, a sacramental perspective means that students are encouraged to look deeper into the mystery of life, open to the possibility of being transformed into instruments of God’s grace in the world. For many children, pre-evangelization is that necessary first step in such a perspective being cultivated and nurtured. Mindfulness represents one approach to engage in pre-evangelization in Catholic schools.

Mindfulness and Wellbeing in Catholic Schools

First, a fuller understanding of the term mindfulness is instructive. Bishop et al offer a useful definition: ‘. . . mindfulness has been described as a kind of nonelaborative, non-judgmental, present-centred awareness in which each thought, feeling or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is.’ ⁵⁰ This nonevaluative attentiveness to the present moment is broadly understood today as a secular psychological practice, despite its beginnings in Buddhism. As Stefan Reynolds argues, ‘. . . most mindfulness teaching today has taken off its Buddhist robes.’ ⁵¹ This secularization and detraditionalization of mindfulness is important in two respects.

First, contemporary mindfulness is no longer rooted in its original ethical and moral framework of Buddhist wisdom traditions. Mindfulness is a rough translation of the Pāli word sati, meaning ‘that which is remembered.’ Far from being a nonevaluative practice, sati involves self-awareness informed by other Buddhist precepts such as the Noble Eightfold Path, a key set of interconnected Buddhist moral teachings, entailing rules such as Right Action, Right Speech and Right Mindfulness among others. In this sense, traditional Buddhist mindfulness encourages the cultivation of an active vigilance to the moral valence of situations rather than a passive and neutral mental state.

Second, the evolution of mindfulness is just one element in a complex intellectual interaction between the Eastern traditions and Western Enlightenment over the past 150 years which has resulted in what has been termed ‘Buddhist modernism.’ ⁵² This multifaceted process relates to the ways that different Buddhist schools of thought and practices, including mindfulness, have adapted and evolved through encounters with the prevailing narratives of modernity, rationality and secularism in the West. Consequently, Buddhist modernism has engendered a significant, contemporary reinterpretation of sati as a non-judgemental, nonreactive awareness also known as ‘bare-attention.’ This development of ‘bare-attention’ mindfulness in the West is seen in the writings of influential Buddhist teachers such as Mahāsī Sayādaw ⁵³ and Nyanaponika Thera, ⁵⁴ who promoted this type of moment-to-moment awareness which did not require prior experience of Buddhist meditation or any connection to traditional Buddhist teachings. Moreover, the contemporary practice of mindfulness in the Western context can be seen as a radical secularization and detraditionalization of Buddhist teaching in that there is a consistent deemphasis of the explicitly religious and supernatural elements associated with Buddhist teachings such as karma, reincarnation and demons. Furthermore, as McMahan argues, this decoupling of mindfulness meditation from doctrines of Buddhist tradition can be so radical that contemporary mindfulness practice for many is no longer understood as a Buddhist tenet at all. ⁵⁵

McMahan’s insight indicates that in some situations mindfulness has undergone both a fundamental decontextualization and a recontextualization. Mindfulness is decontextualized in that it is no longer necessarily connected to an Eastern wisdom tradition with specific doctrines and supernatural tenets. It is recontextualized in that mindfulness has been adapted to Western culture influenced by rationality, secularization and modernity. As such, contemporary mindfulness has been accepted by secular society as an activity independent of religious teachings or any commitment or affiliation to a faith tradition which has been able to enter areas of civic and commercial life including education.

In terms of the Irish primary school landscape, the previously mentioned religious education curriculum for Catholic schools does not refer to mindfulness. However, within the Christian tradition, there is a rich history of silent and contemplative prayer, which is referred to as a learning outcome. ⁵⁶ The multidenominational Educate Together patron explicitly includes meditation practice as a learning outcome within its Learn Together curriculum. ⁵⁷ The multidenominational Community National School model does not explicitly address mindfulness or meditation but elements of their Goodness Me, Goodness You! curriculum allude to means of improving wellbeing. ⁵⁸ This is an important point, as mindfulness practice in Irish education, and by extension, Catholic primary schools, is located within the broader discourse of wellbeing promotion. The definition for wellbeing is offered by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA):

Student well-being is present when students realise their abilities, take care of their physical well-being, can cope with the normal stresses of life, and have a sense of purpose and belonging to a wider community. ⁵⁹

Meehan argues that the global shift in education towards identity and wellbeing ‘. . . has implications for school curricula and communities.’ ⁶⁰ These implications can be observed in the Irish educational context, where wellbeing has emerged as a central theme in policy literature for Irish primary schools ⁶¹ and in curricular reform. Wellbeing is set to become a more visible and significant curricular area in primary schools, as seen in the Draft Primary Curriculum Framework, which will replace the 1999 Primary School Curriculum. This is observed in the placing of wellbeing as both a curricular subject and a key competency. First, the proposed curriculum changes include the incorporation of PE (Physical Education) and SPHE (Social, Personal and Health Education) into a single subject known as Wellbeing up to 2nd Class, with a time allocation of three hours per week. This in contrast to an hour and a half per week for PE and SPHE in the previous curriculum. Second, wellbeing is set to be one of seven key competencies of the new revised curriculum, which ‘. . . aims to provide a strong foundation for every child to thrive and flourish, supporting them in realising their full potential as individuals and as members of communities and society during childhood and into the future.’ ⁶² This identification of wellbeing as a key competency as well as a specific subject highlights a conception of education as a process of human development, enabling children to achieve success as individuals and grow to be citizens that contribute to the good of society.

As such, the rationale for mindfulness practice in Irish schools supported by numerous studies proposing that mindfulness has a positive impact on student wellbeing, development and performance. At a time where children’s mental health is increasingly challenged by external factors including smartphone overuse ⁶³ and cyberbullying, ⁶⁴ any resource that is proven to improve child wellbeing is to be welcomed, including in Catholic schools. ⁶⁵ As Meehan convincingly argues, human flourishing is an ever-present characteristic seen in the Christian faith tradition ⁶⁶ and is central to the mission of the Catholic school. However, this does not mean that mindfulness in schools is a panacea. Several critics have questioned what educational outcomes mindfulness practices are meant to serve. ⁶⁷ A significant component of many of these critiques is the manner in which stress and anxiety is privatized within the individual. Forbes summarizes the dangers of such a misappropriation of mindfulness: ‘This ideology promotes a privatised, individualistic, market-based worldview and structure. Its ideology posits that stress, lack of attention, and reactivity are problems that lie within the individual, not society, societal institutions, or social relations.’ ⁶⁸ In this sense, mindfulness leaves no room for personal or societal liberation or transformation, instead focusing on the individual themselves. There is also a risk of mindfulness contributing to students interpreting stress as personal failure in the pursuit of academic attainment. Success in exams, while important, is not the sole metric of success in Catholic schools, which promote the holistic development of the student.

While these critiques make an important contribution to this discourse, there remains a paucity of critical papers on mindfulness in education as highlighted in Ergas and Hadar’s systematic literature review. ⁶⁹ This raises questions over the rapid growth in popularity of mindfulness-based interventions in schools and it might be argued that the zeal in sharing the good news of mindfulness has overtaken the evidence supporting it. This was observed in a recent publication of a major study into school-based mindfulness training, which found that the practice did not appear to boost wellbeing or improve the mental health of teenagers. ⁷⁰ Catholic schools cannot and should not presume that mindfulness is the definitive solution to stress reduction. The outcomes of mindfulness must always be humanizing rather than dehumanizing, and only then can it potentially become an invaluable resource to the Catholic schools’ evangelizing mission.

Mindfulness as praeparatio evangelica

The positive role that mindfulness can play for pre-evangelization can be identified in two ways: as a contemplative practice, and as a means of inflaming sacramental imagination. First, the possibility of evangelization in Catholic education in many cases cannot occur unless students acquire a spiritual literacy through pre-evangelization. Mindfulness offers such a possibility as a contemplative practice, which is defined by Roth as ‘. . . the many ways human beings have found, across cultures and across time, to concentrate, broaden and deepen conscious awareness.’ ⁷¹ Such practices enable students to become attentive to their inner life of thoughts and feelings, enabling them to make and discover meaning in their lives, echoing Michael Paul Gallagher’s advice to a fellow priest who wanted to reach out to young parishioners:

They needed help to find their own questions before they would be open to the wisdom emanating from the Christian tradition. They needed to pay attention to their own experience and discover their own depth before they would be ready to appreciate the depth of their faith. ⁷²

This probing of the inner life can open students to deeper questions of ultimate meaning and purpose in life, thus entailing a more humanizing and holistic education, which is central to a Catholic vision of education. The case for such contemplative turn in education has been convincingly made by several educationalists. ⁷³ It supports the view that because education is a human process, students should be encouraged to reflect on what gives them meaning in their lives and what constitutes authentic human flourishing for them. In the Catholic school, it is the person of Jesus Christ that reveals what it means to be fully human and fully divine, and that our ultimate destiny is to be found in eternal life with God. Before such an invitation into relationship with Christ and His Church can begin, an openness to the possibility of a transcendental horizon to life is necessary. In the case of the Catholic school, mindfulness can enable children to deepen attention to their spiritual depths, making possible an experience of the transcendent, or to put another way, a ‘de-secularization’ of the imagination. Mindfulness as a contemplative practice can thus act as a precursor to students coming to see the Christian life offered by the Church as a credible source of meaning and authenticity. In a post-Christian Ireland, young people no longer axiomatically inherit the faith of their parents and grandparents. Rather, they need to be supported in becoming aware of their own depths, questions and sources of meaning. This can be the first step in approaching questions of ultimate meaning, and an openness to a transcendent horizon to life, the Holy Mystery we call God. In this way, mindfulness can act as praeparatio evangelica, offering a fertile ground for the seed of faith to grow.

Second, mindfulness can contribute to the development of a sacramental imagination in students. Catholic education promotes a sacramental perspective on life. According to John Sullivan:

A sacramental perspective views the world as a whole, as the theatre of God’s grace . . . it acknowledges that God can be encountered anywhere, anytime . . . Catholic education should strive to invite students to see God’s presence in all aspects of their experience. ⁷⁴

From this perspective, mindfulness can cultivate an awareness of God’s grace in students’ everyday experiences. It is an invitation to view the world as being grounded in God, each moment offering something of God’s creative, loving presence. From a pre-evangelization perspective, this approach allows students to encounter grace in the ordinary aspects of life, rather than perpetuating a false dichotomy between the sacred and the secular. Mindfulness as an innate human capacity can then aid students in seeing the holy in the ordinary. This does not demote sacred moments in Church life and ritual, but instead highlights the point that every human experience is rooted in God’s unmerited grace.

Mindfulness can also aid in dissolving any proposed secular/sacred binary within Catholic education, particularly any interpretation of religious education as the sole component of learning that explores the presence of God. ⁷⁵ Mindfulness as a contemplative practice in a Catholic school can aid students in helping them explore their inner life, making sense of their whole lives in light of the sacramental perspective that God mediates Godself across all of their experiences. This cultivation of a sacramental imagination in students invites them to find meaning in their lives while also learning to experience God’s presence. This is a necessary precursor to evangelization, inviting students to see their life as having ultimate meaning, making faith in God a genuine possibility.

This imagination must be nurtured in religious education but also across all other curricular subjects. For teachers, this means instilling in children a sense of wonder and attentiveness in their lives, attuned to God’s presence in every experience. The practice of regulating attention to the present moment can aid students in becoming aware of grace in every moment of creation. This attentiveness to God’s presence is an important component of pre-evangelization and is necessary for children to develop a personal relationship with God.

Conclusion

This article argues in favour of mindfulness as a resource for praeparatio evangelica in the Irish Catholic primary school. These schools face serious challenges in living up to their mission of evangelization and need resources that pre-evangelize, interrupting the secular framing of much of contemporary life and culture. It is proposed that Catholic education needs resources precisely like mindfulness now more than ever to interrupt perceptions of the world which preclude any transcendental conception of human flourishing, preparing the way for students to hear the Gospel. In this way, the Irish Catholic primary school is only then in a position to share in the evangelizing mission of the Church.