The Witness of the Teacher: Gravissimum Educationis at 60

The year 2025 marks the 60th anniversary of a number of documents from the Second Vatican Council. While Lumen Gentium, Gaudium et Spes, and Dei Verbum (and even Dignitatis Humanae) often take the spotlight (for very good reasons) when examining the final documents of the Council,¹ it is worth reflecting on the development of ideas sparked by Gravissimum Educationis, the Council’s brief but significant Declaration on Christian education.² Unlike the other conciliar documents, this text specifically allowed for future work to be done; in fact, the introduction of the Declaration ends with this proclamation: “These principles will have to be developed at greater length by a special post-conciliar commission and applied by episcopal conferences to varying local situations.”³ To a large extent, this development has been the task of the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education whose many important texts have allowed for a filling-in-the-gaps from the conciliar document. Following the trail of these post-conciliar meditations can be illustrative for teachers and educators but, by extension, all those seeking to teach the faith today, and from this inquiry we can begin to see how the Church in the modern world has developed her doctrine of teaching and her self-understanding of her own “teaching function.”⁴

This essay restricts its meditation to one particular aspect of this pedagogical renewal: If I were to pick one aspect of Gravissimum Educationis that has developed the most (and even, to some extent, taken on a life of its own), I would pick the word “witness.” Few other words carry with them a force, transformation, and iconography of the new thrust of the Church’s teaching in the modern world than this one; furthermore, watching the pedagogy of witness emerge from Gravissimum is not only instructive for educators but for all the faithful seeking to know and spread the faith.⁵

However, to begin one’s examination of the trajectory of the Council and its influence, it is helpful to look at its preceding elements. And although Gravissimum Educationis allowed for follow-up clarifications, it still lived in the shadow of Pius XI’s masterful 1929 encyclical, Divini Illius Magistri, and showed its dependence on that document with multiple references. For Catholic school teachers, the most significant reference comes from the reference to Pius XI’s claim that

Perfect schools are the result not so much of good methods as of good teachers, teachers who are thoroughly prepared and well-grounded in the matter they have to teach; who possess the intellectual and moral qualifications required by their important office; who cherish a pure and holy love for the youths confided to them, because they love Jesus Christ and His Church, of which these are the children of predilection; and who have therefore sincerely at heart the true good of family and country.⁶

Gravissimum echoes the passage thus:

But let teachers recognize that the Catholic school depends upon them almost entirely for the accomplishment of its goals and programs. They should therefore be very carefully prepared so that both in secular and religious knowledge they are equipped with suitable qualifications and also with a pedagogical skill that is in keeping with the findings of the contemporary world. Intimately linked in charity to one another and to their students and endowed with an apostolic spirit, may teachers by their life as much as by their instruction bear witness to Christ, the unique Teacher.⁷

Both passages highlight the need for teachers to be competent in their area of instruction as well as holy and good in their lives; their relationship with their students should be steeped in charity.

At the same time, the conciliar document opens the door to a new expression of Catholic school teaching: the teacher must “bear witness to Christ.” The word is not arbitrary. Already in paragraph 7, Gravissimum has noted that Catholic teachers in non-Catholic schools can teach the faith “by the witness of the lives of those who teach.”⁸

Notably, the word “witness” (Latin: testimonium) is used only once in the Pius XI document but only as a reference to “history bear[ing] witness.”⁹ Witness as a pedagogical expression is largely absent from the pre-conciliar meditations on education.

But witness is important to the Second Vatican Council; in another 1965 document of the council, Ad Gentes, the Council’s reflection on missionary life, an entire section is written on witness in the work of evangelization. In that text, the council states:

For all Christians, wherever they live, are bound to show forth, by the example of their lives and by the witness of the word, that new man put on at baptism and that power of the Holy Spirit by which they have been strengthened at Confirmation. Thus other men, observing their good works, can glorify the Father (cf. Matt. ES:16) and can perceive more fully the real meaning of human life and the universal bond of the community of mankind.”¹⁰

Thus, Christian witness, as articulation of the faith flowing out of an expression of a good and holy life, is central to the missionary action.

Few texts summed up the shifting dimension of witness — while simultaneously highlighting its importance — more than Paul VI’s oft-quoted line in the 1975 document Evangelii Nuntiandi. He wrote: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.”¹¹ He then defined “witness” in terms of conduct: “It is therefore primarily by her conduct and by her life that the Church will evangelize the world.”¹² By this time, then, only ten years from the end of the Council, witness had come to mean the entire synthesis of one’s words and deeds ordered to a life of holiness in the imitation of Christ. With this development, to bear witness to Christ means not simply testifying to one’s faith in Him but also living a life of sanctity that reflects the total commitment one has given to Him as Lord.

It followed naturally perhaps that the conciliar follow-up documents to the Declaration on education built on this principle. In 1977, the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education explained that “the nobility of the task to which teachers are called demands that, in imitation of Christ, the only Teacher, they reveal the Christian message not only by word but also by every gesture of their behaviour.”¹³ Then in 1982, in describing the role of the laity, the Congregation made abundantly clear that teachers are first and forefront “witnesses to faith.”¹⁴ At this point the emphasis on a life lived well in witness is so pronounced that it is distinguished from the proclamation of the word! “In order to achieve this presence of the whole Church, and of the Saviour whom she proclaims, lay people must be ready to proclaim the message through their words, and witness to it in what they do.”¹⁵

As late as 2023, the Sacred Congregation continued to affirm this principle for teachers: “Among all the members of the school community, teachers stand out as having a special responsibility for education. Through their teaching-pedagogical skills, as well as by bearing witness through their lives, they allow the Catholic school to realize its formative project.”¹⁶

Bearing witness to Christ originally meant the articulation of one’s faith with unswerving dedication to the point of shedding blood. Hence the word witness — in Greek, μαρτύρ — becomes the root of our word “martyr” today. At the same time, and in light of the Christological reflections of the Council, the Church today highlights the act of living a holy life itself as the core of Christian witness. Thus, we might conclude that, sixty years after Gravissimum, teachers, on whom most of the success of schools is founded, must first strive now not to be teachers! They must first strive to be witnesses.¹⁷

If the emphasis on teaching is both word and deed, and, perhaps, an even deeper emphasis on deed, then the teacher today is to embody many of the key principles of the Second Vatican Council. Striving for Christian witness means embracing the universal call to holiness,¹⁸ it means reaching all people of the modern world even when words fail,¹⁹ and it means echoing the divine pedagogy in which God himself speaks to us in word and deed.²⁰

It speaks to a recovery of the anthropological truth of man’s mimetic nature, a fact heavily overlooked in the neo-Romantic forces of modernity; it demands that we recall that we are stimulated to desire not simply from the ideas of the good and true that appeal to us. Most significantly, we imitate people who attract us with an apparent glimpse of divine Being that we wish to have ourselves.²¹ Lectures alone will no longer move the masses; it is people who will engage the hearts of other people. Ideas are not the influencers of today; influencers are the influencers.

As a result of these developments, the teacher today who looks to Gravissimum Educationis can embrace the rich development of the word “witness” in educational texts from Rome but also in Magisterial texts on the New Evangelization. In fact, Pope Francis, in the key foundational text of his pontificate, made clear that witness would be the force when intellectual abstraction could not prevail:

We will never be able to make the Church’s teachings easily understood or readily appreciated by everyone. Faith always remains something of a cross; it retains a certain obscurity which does not detract from the firmness of its assent. Some things are understood and appreciated only from the standpoint of this assent, which is a sister to love, beyond the range of clear reasons and arguments. We need to remember that all religious teaching ultimately has to be reflected in the teacher’s way of life, which awakens the assent of the heart by its nearness, love and witness.²²

In this light, the whole thrust of the Second Vatican Council, “pastoral in character,” shines forth in the life and work of the teacher who is a witness. The one who teaches as the Council urges becomes an icon of the very goal set forth by Pope St. John XXIII when he convened the Council:

The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another. And it is the latter that must be taken into great consideration with patience if necessary, everything being measured in the forms and proportions of a magisterium which is predominantly pastoral in character.²³

The Council asked the question: What would it look like to bring the deposit of faith to people in the modern world? One fundamental answer would have to have been found in the great teachers of modern people all along. It makes sense that we can find some of them in Catholic schools and, by extension, in catechism classes, missionary work, or other evangelical apostolates.

Thus, in conclusion, perhaps a new meaning emerges from the original phrase in Gravissimum: “May teachers by their life as much as by their instruction bear witness to Christ, the unique Teacher.” The one who teaches in the heart of the Church not only incarnates the goals and vision of the Council, he, in a sense, reflects a special facet of the Christ, “the unique Teacher.” To follow Christ begins in following the great teachers whom He has sent.

The big takeaway from returning to Gravissimum at sixty years is to realize that we must keep praying for and finding the teachers, catechists, missionaries, and, above all, clergy who can witness; at the same time, when we find them, we can glimpse the heart of the Second Vatican Council’s mission incarnate. We can then follow them so that we can better follow the Lord Jesus Christ, who, when encountered by Mary Magdalene on Easter Sunday, was hailed as Rabbi: Teacher.