00:00:00:00 – 00:00:30:21

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

Welcome to Conversatio, the podcast of Belmont Abbey College. This podcast aims to form and transform our community so that each of us can reflect God’s image. My name is Doctor Thomas Varacalli. I am the interim dean of the Honors College at Belmont Abbey, and today I am joined with Doctor Ryan Messmore of the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education.

 

00:00:30:23 – 00:00:48:19

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

Doctor Messmore, it’s a pleasure to have you here today. 

 

Dr. Ryan Messmore

It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you. 

 

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

Is this your first time at Belmont Abbey? 

 

Dr. Ryan Messmore

It’s my second time, actually, but it was over a decade ago that I was last here, so it’s really good to be back. 

 

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

Well, we’re glad to have you. 

 

Dr. Ryan Messmore

Thank you. 

 

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

Doctor Messmore, say something about how you became Catholic. Because I’ve heard that you are a convert.

 

00:00:48:19 – 00:01:13:16

Dr. Ryan Messmore

That’s right. I grew up as, a Protestant, evangelical. And, it was probably when my wife and I went to Cambridge University. I was doing a one year master’s degree there that we really came to appreciate. The high Anglican liturgy, the beauty of the liturgy, especially, around Holy Week.

 

00:01:13:18 – 00:01:43:06

Dr. Ryan Messmore

And we loved celebrating that liturgy. Until one, one year, we were in a small group, Bible study and we, we, they were on Thursdays and we showed up on Holy Thursday and we said, Happy Monday/ Thursday, everyone. And they looked at us and said, oh, it’s today’s special. We thought, oh, dear, we’re not going to be able to celebrate the tritium, in the way that we were wanting to, there.

 

00:01:43:06 – 00:02:02:07

Dr. Ryan Messmore

So I said, we’ll have to celebrate at that Catholic church that we drive by on the way to get here, and probably have reconfirmed all the reasons that we should not be Catholic. But gosh, we got to the end of that. That Easter and just thought we’re going to need better reasons to keep driving by this Catholic church.

 

00:02:02:09 – 00:02:28:12

Dr. Ryan Messmore

It was beautiful. We heard the scriptures preached, we saw the sacraments administered and, thought, wow, what are we actually protesting here? That was right before I went to Oxford for my doctorate, and I was in a peer cohort group of about seven or eight students, and about four of them were going through RCIA.

 

00:02:28:14 – 00:02:50:18

Dr. Ryan Messmore

And so I would go over, I would talk to them, I’d come back with all these questions. I would talk to my wife, we would generate more questions. I’d go back to Oxford. So there was a period of a year or two there, where we felt the spirit of John Henry Newman chasing us through the streets of Oxford and eventually led us home to Rome.

 

00:02:50:20 – 00:03:22:12

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

Saint Cardinal Newman has done that for many. What over thinkers in the Catholic liberal tradition have you gravitated to? 

 

Dr. Ryan Messmore

Yeah. Of course, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, but also the story, more recently of Edmund Campion, has captured my imagination, a convert, Oxford scholar, and ultimately ended up giving his life, for the church and for the Catholic faith.

 

00:03:22:12 – 00:03:54:01

Dr. Ryan Messmore

So, I’m inspired by him. We pray a lot together. 

 

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

Wonderful. It’s one of the books on my to-do list is to read Evelyn Waugh’s book on Campion. 

 

Dr. Ryan Messmore

Really good, really good. His story is amazing. It really is. 

 

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

Well, you are the director of the Catholic Educator Formation and Credential Program at the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education.

 

00:03:54:03 – 00:04:21:10

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

Can you explain a little bit what ICLE is and what it currently does? 

 

Dr. Ryan Messmore

Sure. Yeah. ICLE is an apostolate that tries to serve the church by helping Catholic schools to reclaim their Catholic identity. We are sitting on the richest. Most successful model of education in the world, which is the Catholic intellectual tradition.

 

00:04:21:12 – 00:04:41:11

Dr. Ryan Messmore

And, we have everything that you need to form a human being. Well, to educate a human being. And, well, within that tradition, we’ve got Augustine. We’ve got Aquinas, we’ve got the first, universities, we’ve got the libraries and the learning that was kept alive, in the monasteries for, for so many years. We’ve got John Henry Newman and J.R.R. Tolkien.

 

00:04:41:11 – 00:05:09:10

Dr. Ryan Messmore

We’ve got the Catholic imagination, the sacramental imagination. So we’re trying to go to Catholic schools and say, this is your tradition. You need to be proud of it. You need to be unapologetically leading with it. Because unfortunately, as you know, many Catholic schools across the country end up looking a lot like the standard public school.

 

00:05:09:12 – 00:05:47:18

Dr. Ryan Messmore

Maybe with a theology class added, maybe with prayer at the beginning of the class. But that strikes us, as one of our friends from my says, as a view in the Catholic faith as frosting and that you can cover on top of the traditional educational cake, but it doesn’t actually change the cake itself. And we are trying to help schools to think through what it would mean to view your Catholic faith as yeast that actually works its way into every inch of the educational cake transforms the nature of the cake itself.

 

00:05:47:19 – 00:06:28:08

Dr. Ryan Messmore

And, when they do, when they see that and understand that, the school changes, and it’s a wonderful thing to see. 

 

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

That’s beautiful. So well needed, right now. Now, what does the credential program that ICLE currently do? 

 

Dr. Ryan Messmore

Well, this program began out of, the consternation of, Catholic schools shackling themselves with the requirement that every teacher at their school receive a secular state teaching license.

 

00:06:28:10 – 00:07:00:21

Dr. Ryan Messmore

That regulation differs from state to state, but there are many states in which private schools do not have to require a teacher license. And yet many Catholic schools do anyway. And so you think about Catholic parents. They have a free public school option available to them, but they choose to spend their money to send their child to a Catholic school instead, only to have the Catholic school turn around and require every single one of their teachers to be trained by the secular state.

 

00:07:00:23 – 00:07:43:20

Dr. Ryan Messmore

We find that very problematic. And, so we’ve created an alternative Catholic teaching credential to the secular teaching license. This is an 18 month program. It’s recognized by many dioceses across the country. We have 250 member schools, it’s a portable credential. So if you move from one state to another, you can take that credential with you and take it to your diocese and have your diocese, recognize it and allow you to teach in a Catholic school, bypassing the whole need to, to be trained at, you know, a large secular state university, on on how to educate.

 

00:07:43:22 – 00:08:05:14

Dr. Ryan Messmore

So, again, we’re trying to help teachers through the basic teachings of the Catholic faith. What it means to be human from a Catholic worldview perspective. And then there’s the pedagogy that flows out of that. How do you manage a classroom? How do you put together a lesson plan? How do you decorate your classroom?

 

00:08:05:16 – 00:08:33:05

Dr. Ryan Messmore

How do you bring to life the wonder and the joy of learning, God’s creation? So we go from deep philosophy and theology all the way down to how do you communicate with the parent of a child? As a classroom teacher and everything in between. 

 

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

Wonderful. One of the unique aspects of likely is it emphasizes, in particular, the importance of Catholic liberal education.

 

00:08:33:07 – 00:09:07:11

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

And it shows somewhat from the word classical. And why should Catholics reclaim Catholic liberal education when sometimes the word liberal can, confuse, some good meaning? Catholics. 

 

Dr. Ryan Messmore

Right. Right. Yeah. So by liberal, we are not referring to, you know, a spectrum of political views (Right wing, left wing). We’re borrowing a much more ancient and time tested word that comes from the word libertas.

 

00:09:07:16 – 00:09:45:14

Dr. Ryan Messmore

Liberales. It’s the Latin for freedom. The freedom that you find in Jesus Christ. And so, we are borrowing, or we are reclaiming within the larger Catholic intellectual tradition, the seven liberal arts. These are the arts that liberate students to be able to think for themselves. We’re freeing them from ignorance from their own untrained passions, from popular opinion and propaganda and really helping them to become the human beings that God created them to be.

 

00:09:45:16 – 00:10:10:14

Dr. Ryan Messmore

And, and we believe that is, a time tested way of educating students. And it goes back over 800 years. So a lot of, a lot of schools who are kind of looking around and saying, oh, enrollment is going down, we need to do something. We need to find a trend or a model out there to help enrollment.

 

00:10:10:16 – 00:10:34:09

Dr. Ryan Messmore

They often reach back to what they call the classical tradition. And then, you know, they kind of bring that in and figure out a way to relate that to their Christian tradition. Within the Catholic tradition, we don’t need to borrow anything more ancient. That is our tradition. And, you know, Aquinas was ours.

 

00:10:34:12 – 00:11:02:16

Dr. Ryan Messmore

Augustine was ours. The earliest, reflections on faith and reason. We’re regenerated within the church. So, yeah, we’re about trying to reclaim our own tradition, and we believe that that has everything that you need, within it. You know, it’s got, Aquinas, it’s got Latin, it’s got the seven liberal arts.

 

00:11:02:16 – 00:11:29:22

Dr. Ryan Messmore

It’s got the first universities. And we’re, we’re recovering that from within. 

 

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

One of the great blessings I have as dean of the Honors College is I get to teach men and women who want to learn the Trivium, the quadrivium, who want to read Augustine and Aquinas. But I feel that my role is somewhat easier than yours because they’re 18 or 19 years old.

 

00:11:30:00 – 00:12:09:04

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

They’ve had time to think through why studying the Trivium quadrillions is so important. How do you show elementary students and students and secondary education students in high school? How do you show that this Catholic liberal tradition is worth studying? 

 

Dr. Ryan Messmore

Through wonder. Through joy. We believe that, Socrates was right.

 

00:12:09:06 – 00:12:44:03

Dr. Ryan Messmire

That, and Aquinas as well. The pathway to wisdom starts with wonder. And we believe that, the doctrine of creation. The doctrine that a good God, a loving God, created all that is, stamped it with his logos, and then created us to be able to know it. This creates this wonderful opportunity to awaken the young student’s imagination, to the enchanted world that God has given us.

 

00:12:44:05 – 00:13:10:10

Dr. Ryan Messmore

So we train teachers how to spark wonder in their students. Starting with a picture study, just putting them in front of a beautiful piece of art and saying, what do you notice? Describe it to me. You know, coming to see it, in new ways. Things that you would have missed before getting outside and just marveling at God’s creation.

 

00:13:10:12 – 00:13:32:06

Dr. Ryan Messmore

Having a wonder day at the beginning of each unit that you’re studying, where the agenda is not to learn anything other than to spark some interest, spark some questions, and then the rest of your unit will be able to unpack and explore those. So if you can start with wonder, then you’ve got the student. They want to learn.

 

00:13:32:08 – 00:13:57:21

Dr. Ryan Messmore

They’re not thinking about tests. They’re not thinking about, you know, all of the boring stuff. They’re like. Tell me the answer. I want to know why God created it that way? Why does it appear that way? And then, and then it’s just a joyful classroom.

 

00:13:57:23 – 00:14:32:06

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

If a school is interested in revitalizing its Catholicism and revitalizing its liberal education. And if they wanted to begin to partner with ICLE, what would the first, 2 or 3 years look like? How would ICLE provide services for that school? Yeah. We do that in a couple of different ways. First, they can send any of their teachers to the credential program.

 

00:14:32:08 – 00:14:51:16

Dr. Ryan Messmore

And they would go through an 18 month program, and they would do that while they were teaching in a school. So that they could learn and gain insight and then that very day, implement it in the classroom, come back, talk about it, figure out how they can improve, go back into the classroom.

 

00:14:51:16 – 00:15:21:05

Dr. Ryan Messmore

So, that’s one way. Another way is that, we would take some of our staff to their school, and we would create a three year plan of professional development, where all of their teachers would come and we would introduce them to the trivium, where we introduce them to the quadrivium. We would introduce them to picture studies, how to lead a seminar, how to use the human tendency to imitate, as a vehicle of knowledge.

 

00:15:21:08 – 00:15:47:15

Dr. Ryan Messmore

We call it mimetic, teaching. We ground them in the five marks of the Catholic school. Which is anchored in the Holy See’s teaching on Catholic schools. And so over three years, we’re, we’re building a relationship with them. We’re returning to them. It’s semester after semester and slowly walking them through, a process.

 

00:15:47:17 – 00:16:10:17

Dr. Ryan Messmore

Those are the kind of the two, long term ways in which we serve schools. We also offer a number of programs for different constituent groups that have a hand in education. So the superintendents of school systems. We have a monthly call with an annual retreat with administrators and headmasters and heads of schools.

 

00:16:10:18 – 00:16:36:05

Dr. Ryan Messmore

We have a cohort of those that meet and talk through the challenges specific to them. Last week, we held our first symposium for priests who serve as pastors of these schools, trying to help them recover their spiritual authority within the school. And how to lead their own faculty, seminars and even picture studies.

 

00:16:36:07 – 00:17:16:16

Dr. Ryan Messmore

So, the work that the demand for this is just exploding and, yeah, we’re, we can barely keep up with the demand. 

 

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

You foreshadowed my next question is going to be how is ICLE, holding up with this increased demand? 

 

Dr. Ryan Messmore

Yeah. Yeah. It’s energizing and it’s very hopeful for us, especially to see the hearing that we’re getting amongst bishops and priests.

 

00:17:16:18 – 00:17:44:03

Dr. Ryan Messmore

You know, some diocesan schools have been around for a long time, and they have deeply ingrained habits. And they can be, they can be big vessels to turn or to introduce to a new way of thinking about, education, liberal arts education. But the bishops are saying something’s got to change in our diocesan schools.

 

00:17:44:04 – 00:18:08:00

Dr. Ryan Messmore

And I think Covid kind of helped drive that home. It brought to the forefront a lot of what has been passing for education over the past couple of decades. And, and they’re hungry. And when you get the bishop and when you get the bishop, superintendent and the priests all kind of swimming in the same direction on that, then really exciting things can happen.

 

00:18:08:00 – 00:18:44:12

Dr. Ryan Messmore

And that’s where, that’s where we’re beginning to see a lot of hopeful light. 

 

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

That’s great. Belmont Abbey is developing a very strong partnership with ICLE, we currently have developed our masters in classical and liberal education, and now up to 12 credits from, ICLE can go to our 30 credit master’s program. So if any students are interested in ICLE, you’ll be able to knock two birds with one stone.

 

Dr. Ryan Messmore

And an even, less expensive pathway to get there.

 

00:18:44:12 – 00:19:34:01

Dr. Ryan Messmore

So, yeah, that’s a great opportunity for young teachers. And we’re thrilled to be partnering with Belmont Abbey on that. 

 

Dr. Thomas Varacalli

Oh, well, thank you, Doctor Messmore, as we conclude, thank you to our audience for joining us. Thank you, Doctor Messmore, for joining us and for this wonderful conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and tell your friends at conversatio is available on Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts. Until next time, God bless.

• Institute for Catholic Liberal Education