At several moments in history, it seemed perfectly reasonable to conclude that the Christian faith was finished. Empires persecuted it, revolutions fought it, and divisions split it apart. Each time, those who were alive had good reasons to think the end had come.
But a pattern emerged in what came afterward. And that pattern has everything to do with education, which makes this history especially relevant to any parent choosing a school for a child today.
A pattern repeated across twenty centuries
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the writer G. K. Chesterton noticed a strange regularity in the history of Christianity. Several times over twenty centuries, the faith seemed to have died for good. And every time, it rose again. He summed this up in an image that became famous: whenever people thought the Church had been devoured, it was those who devoured her who ended up dying—not the Church.
This is not merely a figure of speech. It is documented history, and a few examples are worth considering.
In the first centuries, being a Christian in the Roman Empire could cost you your life. Christianity seemed like a marginal sect that the greatest power in the world would crush. In 313, that same Empire recognized its freedom, and within a few decades Christianity had become the religion of Rome.
In the fourth century, a movement called Arianism, which denied the divinity of Christ, spread so widely that it seemed almost the entire Christian world had embraced the error. The doctrine endured, and the emperor who opposed it, Julian, became known as “the Apostate.”
Much later, the Protestant Reformation, beginning in 1517, divided Christendom and removed entire nations from communion with Rome. And at the end of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution attempted to erase Christianity from France: churches were profaned, priests were executed, and Pope Pius VI himself died a prisoner of the revolutionaries in 1799. In both cases, decades later, the faith was still standing, while the regime that wanted it dead had passed away.
The way forward almost always came through education
Here is the part that often goes unnoticed—and it is the central point of this story.
When we look at how the Church emerged from each of these crises, one constant appears: recovery almost always involved forming people. Educating them.
From the disorder that followed the fall of Rome, the monasteries of St. Benedict preserved ancient knowledge, copied the books that survived, and opened Europe’s first schools. Centuries later, in response to the rupture of the sixteenth century, the Jesuits of St. Ignatius of Loyola became the largest network of schools in the world and, in 1599, published the Ratio Studiorum, the first systematized course of study in history, applied from Peru to Japan. And amid the social disorder of the nineteenth century, with cities full of abandoned children, a priest—Don Bosco—responded by opening homes where boys from the streets could study, learn a trade, and come to know God.
The pattern is difficult to ignore. In the face of collapse, the response that proved most enduring was neither political nor military. It was teaching the next generation. And that makes sense, because at its root every great crisis is, in some way, a crisis of formation: a generation that did not receive what it needed to receive. Correcting that is slow, quiet work—one person teaching another for years, with no visible short-term result. Exactly what a school does.
What is today’s crisis?
If the pattern holds, then it is worth asking: what is the crisis of our age?
In most of the world, it is neither bloody persecution nor a heresy. It is something harder to name because it is in the very air we breathe. It is an entire generation being formed by screens. Children whose attention is fragmented before attention itself has had time to form. Teenagers exposed too early to content that wounds their capacity to love before it has matured. A world in which images replace reality, and in which living with purity and purpose can sound almost impossible to a young person, as though it belonged to another age.
It is a crisis of formation, as the others were. And if history is a guide, the answer also passes through education: forming children who can use technology without being used by it, and who can seek what is true in a world full of simulations.
An answer with a teenager’s face
And here the story takes on a striking detail.
Amid this crisis of screens, the Church presented to the world a young man who lived precisely within it and overcame it. Carlo Acutis was born in 1991, grew up in Milan, and was an ordinary modern teenager: he liked video games, soccer, and computers. He died of leukemia at age 15 in 2006 and was canonized in 2025.
What makes him a saint for this crisis is not that he did something extraordinary, but that he did simple things amid everything that now pushes young people in the opposite direction. He used the same internet that distracts so many people to create something good—a project gathering accounts of Eucharistic miracles—and lived his faith naturally without ceasing to be a boy of his time. Our age objects that it is impossible to live this way today. Carlo is proof that it is possible.
There is a detail that speaks closely to Brazil: the miracle that opened the way for his beatification was the medically unexplained healing of a Brazilian child in Campo Grande. And he left a phrase that summarizes, better than any treatise, what a good education seeks to prevent: everyone is born an original, but many die as copies.
What this means for a school—and for your child
If this reading of history is correct, then a school is not merely a place that teaches subjects. It is part of something larger and older: the way the next generation has repeatedly been formed to live through the age into which it was born.
And that changes what we look for in a school. If today’s crisis is fragmented attention, then teaching a child to read a long text to the end is more than a study technique. If the crisis is the difficulty of distinguishing the real from the simulated, then forming judgment and character matters as much as content. If the crisis is the feeling that it is impossible to live with faith and purpose today, then the best response is to form children who prove through their own lives that it is possible.
This is the history in which Acutis places itself. The school bears Carlo Acutis’s name precisely because it believes that education is the enduring answer, and that it is possible to form whole children capable of living with faith, intelligence, and purpose in today’s world—screens and all.
Discover Acutis Academy and an education that forms your child for the age in which they live.
