Let us begin with the question that orders all the others—and with an uncomfortable answer.
Who are we working for?
A school is accountable to several groups. The families who pay. The students who receive the education. The regulatory bodies that oversee it. The team that depends on it. The partners or shareholders, when there are any. None of these groups is illegitimate, and an institution that disregards any of them is wrong.
But none of them is the final authority. A Catholic school organized merely to satisfy these five visible constituencies—all of them able to complain—will eventually produce exactly what their satisfaction requires: a very well-managed school that is ultimately no different from any other.
The true employer is someone else. And He does not send emails.
This is not devotional rhetoric. It has immediate, concrete, verifiable operational consequences, because it changes the standard of quality for every task no one audits. The lesson carefully prepared for the smaller, less prestigious class. The assignment corrected with genuine attention, even knowing the student may look only at the grade. The thoughtful reply to a difficult mother. The internal report no one will read, done properly. The file organized correctly.
St. Paul states this with a severity that leaves no escape: do everything wholeheartedly, as for the Lord and not for men (Col 3:23). The standard that follows is simple to state and demanding to apply: the quality of invisible work is the exact measure of the sincerity of visible work.
The messianic temptation
Having said that, we must immediately disarm the distortion that often accompanies this idea, because experience shows that the two tend to arrive together.
Working for God does not mean that the institution has a salvific mission. No school saves anyone. Acutis Academy is not the redeemer of Brazilian education, not the last fortress of Western civilization, and not the hope of a generation. Christ is the one who saves, and He did not need us in order to do so.
The messianic temptation is subtle and destructive from within, and its symptoms are worth recognizing because they are quite identifiable. It produces institutional pride: the habit of comparing oneself with other schools and always coming out on top. It produces exhaustion: teachers carrying a burden that does not belong to them and becoming ill while convinced that this is holiness. It produces harshness: the curious severity of those who imagine themselves at the forefront and therefore feel entitled to mistreat those they consider behind. And in the end, it produces blindness to one’s own faults, because people who believe they are saving the world have no time to examine their conscience.
None of this is God-centered. It is the institution at the center, using God as its justification.
The alternative is modest and daily: we are an instrument. An instrument is something used to reach something else, and it loses its meaning entirely when it becomes the end in itself. A hammer is not the purpose of carpentry. A Catholic school is not the purpose of Catholic education; it is a tool for leading real people toward an encounter with God, and its value is measured by that.
What follows, therefore, is that excellence is not competition. We seek to do things well because poorly done work offered to God is an offense, not because we want to be better than others. The difference between those two motivations is invisible from the outside and decisive on the inside.
Against a provincial mindset
And here we must make a criticism of the Brazilian Catholic educational environment, including ourselves.
A certain provincialism has taken root: a tendency to assume that what is done here is all that can be done, that Brazilian problems are unique, and that comparisons with institutions abroad are either elitism or an inferiority complex. The practical result is that we poorly reinvent, on our own, what others solved well decades ago.
There is no need to invent a method of classical education. It exists, it is documented, and institutions around the world have practiced it for a long time with verifiable results. Looking to them is not subservience; it is competence.
That is what we have sought to do, which is why we pursue partnerships with institutions that are ahead of us.
Kolbe Academy, in Napa, California—the American Catholic school that grants our students’ diplomas—has more than four decades of accumulated experience in classical education and homeschooling, with developed materials, trained teachers, and mature processes. We learn from that experience.
The University of Dallas, in Texas, is a Catholic university known for maintaining a Core Curriculum in the liberal arts that every student takes regardless of major, as well as a Rome campus attended by nearly the entire student body. It is a model of how serious humanistic formation can be integrated with professional higher education.
And the Accademia Vivarium Novum, in Frascati outside Rome, is probably one of the most radical institutions in the world in this field: an academy where students live in total immersion in Latin and Ancient Greek. The languages are not merely studied; they are spoken all day, in class and outside it. We have been there. It is difficult to describe the effect of watching young people from twelve nationalities discuss philosophy in Latin with near-native fluency. It reshapes one’s sense of what is possible to teach.
There is another model that marked us in a different way. When visiting Ave Maria University in Florida, what impressed us was not the academic standard—high, but expected. It was the combination: genuine intellectual rigor alongside daily Mass, weekly confession, and perpetual Eucharistic adoration. None of it felt like folklore, coerced obligation, or a concession to confessional marketing.
This dismantles a false opposition that many Brazilian Catholic schools have accepted without examining: the idea that academic seriousness and spiritual intensity compete for the same time, and that investing in one comes at the expense of the other. It does not. Where belief is genuine, the two grow together, and historically that has always been the case.
The proper order of priorities
It is worth making the hierarchy explicit, because routine reverses it with remarkable ease.
The purpose of the school is to help save souls and form saints. That is the sentence, and it can sound disproportionate when said about an institution that also has to issue invoices, meet required instructional hours, and answer complaints about uniforms.
But these things do not compete, provided the proper order is respected. Billing, required hours, and uniforms are means, and means demand technical competence precisely because they serve something important. A disorganized school is not more spiritual; it is simply disorganized, and real families suffer because of it.
What cannot happen is for the means to take the place of the end. The mechanism is always the same: the means are urgent, while the end is not. Enrollment has a deadline. The formation of a soul does not. So urgency wins every day, and by the end of a year no one remembers why the institution existed in the first place.
The remedy is not heroic. It is the periodic and unglamorous examination of institutional conscience: what did we do this month that can be explained only by our ultimate end? If the honest answer is “nothing,” then it was a month of management, not mission. And it is worth noticing that this can happen even in a month of excellent metrics.
Do not be afraid of the future
There is one last thing, and it may be what we most need to say to one another.
The conservative Catholic environment has a tendency toward catastrophism: a disposition to consume and produce narratives of decline—everything is getting worse, the Church is emptying, the West is ending, the next generation is lost. This attitude feels lucid, but in reality it is a form of cowardice wearing the appearance of realism.
There are two objections to this: one practical and one theological.
The practical objection: catastrophism does not educate. No one forms a child for a world they do not believe in. A teacher convinced that everything is ending communicates that conviction regardless of the lesson content, and the child senses it before being able to name it. Education is an act of hope: it affirms that the future is worth preparing for. Anyone without that hope is in the wrong profession.
The theological objection is more serious. Discouragement about the future, when faced directly, is a lack of faith in Providence. If God governs history—and that is what we say we believe—then history is not out of control, even when it is beyond our control. Each of the great crises through which Christianity has passed seemed terminal to those living through it, and none was. People in 476 could not know that Benedict was coming. Those in 1520 could not know that Ignatius was coming.
We do not know what is being prepared either. And it is not our task to know. Our task is that of the sower: to plant well, at the right time, in the soil we have been given, and leave the harvest to those who come after us. It probably will not be us. St. Paul had already settled the question: one plants, another waters, but God gives the growth (1 Cor 3:6–7).
The future belongs to God. And the signs we can see—a generation of young saints being raised to the altars and the number of families once again seeking serious Catholic formation—do not suggest collapse. They suggest that something is beginning.
What we ask
One request remains, and it is concrete.
We do not ask for enthusiasm; enthusiasm lasts six weeks and then February arrives. We ask for two less exciting and more durable things.
The first is study. Anyone who works in Catholic education must continue studying, because this is the pillar for which material evidence cannot simply be displayed, and therefore one must know how to reason and argue. A teacher who has stopped studying delivers, year after year, an increasingly faded version of what they once learned.
The second is spiritual life—not as a pleasant addition to the work, but as a condition for it. The fruit of this vocation is not produced by us. Three years with Christ Himself as their teacher were not enough for the Apostles without Pentecost. Whoever does not pray for their students is doing only half the work, even if that half is done very well.
And the rest—the numbers, growth, recognition, the future—does not belong to us. It is a relief that it does not.
The question that remains
If this school closed tomorrow, what would have been done that would remain?
Not the brand, the structure, or the metrics. The people. Real students, with names, who left here knowing something true and loving something good.
If there are ten, it was worth it. If there is one, probably so too.
That is the work Acutis seeks to do every day, including the parts no one sees.
Discover Acutis Academy, a school committed to the formation of each student, one by one.
For further reading
- Holy Scripture: Col 3:23–24; 1 Cor 3:5–9; Mt 25:14–30; Lk 17:10.
- PIUS XI. Divini Illius Magistri (1929).
- CONGREGATION FOR CATHOLIC EDUCATION. The Catholic School (1977). On what concretely distinguishes a Catholic school from a good school.
- NEWMAN, John Henry. The Idea of a University.
- SERTILLANGES, A.-D. The Intellectual Life. One of the finest books on the duty of study for those whose work depends on the intellect. Short, practical, uncompromising.
- CHESTERTON, G.K. The Everlasting Man. Against catastrophism, through historical argument.
- ST. JOSEMARÍA ESCRIVÁ. The Way. On the sanctification of ordinary work and excellence in what no one sees.
- SOCIETY OF JESUS. Ratio Studiorum (1599). Documentary evidence that academic rigor and spiritual formation were never rivals.
