All About Happiness

We remember our Penny Catechism when it comes to our raison d’être, the reason why we are. God made us to know Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world, and be happy with Him forever in heaven. The happy life is rejoicing in the truth, as St. Augustine said, and so, in all we do, we strive to make life happy and to teach the art of happiness, of merriment, of festivity, of true rejoicing. Our school is a place to learn how to live well.

Our mission is to form whole and happy men through adventurous encounters with the good, true, and beautiful, bringing our students into meaningful contact with each other and the things of earth and heaven. We take into account a boy’s appetite for action, and so send him roving with Robin Hood, praying with St. Francis, and running with Achilles. We know boys enjoy challenges, and so we square them off with Euclid and Shakespeare. We understand a boy’s capacity for supernatural virtue and participation in grace, and so engage him in sublime liturgy and a lively prayer life.

We see his need for imaginative and emotional appreciation of reality and the arts, and so give him songs to sing, poems to say, balls to juggle, boards to saw, images to carve, and animals to tend. We form boys with thoughtful minds, pilgrim hearts, and contemplative souls, that they may become real men with real loves for real things, men who can see and sing and speak, men who know their God and know their pious duties. In these lie a happiness which is holiness, and that beatitude is our mission.

“Better a crust with content than honey with a sour heart” resonates with our educational outlook, based on joyful friendship with each other and with Christ. In fact, Gregory the Great Academy judges its wellbeing by the happiness of its students. Happy boys and a happy life are our measures of success. Happiness is our goal, for it is the goal of any true education.