As an Anglican with over 30 years’ experience of working in the broad field of Christian education, researching and teaching the topic in an explicitly ecumenical organization, I readily acknowledge the scale and depth of research, scholarship and practical experience in this area located within the Roman Catholic Church. While this important book focuses on the work of Catholic schools, there is much here that is of broader relevance, including to those with an interest in the work of Anglican teaching institutions (cf., within an English context, Howard J. Worsley (ed.), Anglican Church School Education [Bloomsbury, 2013]).

Professor Gerald Grace, KSG, is a Catholic layman who has worked within the secular disciplines of the history and sociology of (school) education at universities in London, Cambridge, New Zealand and Durham. His focus on Catholic education mainly developed after his early retirement in 1996, working as an unpaid scholar at University College and later St Mary’s University, London, during which he founded the Centre for Research in Catholic Education, co-edited the two-volume International Handbook of Catholic Education (Springer, 2007) and launched the journal, International Studies in Catholic Education.

This Festschrift is divided between ten broadly theoretical studies by Grace’s colleagues located in the UK or Ireland, who represent most of the major writers in Catholic education there, and a further ten studies that discuss the influence and implementation of Grace’s work across the world, including in Australia, France, Scotland and Thailand.

I have picked out from these sources several salient concepts and issues within Gerald Grace’s labours. Perhaps the most significant of these is spiritual capital, a term adapted from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s metaphorical use of the term ‘capital’ to refer to any assets that may be acquired and used, including ‘religious capital’. For Grace, spiritual capital designates the ‘resources of faith and values derived from vocational commitment to a religious tradition’ (Grace, quoted on p. 57) and involves both a transcendent awareness and a spiritual worldview. In Grace’s work, the faith and values in mind are those of Catholicism. These should be embodied in and transmitted by school leaders and others concerned with church schools (pp. 70-71, 187-8). They represent a facilitating rather than a dominating form of capital (pp. 77, 184) and are held by individuals and bodies for the sake of empowering others through their witness. They require a specific and distinctive Catholic formation of lay Catholics, especially headteachers. Such a focus would be more difficult to identify in the case of Anglican education, at least with respect to any doctrinal element. However, the writers include among the values component of spiritual capital the more inclusive values of honesty, communion with God, devotion to duty, openness, self-sacrifice and a sense of service and responsibility (pp. 174-5, cf. 216).

Failure to maintain this resource of spiritual capital would compromise what Grace calls the mission integrity of Catholic schooling, which he and others define as ‘fidelity in practice and not just in public rhetoric to the distinctive and authentic principles of Catholic education’ and ‘how the school is living out its characteristic spirit’, rather than drifting away from both (quotes on pp. 16 and 210; cf. 14, 81).

In this context, Grace draws from another sociologist of education, Basil Bernstein, the notion of invisible pedagogy, which is essentially the socialization of learners into desired dispositions and overt behaviour – the ‘person forming’ component of schooling that should accompany its overt teaching of the more visible pedagogical outcomes of academic achievement (pp. 85-6). This might allow the view that the primary purpose of Catholic education is the formation of good people, something that could on occasion conflict with the (more measurable) production of academic excellence. A related theme is Grace’s general resistance to the power of market forces in education, which runs alongside his concern to combat secularization (pp. 34-8, 43). Both should be of concern to Anglican educators (on the former, see my essay in the book cited above, Worsley, 2013, ch. 6).

The critique of the commodification of schooling and of domineering school leaders connects to three other themes expressed in the book: moral philosophy’s concept of the common good (goods shared by and of benefit to most members of a community: cf. 38, 209, 241-5), Catholic social teaching’s related concern for the preferential option for the poor (cf. 44, 104, 135, 177-8, ch. 16) and the notion of servant leadership (ch. 18, 242-3). None of these, of course, are uniquely Catholic principles.