An Alumnus Story: Going Home, and Finding Woke

A distinguished Catholic high school in Rochester, N.Y., succumbs to secularity and left-wing fads.

I f my experience is any indication, Thomas Wolfe was right: You can’t go home again.

Or, if you try, don’t be surprised by what awaits you.

Recently, I went home again, to Rochester, N.Y. It had been a while, but, venturing back for family reasons, I took the opportunity to visit my high-school alma mater, Aquinas Institute, from which I graduated in 1972. To put it mildly, the school’s leadership had been after me for some time to visit. And to engage — a not unexpected thing for an alumnus of some means (thanks to hard work and God’s graces) who was being solicited for a major gift.

Long held in high regard locally, Aquinas is a Roman Catholic school founded over a century ago, named after, and based on the teachings of, the learned saint, the “Angelic Doctor.” While a student there, I had the singular good fortune of being mentored by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Famous for his national television show, Life Is Worth Living, the great patriot and faith-propagator was then serving as head of the Rochester diocese. Bishop Sheen had an iron-trap mind and a disciplined way that awakened me to the body of our Judeo-Christian values and inspired me to seek excellence in it. (I had the additional honor of being an altar boy who served alongside him at many Masses at Sacred Heart Cathedral.) Complementing this giant of faith, Aquinas Institute became the platform of my personal formation and predicate sense of right and wrong — indeed, it gave me a moral compass by which I have aspired to live my life.

God, family, and country were the daily mantra of Sheen and the values espoused by Aquinas. My classmates and I were fortunate to have had such guidance. These adolescent years are not easy at the best of times, but we came to understand and appreciate that our freedoms were a gift. Most of us cherished the opportunities that this God-blessed land afforded us all, irrespective of color, gender, or creed.

Aquinas Institute of a half century ago taught us that America was an exceptional nation. My own success is proof of that American dream, and there has always been a sense of indebtedness to the institution — although in recent years I had learned of the school’s drift, akin to many a Catholic institution’s mission shift, genuflection before political correctness, and affinity for and accommodation of the secular.

Still, presented with the opportunity to return, and having had from the school’s administrators and development officers an open invitation to visit and to speak, those emotional bonds compelled me to . . . go home again.

What transpired proved shocking and disturbing.

Make no mistake: The red carpet was laid out for my wife and me, as Aquinas Institute staff made a conscious effort to put their best foot forward. However, as I once again walked the halls, there was a sense of . . . veneer. Something seemed very off.

It was, but not with the students.

My wife and I had offered to share our life experiences with junior and senior classes, and this we did. It is fair to say that the talks — through which we sought to reassert our ancient truths, to inspire students to understand them, to show the implications to them personally as a matter of self-interest, and to remind them of their right to the pursuit of happiness in a time when political correctness, Black Lives Matter orthodoxy, and woke ideology are determined to indoctrinate them — enthralled the attendees.

Most, but not all.

Immediately afterward, we were inundated with thanks from a surge of students — we found this to be terribly encouraging. My wife was surrounded by dozens of youth, several in tears of thanks. Feeling empowered in the moment, many told us how needed our talks were, and how they were having to endure a tyrannical command to follow woke sufferance in every form. In private comments, students (and some staff) quietly cheered — that our words had emboldened them, and that they were “the most important talks they have had in their time” at Aquinas. And, there was this admission from a trustee: There was a raging battle for the soul of the school.

The students were mature and smart. I recognized in them those same values that had been drilled into me long ago. My thought was clear: These kids and the parents can be proud. They presented themselves as the solid timber of America’s future.

On a nostalgic note, I met the school’s football coach, an old classmate of mine, who invited us to return as a special guests on the field. I was a player in my day, so this struck a chord, but we subsequently had to decline.

Our departure could only be described as polite.

And that’s where the politeness ended.

Little did we know, our talk had “triggered” a tiny number of students. What ensued unmasked a cauldron of woke political correctness within the school’s teaching ranks, the administration, and the board of trustees.

Their mistake? They had allowed us to speak truth about our times, our country, and its future, and about our disdain for those sentiments by which America is held in low esteem. This does not go over well with the professional education class, even in a Catholic institution whose classrooms were once filled with the direct words of Fulton Sheen, espousing ancient truths now rejected as fairy tales and outdated mores.

The morning following our visit and talks, I awoke to find a sly email from the school president disinviting us, on “technical” grounds, from the football match. But my inbox also contained another email from a parent, whom I did not know, quite upset about how I had been insulted via a widespread school communication.

What communication? I soon found out: Aquinas’s president, the previous evening, sent an email to the school community denouncing us and our talk:

Dear Aquinas Families,

Today we had on campus an alumnus and his wife who wanted to share with our students the secrets of their success in their business careers. They spoke to members of our junior and senior classes. Unexpectedly, both speakers shared some of their personal beliefs. We have heard from several students and parents that they were offended. Please know that this was not the intended purpose of today’s presentation. These personal opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by our guests do not reflect of the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of The Aquinas institute.

We will address this with our students on Monday morning. We will also use this as an opportunity for open dialogue and our belief that we will treat all others as children of God, deserving of respect and dignity. . . .

Sincerely,

Dr. Anthony Cook ’99
President

We also learned that the administration was arranging for counseling the following school day to reassure those who felt violated by our words.

We also learned, from students and parents, that children as young as sixth-graders were told, by teachers, that we were “hate speechers” and “racists” and “right-wing conservatives.”

In the ensuing weeks, we have heard plenty, and directly, from scores of parents and alumni who are as angered by the administration’s actions as they were thrilled by the message of our talks. From the administration, no longer bequest-soliciting, we had heard nothing other than a milquetoast arrogant report from the very same vacuous president.

The commissariat — the politburo of the school — had spoken. Like proletariat guardians everywhere, they are consumed by their embrace of the new tautology of hard-left socialism, or worse. And they refuse to countenance any acknowledgment that the school administration needs to be held accountable for this accelerated quest for the lip of Dante’s Inferno.

What goes on at Aquinas Institute and elsewhere is deeply disturbing. Ideology is the rage, manifested in the indoctrination of preteen children in what are no less than creepy, sadistic notions of life, and in the massaging, intimidating, and cowing of students to heel to the doctrines of Black Lives Matter, a Marxist organization dedicated — in its own public declarations — to destroying our nation and our long-held values, and to the other outrages — while elsewhere contorting mendacious notions of gender and divisive critical race theory.

How can an Aquinas Institute square with a Thomas Aquinas?

It cannot. The embrace of this modern project to undermine the virtues and freedoms and unalienable rights that are our endowment come wrapped in a papier-mâché Catholicism, making this school, a place of hollowed-out Christian prayers, more closely aligned to secularism than to anything Moses brought back from the Mount, or to any of the teachings of its namesake, or to the words of the man of heroic virtue who walked its halls — the beatified Bishop Sheen — while he imparted to students the teachings of Jesus Christ and the sacred doctrines of that institution we once beloved as Holy Mother Church.

The official attitude taken toward the talks given by my wife and me is . . . offense: How dare we reach into the teaching of Christ for our sense of patriotism or for the enlightened values implicit in our capitalist system? How dare we question these ideological lies spewed by BLM and woke Twitter mobs while advocating an environment of academic freedom and acclaiming the pillars of truth that formed this great nation?

No. We were to be derided and mocked by the zealots who go by the professional title of “administrator.”

Even in a Catholic school with a profound tradition, these moral eunuchs have taken over the court, in their kumbaya trance espousing white guilt, despite its insulting every black man and woman in America, despite its directly assaulting the tenets of the Catholic faith.

This posing may give virtue-signaling school officials a great sense of satisfaction, of the smug variety. But as for their human charges: More than claiming acolytes, at least at Aquinas, these institutional cave-ins have repulsed and roused — even emboldened — many students, parents, and alumni who are prepared to take back this heralded school from those determined to subvert its legacy and mission.

Will they succeed?

Money talks: Concern and hesitation to continue to financially support this lie is growing. Those with a stake see the indoctrination for what it is, and reject its tyrannical-fist imposition that is intolerant of questions or independent thought.

Growing up Rochester, I was imbued with the grace of knowing that there was no mountain too high. There was nothing that one could not achieve in this great land. At a time when New York merited its nickname “the Empire State,” we could boast of hardworking people, and the fact that Monroe County, which had the nation’s fourth-largest county economy, was a testament to this truth.

But then, once upon a time, Rochester even sported an NBA franchise.

Today, the same intolerant forces suffocating Aquinas Institute have run roughshod over this community and state. Once a place of opportunity and achievement, it today appears broken, lawless, and distressed. I no longer recognize my old hometown.

But I remain an optimist. There is brewing a desire to take back our destiny and our institutions, because they are that, ours. This is a project not of the elites but of the grassroots, of the people, not of feint heart, who live in the community, outside of gates, whose children attend the schools overseen by ideologues, whose churches have replaced the Sermon on the Mount with the planks of the latest Democratic platform. These are our battlefields, all worthy of reclaiming, all of them the patrimony of our forebears — these very personal places where a fevered opposition has planted weeds of dissent and brambles of chaos.

Thomas Paine mocked sunshine patriots. May we, today, add to them sunshine Catholics — people complicit, by commission or omission, with the destruction of important legacies. For the rest of us, whether it is the assault upon America, or once-heralded places such as the Aquinas Institute — where there are still young men and women of sound mind, who know intimately the tyranny of practicing leftists — we must accept the challenge of our times. Or expire.

We must fight for our birthright. And prevail.

Then, maybe, we can go home again.