“We weren’t exactly given a mandate,” Hanby says, “Nor did we really intend to create what was essentially a philosophy of education for a new school. We just set out to do what we thought was intrinsically good. We all believed that there is a great deal of contemporary confusion about what education is. We knew that we wanted children to read well, write well, speak well, and think well. We knew that we wanted them to ask and think about the great human questions. We were convinced that you can’t educate as if God doesn’t exist—or as if the Church weren’t integral to the meaning of humanity and the West—without falsifying history and cultivating illiteracy. We knew we wanted to make our children heirs to the great tradition of Christian humanism.”

They recreated the school according to a classical model, and ran the school to teach the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, out of the Catholic tradition. It turns out people are hungry for that. Result? Of all the schools on the closing list, it’s the only one still open. And along with the parish, it has become a center of the community. The stories about how the community has come together around the parish, its school, and each other, are deeply inspiring. If they can do it, why can’t the rest of us? More:

The public solidarity of the parish makes it easy to forget that the intentional community has always been a minority in Hyattsville. The thought of forming remote Christian enclaves far from the scorn and rot of contemporary American society may be tempting, but Chris Currie doesn’t have much interest in that interpretation of what’s called the “Benedict Option.” “Christianity started as an urban religion—not that you can’t be Catholic and rural,” he says, “That’s always been the missionary dynamic of the Church.”

Currie believes that Hyattsville’s intentional community has chipped away at straw man caricatures of what it means to be Catholic: “I think it was probably a lot like that in ancient Rome, even when Christianity was overtly persecuted. Folks looked at their Christian neighbors and said, ‘This is attractive.’ And honestly, unless we form these communities, how are we going to evangelize society? It’s not going to be based on intellectual propositions abhorrent to most Americans today. They’ve got to experience people living a Catholic faith in their everyday life. Where better to do that than an urban community developed around the common life?”

See, I think this is a misconception about the Benedict Option. If it only involves going out to the hinterlands in Christian withdrawal, it won’t succeed, because most people can’t do that. Chris Currie may think he and his community aren’t living out the Benedict Option, but as far as I’m concerned, they truly are. As Alasdair MacIntyre said in the final paragraph of After Virtue:

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.

Notice not “form” but “forms,” plural. The Benedict Option will look very different in different places. It has to serve the needs of the community that exists, rather than suit an ideal. You can do it in the country, as the Clear Creek Catholic community has. You can do it in a small town, as the Eagle River Orthodox community has. You can do it in an old inner-ring suburb, as the St. Jerome folks have done. The key thing is that the church has to be intentionally countercultural, and it has to be at the center of your family’s life, and your community’s life. It can’t just be an add-on to the same life everybody else has. Chris Currie is right: neighbors have to be able to look at the life the community has in common and say, “This is attractive.” Even more importantly, one’s kids have to be able to look at the community in which they grew up and say, “This is attractive.”

I’m very, very encouraged by what the St. Jerome’s people have accomplished, and I’m thinking about things our little Orthodox parish here in West Feliciana might do along those lines with our own resources. Read the whole article, by Will Seath; I dare you not to be inspired.