The following keynote address was delivered by Dr. Peter Kreeft at our 2025 Chesterton Gala on May 17, 2025.

I am the least important person in this room tonight, because I am here merely as a kind of matchmaker between the Chesterton Academy people and you whom they invited.

Matchmaking is also my role as a philosophy professor: Socrates, meet Jack; Jack, meet Socrates. Plato, meet Jill; Jill, meet Plato.

Evangelism is matchmaking too. Jack and Jill, climb the hill and meet Jesus; Jesus, meet Jack and Jill. All Christians are evangelists: little mirrors who dimly reflect the Sonlight, the light from the Son of God.

I am here as an advertiser as well as a matchmaker. The Chesterton Academy people have a remarkably high quality product to sell you at a remarkably low price. I’m a terrible salesman for most products: I tried to help work my way through college by selling cosmetics door to door in the 1950’s and the only people who bought any were my relatives. I’m not very good at the world’s oldest profession, advertising, which the Devil invented in the Garden of Eden to sell an apple that has morphed into a computer.

But the product that I’m advertising is truly great. And unlike cosmetics, I know something about it, about schools and teaching and learning. And I know how important education is, especially adolescents, at the crucial turning point when childhood is behind them and adulthood is in front of them, the time when two tides, the ebb and the flood, crash against each other in confusion.

My argument for Chesterton Academy is very simple: What else is there?

What are secular schools like today? Do they reflect your values? Are they your servants or are they your enemies?

Eighty five per cent of children who grow up in Catholic families lose their faith by graduation time. Eighty five per cent! Your children are the most important people in your life, the people you have the most responsibility for, and the people you have the most powerful influence on. Are you happy that the educational establishment is massively aligned with the ideological extreme Left, the cancel culture, wokeness, a scorn for tradition and for common sense, moral relativism, the whole sexual revolution including sodomy, abortion, and transgenderism? If not, how much can you do about it? How influential are parents in designing their own children’s education today?

It didn’t use to be that way. Both the schools and the parents saluted the same flag, which contained 50 stars. Now the flag that flies over our state schools is the LGBTQ rainbow flag, designed in Sodom and Gomorrah, to be waved at perversion pride parades. Your kids are being taught, usually implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that all religions are oppressive but that the teachings of the Catholic Church are the most oppressive of all. If taken seriously (which they no longer are by most Catholics: 90-92% believe in contraception and in vitro fertilization, i.e. sex without babies and babies without sex.) They are being taught that religion is superstition, God is a myth, parents are authoritarian, tradition is a trash heap, our ancestors were bigots, and that the small minority of Catholics who still believe that contraception, sodomy, abortion, divorce, and transgenderism are evil are evil, intolerant and intolerable; that the classics are wicked because they are sexist, classist, and racist; and that our children do not have even the right to life before they are born but once they are born they have the right to be anything they want to be, in other words that they are gods. America is the most polytheistic nation in history. The Greeks had about 350 gods, but the Americans have 350 million gods.

They smell racism everywhere, and they are the most racist people in the world. They preach diversity and pluralism and inclusion and they are the least diverse, pluralistic, and inclusive people in the world ideologically. The higher you go in higher education, the lower it gets. Guess which university, out of the 2,000 in America, was found by a secular, neutral investigation to foster the least freedom of thought and speech? Harvard.

Even apart from morality and religion, our public schools are increasingly failing in academics. Passing grades are lowered, test questions made easier, and still the scores go down.  On the SATs, reading questions have been cut in half, dumbed down, and all questions about analogies are forbidden because even the best students were getting them wrong, because we are thinking like our computers now, and the one thing digital computers cannot deal with is analogies. They have no intuition. Artificial intelligence is making our intelligence more artificial and less intelligent.

What does the State believe is the purpose of the education its schools provide? Suppose you wrote to your congressman and asked that simplest and most important of all educational questions: what is this big, expensive thing all for? What is the good, the goal, the purpose, of education? They have no idea. They are flying a plane and have no idea where the landing field is. They can only say: It is whatever you want it to be. And we spend billions of dollars on that “whatever”. We are perfecting our technological tools and not even asking what job the tools are for. What is a human being and what is the meaning and purpose and end of human life? Public schools dare not even raise that question for fear of offending someone’s increasingly fragile feelings or being “judgmental,” that is, daring to judge between truth and falsehood anywhere except in the exact sciences.

We are in the middle of a great spiritual war today, and the spirit that lusts after our children’s minds and bodies is not the Holy Spirit. “Spiritual” is not a synonym for “good”: there are evil spirits too, and they demanded the sacrifice of children before: in ancient Canaan, where parents gave up the bodies of their own children to be thrown into the mouth of their giant idol in the Valley of Ge Hinom, or Gehenna, which Our Lord used as an image of Hell. Gehenna was a garbage pit in Old Testament times. The fires never went out. Today it is a prosperous suburban housing development. These same spirits demanded the same sacrifice in ancient Aztec Mexico, until their worshippers were defeated in physical battle by Cortez at odds of 10,000 to 1, and in spiritual battle by Our Lady of Guadalupe, who inspired 9 million conversions and baptisms in the decade that followed. Read that spectacular story in Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness by Warren Carroll, the historian who founded Christendom College. Historians estimate that 1/3 of both Caananite and Aztek children were sacrificed. It is the same proportion as the proportion of children conceived in America who are killed now before they can be born. And the majority of Americans now approve of this holocaust, especially your children’s teachers and educators in both formal education and informal education, i.e. popular media.

We have reached a tipping point today, when now more than half of all Americans polled say that their primary reaction to the word “Christianity” is negative rather than positive. We are not moving from the catacombs to Constantine but in the opposite direction. The dead fish are being swept downstream by this river; only live fish can swim against the current, upstream. So let’s stop complaining about all the dead fish around us and thank God for giving us the great mission of being the salmon. And let’s support that mission as strongly as we possibly can.

When my wife and I were first married and had 4 kids in 6 years, we were fairly poor, but we put first on our budget our kids’ education, especially in high school and college. For no matter what our job is, or our career is, our kids are our primary vocation. That vocation is even more essential than the priesthood. Priests serve families, families don’t serve priests. Abolishing families would kill the Church much more totally than abolishing priests, for a Church with good families can produce new priests but celibate priests cannot produce new families. And the primary reason for priestly celibacy is that married priests would have to put their families first, not the Church. It’s the same reason the military prefers Navy Seals and Green Berets to be unmarried.

Our primary vocation is our children’s education, for both life in time and eternal life. And academics is an important part of that. God gave parents that tremendous responsibility. Don’t put it second to anything. Give your kids every possible push up the ladder to Heaven, which is the final end and goal and purpose of you and of them and of everyone else—and if that is not true, then our whole religion is an enormous lie. When we die, and instantly appear at the Last Judgment, we will hear these words from the lips of Our Lord: “Truly, truly I say to you, whatever you have done to the least of these, My family, My children, You have done to Me.” They are not the State’s children, they are His children, and He has given them to you for a few precious years. Handle with care. This product has literally incalculable, eternal value.

The students at Chesterton Academy are the most impressive advertisement for its product. It does not feel like an institution to them, but like a large family. Their laughter is joyful, not cynical. Everyone who visits Chesterton Academy remarks about this, because it is remarkable—it is rare, like gourmet steak.

Here are ten specific reasons Chesterton Academy works so well.

First, they are not only Catholic but happily and enthusiastically Catholic.

Second, in them faith and reason marry. The mind of God is found everywhere, not just in theology classes but also in the sciences, where they study the divine mind in nature, and in the arts and humanities, where they study the best human minds.

Third, they read the classics, the great books. What’s the alternative to “great books?” Either no books or crummy little books. The whole person is fed. They learn to love goodness and beauty as well as truth. Chesterton defined tradition as “the democracy of the dead,” extending the vote to our ancestors. The dead come to life at Chesterton Academy.

Fourth, here the arts come to life too, which are rapidly dying elsewhere.

Fifth, the students learn to love truth as an end in itself, not just a means to pleasure or power or prestige. That’s the essence of “liberal education.” And that’s the purpose of an open mind, as Chesterton said: An open mind is like an open mouth, its end is to chomp down on some solid food. Public schools teach relativism and scientism: that we can know truth only by the scientific method­ which is a most unscientific idea that cannot be proved by the scientific method.

Sixth, they are not ideologized. They don’t throw all ideas into two fishnets labeled “liberal” or “conservative” and then throw one of the nets overboard. They don’t politicize everything.

Seventh, students make lifetime friends there, good friends, and friends are their most powerful influences at this time of their lives.

Eighth, their graduates will help save our sick society. The most important product of any society is its children. Today we are not producing them either in quantity or quality.

Ninth, it is the parents, not professionals, who administer them and make the policies, not the educational establishment. State schools used to ask for more parental involvement; today, most of them fear that, and see parents as their enemies, the obstacles to their agenda.

Tenth, Chesterton Academy is amazingly inexpensive because it was founded and is run and taught and administered by amateurs, not professionals. The word “amateur” means “lover.” These teachers love both their students and their subject more than their salaries. Those who started this school and sacrificed for them did not do it to make money.

A word about this very practical thing, money. Money is a good thing, but it does good only when spent, not when kept. It’s like love that way. And there is absolutely nothing in this world more worth spending your money on, as well as your care, your energy, your time, your prayers, and your passion, than giving your kids the very best road to Heaven, the one with the most appetizers of truth, goodness, and beauty, to prepare them for Heaven’s main course.

Chesterton Academy is faithful to the Church. During the Great Depression, the banks closed, and foreclosed, but the Catholic Church, our First Supernatural Bank and Trust Company, never closes or forecloses, and we can bank on it and trust it. All our investments in its enterprises, especially its schools, pay compound interest.

So, the ultimate reason for investing in Chesterton Academy is because God wants you to. Not because I want you to. Don’t listen to me, listen to your conscience, God’s inner prophet, and then do what it tells you to do—what He tells you to do. Just be very quiet and very honest for a few moments and pray, and listen, and you will hear a still, small voice that says:

“Your kids are Mine. I gave you these kids on loan. They are the most precious things in your life. Treat them with maximum love and care. Go the extra mile. Invest in them passionately. Remember, this world is only the womb for eternity, and the only thing you can take with you to eternity is your soul. Let your money be like polish for their souls. Help them shine.”