According to Harold Beutow, “One of the tangible results of the Vatican II as applied to United States Catholic education was the change in the constitution of NCEA in 1968. This put the Association at the service of society through Catholic education, rather than only at the service of Catholic schools” (Beutow’s Of Singular Benefit, p. 305).

In this document, you can see the side-by-side comparison of the existing constitution (on the left) and the suggested changes (on the right) proposed at the 1968 constitutional conference. Although the suggested changes included some administrative restructuring of the NCEA, arguably the most important changes were to Article II: Objects.

Compare Article II and the suggested changes on pages one and two, below.

Questions

1. What does “objects” mean in this context?

2. How does “Catholic education” differ from “Catholic schools”?

3. Why is it significant that one of the stated objectives of the NCEA is to “foster cooperation”? What is implied by the phrase “other professional agencies in the field of education”?

4. Similarly, why is it significant that one of the stated objectives of the NCEA is to “enable Catholic education to interpret itself to the public”?