Sacred Heart Spirituality
As a School of the Sacred Heart, Carrollton holds that Jesus Christ is at the core of who we are. We believe that an informed, lively faith is the fruit of reading the Gospels and encountering the person of Jesus Christ as He is presented in the Scriptures.
Carrollton graduates have a basic understanding of the Church’s teaching about Christ and His redeeming mission, as well as an understanding of the Church’s past and present role in that mission. Ideally, the Carrollton graduate is beginning through faith to affirm the belief that there is meaning in life and thereby has begun to develop a sense of hope. She has begun to form her conscience and evaluate moral choices, and can reason through moral issues with increasing clarity. She has begun to appreciate how a vibrant Christian community and the celebration of the Eucharist complement each other. She is learning through her own failures of the need for healing and reconciliation. She is embracing Madeleine Sophie Barat’s way of prayer with a daily practice of silence, of espacio.
As inheritors of St. Madeleine Sophie’s vision, we believe the future will belong to well-educated, thinking, confident people. More importantly, we are convinced that the quality of the future depends on the choices to be made by these same people. We want our students to become effective leaders. Nothing short of excellence in their education will prepare them to assume such leadership. The key to such excellence is faithfulness to St. Madeleine Sophie’s vision. Central to our vision and practice of education is our belief in God, as revealed in and through the person of Jesus Christ. This education of both heart and mind enables our graduates to be successful women, because they come to know who they are and whose they are. They understand how their God loves them, and they feel compelled to treat others with respect, because they believe each person is known and valued by God.
St. Madeleine Sophie Barat often spoke about prayer and its essential role in our lives if we are to come and see ourselves as God’s Beloved. She considered prayer to be our support; it is the “relief of our hope.” Madeleine Sophie Barat never wrote a book on prayer, but she did write over 14,000 letters in which she spoke a great deal of prayer. Her word for prayer is interior spirit. She once wrote to someone wondering about prayer …
“Interior spirit is, then, that intimate union of our soul with God … that immediate dependence upon the grace of God, upon the touch of the Holy Spirit. It is the fine and sensitive tact of the soul in recognizing in herself the operations of God so that she may give herself over to them.” Let us remember that Madeleine Sophie urged her Religious as she would urge us today to be contemplatives in action. As she explained … “But at least we must unite solitude to the work we do, and counter this whirlwind with a deep cavern where the soul can take refuge as often as possible.”
Our greatest hope is that the Carrollton graduate has developed her interior life so that she is one who trusts the Spirit dwelling within. We hope that she has developed the habit of looking for God in all things. This habitual instinct – to choose God – takes time and energy to develop. We want our graduates to know that a life rooted in prayer has both fullness and integrity.
Spirituality Events
Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart
"For the sake of one child, I would have founded the Society."
-Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat
-Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat
