Even in places of
intellectual formation in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the legacy of Western Christianity is still evident.
It takes profound educational work and continuous discernment, which must involve all the academic community, promoting that synthesis
between intellectual formation, moral discipline and religious commitment which Blessed John Henry Newman proposed in his «Idea of University.»
Tony Esolen is also a wonderful man, a scintillating spiritual writer, and a teacher who takes character formation as seriously
as intellectual formation because he wants his students to be virtuous and happy, not just smart and employable.
However, After Asceticism points to common deficiencies and aberrations in the religious purpose and
intellectual formation of priests dating back to at least the 1950s.
Rourke shows in detail
the intellectual formation that gave rise to this eccentric version of the social magisterium.
There, the pope stressed the imperative of integral formation, in which human development, spiritual growth,
intellectual formation, and the development of pastoral skills mesh together in preparing the priests of the future.
The Church has outlined clearly that formation of priests has four foundations or pillars: human formation, spiritual formation, pastoral and apostolic formation and
intellectual formation.
This intellectual formation works against the metaphysical foundations of natural law reasoning, and therefore most people find the arguments remote and unconvincing — «academic» in the bad sense of being about something other than the real world we live in.