By Robert Royal.
The following is adapted from an address given at the Chesterton Academy, Vero Beach, Florida February 19, 2026.
Those of you already engaged in this wonderful institution don't need me to tell you the inestimable value of reading great books even at an early age. And for those of you who may be discovering this academy for the first time, let me just say that I would have been grateful myself to have been able to attend such a place, which unfortunately did not exist when I was young. It was a great need back then, an even greater one now when we've lost even more of our religious and cultural heritage. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that without educational institutions like this one, the days will rapidly grow even darker and more chaotic for both America and Christianity.
But there is a path out, as I've tried to suggest in the title above, which is drawn from a poem in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings:
The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
Now, like all poems, this one bears multiple meanings, and like all good poems it has a significance beyond even those meanings, because it opens a door to the world, a larger world and some larger way that we must remain aware of if we're to remain fully human. That, it seems to me, is the crucial value of Chesterton Academies, even as they teach the more usual skills that we all need to manage our lives in our more mundane world.
As I say, I did not have the benefit of a school like this, but I did have two key advantages in addition to growing up in an intact family: a Catholic Church that in its liturgies and schools conveyed a great deal implicitly. I've often joked that the young nuns who taught me as a child probably never read Aristotle, or even Aquinas. But the Church that formed them had, and they conveyed that rational sanity of those two great figures, a sanity that meshed perfectly with the ordinary virtues that we also were living out at home.
And there was one more thing: Latin. Like a lot of boys my age, I memorized the responses to what we now call the Traditional Latin Mass – I could still rattle off a number of them today. Memorizing the Latin responses had the advantage that you could serve at Mass – and you could get out of school to serve at funerals, often almost the whole day, and you could get tips at those and weddings. So, Latin has always had a certain baseline affection, and even today Latin words have a certain aura for me.
There was one other experience I had that set me on the larger way that I hope I am still on. It must have been in the late fall of my junior year, right after Thanksgiving, because I played football and the season was over. There were still autumn leaves on the trees. We'd been reading Virgil's Aeneid in Latin, last period. After school, I was walking with a few friends over to someone's house under those autumnal colors.
Out of nowhere a sense of the long stretch of time and the recurring seasons and all the people that had lived and died since Virgil's day, which was also Jesus', came over me in ways that I still can't entirely express. But I knew and have known since that there was some larger way – and I have labored ever since to be worthy of it and to convey some portion of it to others.
I wouldn't say that is the sole purpose of true education, but it's central. As our newest Doctor of the Church, St. John Henry Newman once remarked, "The problem for statesmen of this age is how to educate the masses, and literature and science cannot give the solution."
Many people today assume that technical knowledge and government schools are all we need to form citizens and flourishing human lives, with science on the rationalist side and literature or the humanities more broadly on the humanist and emoti...
