Saint Patrick Academy is living proof that excellence in both spiritual formation and academics is possible.  In fact, it is preferable. Each day our private school’s students engage in a rigorous curriculum that has placed them within the top 1-15% of all students in the country. Each day our students gather to ask for the blessing of Our Lord.  There are a lot of things that set our private K-8 school apart, but this union of the mind and heart is perhaps the biggest.

Aristotle said that “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”  Saint Patrick Academy exists to inspire, to draw out and to enkindle in the hearts of our children the love of learning and the love of God. This is what it means to educate fully. As it was said of Our Lord, “He came to fill the hungry with good things.”

Our Portsmouth, NH private school bears a tagline: Education Fully Alive. The idea for this came from a quote by Saint Irenaeus: “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.”

Saint Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians explains, “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

Saint Paul sums up Saint Patrick Academy pretty well: “that you may have the power to fully comprehend and to know the love of Christ.”  This is what we want for our children. A perfect union of mind and heart. This is our measure of success.

Fully alive means to have the ability to fully comprehend. It means to be alert, and awake to the true significance and meaning of all things. It means to hear the inherent harmony of the universe, to see the whole beyond the sum of its parts, and to understand the profound significance of each person. And once you have seen all this, it is impossible not to be grateful.