Colonel Welborn Barton Griffith Jr.: An Icon for Classical Christian Education

This is a modified version of a talk that I gave at Chesterton Academy of Our Lady of Victory in Centennial, CO, on March 6, 2025.

In August of 1944, American forces were fighting Nazi soldiers at Chartres, a small French village about sixty miles outside of Paris. You may recognize that name, and perhaps you have visited that village. It is home to one of the great treasures of medieval Catholicism: Chartres Cathedral, famous for its original stained-glass windows. The cathedral sits on the highest hilltop in the village, its two spires overlooking wheat fields that extend for miles in every direction. It is impossible to enter the village of Chartres without a sightline that includes the spires of Chartres Cathedral. At the same time, Allied forces were hiding in the woods approximately fifteen miles from the village. They had intelligence that German snipers were hiding in the spires and were prepared to pick off Allied soldiers as they tried to make their way into the town. Based on that information, Allied command called in a directive to shell Chartres Cathedral with artillery. 

Colonel Welborn Barton Griffith Jr.—a man born in a small Texan town in 1901 and a graduate of West Point—was a forty-two-year-old operations officer with the XX Corps serving in General George S. Patton’s Third Army. On the morning of August 16th, 1944, upon hearing of the directive to shell the Cathedral, Col. Griffith and his twenty-year-old driver—Eugene Schulz—got into a jeep and made their way behind enemy lines. Eventually, the two American soldiers got into the village, walked into the Cathedral and through the nave, climbed the spires, and discovered that no Nazi snipers were hiding there. Col. Griffith radioed back to the operations camp with the news, and they immediately rescinded the order to shell the building.  

In the words of Schulz, Col. Griffith’s decision to risk his life to save it is “the reason why Chartres Cathedral is standing today.”[1] Tragically, Col. Griffith was shot and killed by Nazi soldiers a few hours later. He was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Purple Heart, the Legion of Merit, and two of the highest military awards bestowed by the French government. To this day, every year on August 16th, the French people living in the region leave flowers next to the building where one of the brave American soldiers who saved their cathedral breathed his last. 

In the summer of 2008, I had the privilege to travel to France as a twenty-three-year-old, fresh out of my first year of teaching high school theology. An older, wiser colleague of mine told me that I would be a fool if I went to Paris and didn’t take the day trip out to Chartres to visit the cathedral. I am grateful for his advice. I will never forget the experience of walking into the thirteenth-century church for the first time. After opening the doors, you’re plunged into what appears, at first, to be a cold, dark, and cavernous abyss. . . and then you look up. And when you do, you see an incredible vision of the Catholic faith written in stone and glass that stretches eight hundred years into the past. I am convinced that anyone with a soul that hasn’t been blunted by years of too many video games, cell phones, and bad television can walk into Chartres Cathedral and catch a glimpse of something as close to a vision of heaven as any one of us is likely to see during our pilgrimage here on Earth. It is transcendent. For my money, Chartres Cathedral is the most beautiful piece of art that human hands have created, and I know that I’m not alone in that assessment.  

But what does all this have to do with classical education? Much, I think. On the train ride back to Paris, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my work as a theology teacher would only be successful if I could find a way to bring something of the experience of Chartres Cathedral into my classroom. The medieval cathedrals of Europe are beautiful precisely because they offer an integrated and harmonious vision of the Catholic faith that engages the senses. Every part of a medieval cathedral proclaims the glory of God and elevates first the eyes and eventually the hearts of its visitors toward the transcendent. Sculpture, stained glass, music, geometry, Scripture, and liturgy all cohere into a symphonic assault on the senses that is more properly described using the language of experience rather than that of place. What would it look like to bring all of that into a classroom? Into a school? 

What the generations of men who built cathedrals like Chartres understood—and what we have largely ignored in the modern West—is that humanity was created to look up not only into the nave of a beautiful medieval Church but into a coherent and integrated cosmos that we can call home. When Dante looked up to heaven, he didn’t see the vast emptiness of space; he saw “the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.”[2] When we help our students to see that basic reality—to see that they are part of a cosmic love story unfolding in a world that coheres and makes sense—we have a recipe for gratitude, and the fruit of gratitude is joy. 

Gratitude produces not only joy but also sacrifice. Gratitude is what motivated Col. Griffith and his driver to risk their lives to preserve Chartres Cathedral. Gratitude is also what motivated scholar Malcolm Miller to dedicate his life to proclaiming the glory of that same cathedral. Gratitude for her children is what enables a mother to find joy in serving her family. Gratitude for his family is what enables a husband and father to suffer through a difficult day at the office and still come home and be kind to his wife and children. A Christian education that does not aim at fostering a sense of gratitude for the things that came before us is an education that will wither before it has a chance to take root. 

The classical curriculum is rooted in the disposition of gratitude, or what the ancient Romans called pietas (piety). Why do we ask our students to read Homer, Virgil, Euclid, Augustine, Aristotle, Dante, and Dostoevsky? To be sure, a student who has read these authors and encountered their ideas will be head and shoulders above her peers at other schools and will be prepared for any university program, but that’s not why we read them. If we content ourselves with mere utility, a strong classical education simply makes a person a “more clever devil.”[3] Mere utility is not what motivated Col. Griffith. If the Allies had shelled Chartres Cathedral, it would probably have been rebuilt, just like the Monte Cassino Abbey was when it was bombed into the ground during the same year. What motivated Col. Griffith was a disposition of gratitude for the men and women who came before him and for what they built with their own hands. What ought to motivate those of us who work in classical Christian education is a desire to help our students discover a love of and a gratitude for the True, Good and Beautiful things of this world—those things that gesture beyond themselves toward Jesus Christ, the One who is Truth, Goodness and Beauty incarnate. 

A school that doesn’t understand what a human being is will never be able to educate human beings properly. A school that doesn’t remember the basic fact that we are created to praise, reverence, and serve God and, by doing that, to save our souls, will teach students according to the world’s standards. The graduates of such a school will be equipped to climb the greasy pole of success, only to be left scratching their heads after reaching the top and wondering, “Is this it?” Even the best books and the finest instruction in the world will not prevent such a school from compromising on the essential things to accomplish secondary and tertiary goals. Such schools will scratch their heads and wonder why their graduates leave the faith behind as adults. The answer will be, of course, that such a school has failed to teach its students how to love the things, people, and places that are worthy of their love, those things that teach us how to love the ultimate object of human desire: Christ Himself. 

I’ve long said that the most authentic measure of a school is not what the fourteen-year-old freshman says about it nor even what the eighteen-year-old senior says after graduating. The most authentic measure of a school is the kind of husbands and wives, mothers and fathers its graduates go on to become twenty years after they leave its classrooms. Show me the man at forty—show me what he loves and what he’s willing to sacrifice for—and I will tell you all about the education he received when he was a boy. 

I do not know what kind of education Col. Griffith received as a young man. The fact that he was born in 1901 suggests that even if he did not attend a Christian school, he received something far more similar to what is offered at today’s classical Christian schools than their secular, industrial counterparts down the road. The mere fact that he was willing to risk his life to save Chartres Cathedral, to ensure that something beautiful withstood the industrial barbarism of World War II, suggests a man whose life was oriented around gratitude and sacrifice for the cultural and spiritual patrimony that was his—and is ours—by right and by the grace of God. Those of us who teach in classical schools would do well to aim at helping our students to become like Col. Griffith, a man with a classical heart even if he never, in fact, received a classical education. 

[1] Eugene Schulz, “WWII Veteran from Wisconsin Honored in France,” interview by Jason Fechner, Spectrum 1 News, September 13, 2019, https://spectrumnews1.com/wi/milwaukee/human-interest/2019/09/13/wwii-veteran-from-wisconsin-honored-in-france.  

[2] See Dante, Paradiso, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander (Anchor: 2008). 

[3] This quote is often misattributed to C. S. Lewis, and its source is unclear.