“We were ordained to teach catechism not to teach school. If we know that children are learning the catechism it is enough.”—Edward Fitzgerald, Bishop of Little Rock, addressing the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, 1884, quoted in Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History From Colonial Times to the Present (1992)
The image accompanying this post is of my alma mater, St. Cecilia High School, of Englewood, N.J. Nearly a quarter-century ago, it, like hundreds of other Catholic schools, succumbed to changing demographics and increasingly unfavorable financial trends that have dramatically transformed the Church in the United States over the past four decades.
The image accompanying this post is of my alma mater, St. Cecilia High School, of Englewood, N.J. Nearly a quarter-century ago, it, like hundreds of other Catholic schools, succumbed to changing demographics and increasingly unfavorable financial trends that have dramatically transformed the Church in the United States over the past four decades.
Over 1,300 parochial schools have closed since 1990 alone, with 300,000 students displaced, according to a fine piece by John DiLulio Jr. in the November 9, 2009 issue of America Magazine. (St. Cecilia’s Interparochial School—the elementary school--thankfully, remains open, for those of my readers who are wondering.)
Tomorrow marks the 125th anniversary of the beginning of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, the largest assemblage of Roman Catholic bishops, I have read, since the Council of Trent in the 16th century. The Plenary Council met for a month to pass measures related to a host of issues, including youth, doctrine, the role of secret societies, and music in worship. But one-fourth of their measures dealt with education.
Tomorrow marks the 125th anniversary of the beginning of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, the largest assemblage of Roman Catholic bishops, I have read, since the Council of Trent in the 16th century. The Plenary Council met for a month to pass measures related to a host of issues, including youth, doctrine, the role of secret societies, and music in worship. But one-fourth of their measures dealt with education.
It’s a fair bet to say that St. Cecilia’s—and its counterparts in parishes all over the country—wouldn’t have come into being at all if not for its blunt debates and prayerful deliberations.
For probably the next 90 years, down to when I passed through the parochial school system, the life of just about every American Roman Catholic was affected by the convocation that met in Baltimore’s Basilica of the Assumption. If you yourself did not pass through the schools, someone crucial in your life—a parent or parish priest—had. Moreover, as I will argue presently, the vitality of parishes often drew on the need to operate the schools.
But I doubt if anyone, outside of clergy or church historians, realizes all that transpired 125 years ago in Baltimore.
Above all, the growth of the parochial school system assumed irresistible momentum because of what was decided there. Bishop Edward Fitzgerald’s viewpoint, quoted above, was by no means a solitary one in this group. These days, with a thousand and one financial pressures impinging on the Church and its prelates, it’s also one you’re bound to hear voiced far more often than ever before.
I recommend DiLulio’s short piece, entitled “The Five M’s,” which prescribes the elements needed to preserve the 7,250 parochial schools still in existence: “mission, market, money, millennial and miracle.”
CCD, the straw that the American hierarchy has grasped, was supposed to provide at least a stopgap measure in transmitting Catholic values. At best, it’s been an imperfectly implemented noble experiment; at worst, it threatens to reduce the understanding of Catholic youth about their religion to the rough state of affairs that obtained when Archbishop John Hughes of New York set about building New York’s parochial school system in the 1840s.
One half of the difficulties facing Hughes is embodied in the one-sentence rejection of the larger native-born American Protestant population recalled by succeeding generations of Irish-American Catholics: “No Irish need apply”—crisp verbal shorthand evoking the hostile environment awaiting immigrants in the 1840s. But the other half of the problems stemmed from the lack of actual knowledge the new immigrants possessed of their faith--ignorance that would make them prey to proselytizers in their new land.
Hughes, writes novelist-essayist Peter Quinn, understandably strove to equip his churches with “the discipline and organization needed to survive in a hostile and brutally competitive environment.” When the New York state government stiff-armed his calls for aid to Catholic schools and greater respect for the sensibilities of Catholic students, he set about, with all the considerable energy this church chieftain could muster, building a separate school system for the children of his flock.
The Third Plenary Council, meeting some 20 years after Hughes’ death, pushed to the forefront the movement he spearheaded, through these measures:
* calling for the establishment of parish schools;
* setting out the pastor’s obligation for these'
* detailing the parish’s obligation to support these schools;
* obliging parents to send their children to Catholic schools.
Even in the best of times, this last requirement was never really filled. At a point when parishes could still rely on low-cost nuns to operate parochial schools, probably no more than one-third of Catholic parents sent their children there. Still, it’s inconceivable that the parochial school system—part of the larger network of church institutions parallel in those years to those in secular society—could have assumed the dimensions it eventually did without those decrees.
Is it really such a surprise that knowledge of key Church teachings can vary dramatically from students exposed several hours a day, several days a week versus those in a program lasting only about an hour, with uncertain ongoing commitments from student and even parents?
According to the 1977 post-Vatican II document from the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education (SCCE), L’Ecole Catholique (The Catholic School): “The integration of faith and life is part of a lifelong process of conversion until the pupil becomes what God wishes him to be. Young people have to be taught to share their personal lives with God. They are to overcome their individualism and discover, in the light of faith, their specific vocation to live responsibly in a group with others.”
Ah, there’s the rub—that implicit rebuke to “individualism,” perhaps the dominant philosophical strain of American life, one that, if anything, has only gathered gale force since the 1960s.
The SCCE is shrewd in taking note of that tendency, but in other ways, I think, this document remains wanting. There is this sentence, for instance: “From the economic point of view the position of very many Catholic schools has improved and in some countries is perfectly acceptable.” I’m not sure which countries the authors had in mind, but whatever was true in 1977 would undoubtedly have to be sharply revised now.
But there is another aspect of Catholic schools that the report, in its laudable focus on the effect on youth, shortchanges: the impact on the larger faith community.
Pastors may understandably groan at the economic burden of a Catholic school (after all, they didn’t become priests to become accountants and managers), but the effort to maintain the school draws on the talents and energy of a parish in a way that nothing else can. Families come to know each other far more closely than they would otherwise.
Did Archbishop Hughes guess that when he advocated “to build the school-house first, and the church afterward”? Probably not, but it emerged as a happy consequence of his position.
Bishop Fitzgerald was unafraid to buck prevailing opinion (he was one of only two bishops to vote against the doctrine of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1869), but even he came around to the need for schools under his jurisdiction. By his silver jubilee as bishop in 1892, 31 schools had been built or were under construction in the Little Rock diocese.
Nowadays, of course, so much has changed. The hostility to Catholicism so prevalent in the 19th century no longer obtains, one argument runs. Why maintain parochial schools at all, particularly when anywhere from one-fifth to one-fourth of its students are not even Catholic?
Supporters of the system—including those in the Church hierarchy—point out, rightly, that the closure of so many parochial schools will leave displaced minority students at an extreme disadvantage with so many substandard public schools. But another constituency will be—and, I believe, already has been—affected by school openings: parishes themselves.
In the future, if parishioners will need to make an overwhelming commitment in money and energy in maintaining elementary and high schools, pastors and archbishops will need to give up something of their own that may be harder to yield: autonomy in overseeing them.
Catholic schools are facing an environment of unprecedented challenges, but that does not mean they are inevitably part of the American Church’s past. That should not discourage or deter anyone. The Church has endured two millennia, but only by confronting problems with the same level of reflection, hope and courage required in this instance.
For probably the next 90 years, down to when I passed through the parochial school system, the life of just about every American Roman Catholic was affected by the convocation that met in Baltimore’s Basilica of the Assumption. If you yourself did not pass through the schools, someone crucial in your life—a parent or parish priest—had. Moreover, as I will argue presently, the vitality of parishes often drew on the need to operate the schools.
But I doubt if anyone, outside of clergy or church historians, realizes all that transpired 125 years ago in Baltimore.
Above all, the growth of the parochial school system assumed irresistible momentum because of what was decided there. Bishop Edward Fitzgerald’s viewpoint, quoted above, was by no means a solitary one in this group. These days, with a thousand and one financial pressures impinging on the Church and its prelates, it’s also one you’re bound to hear voiced far more often than ever before.
I recommend DiLulio’s short piece, entitled “The Five M’s,” which prescribes the elements needed to preserve the 7,250 parochial schools still in existence: “mission, market, money, millennial and miracle.”
CCD, the straw that the American hierarchy has grasped, was supposed to provide at least a stopgap measure in transmitting Catholic values. At best, it’s been an imperfectly implemented noble experiment; at worst, it threatens to reduce the understanding of Catholic youth about their religion to the rough state of affairs that obtained when Archbishop John Hughes of New York set about building New York’s parochial school system in the 1840s.
One half of the difficulties facing Hughes is embodied in the one-sentence rejection of the larger native-born American Protestant population recalled by succeeding generations of Irish-American Catholics: “No Irish need apply”—crisp verbal shorthand evoking the hostile environment awaiting immigrants in the 1840s. But the other half of the problems stemmed from the lack of actual knowledge the new immigrants possessed of their faith--ignorance that would make them prey to proselytizers in their new land.
Hughes, writes novelist-essayist Peter Quinn, understandably strove to equip his churches with “the discipline and organization needed to survive in a hostile and brutally competitive environment.” When the New York state government stiff-armed his calls for aid to Catholic schools and greater respect for the sensibilities of Catholic students, he set about, with all the considerable energy this church chieftain could muster, building a separate school system for the children of his flock.
The Third Plenary Council, meeting some 20 years after Hughes’ death, pushed to the forefront the movement he spearheaded, through these measures:
* calling for the establishment of parish schools;
* setting out the pastor’s obligation for these'
* detailing the parish’s obligation to support these schools;
* obliging parents to send their children to Catholic schools.
Even in the best of times, this last requirement was never really filled. At a point when parishes could still rely on low-cost nuns to operate parochial schools, probably no more than one-third of Catholic parents sent their children there. Still, it’s inconceivable that the parochial school system—part of the larger network of church institutions parallel in those years to those in secular society—could have assumed the dimensions it eventually did without those decrees.
Is it really such a surprise that knowledge of key Church teachings can vary dramatically from students exposed several hours a day, several days a week versus those in a program lasting only about an hour, with uncertain ongoing commitments from student and even parents?
According to the 1977 post-Vatican II document from the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education (SCCE), L’Ecole Catholique (The Catholic School): “The integration of faith and life is part of a lifelong process of conversion until the pupil becomes what God wishes him to be. Young people have to be taught to share their personal lives with God. They are to overcome their individualism and discover, in the light of faith, their specific vocation to live responsibly in a group with others.”
Ah, there’s the rub—that implicit rebuke to “individualism,” perhaps the dominant philosophical strain of American life, one that, if anything, has only gathered gale force since the 1960s.
The SCCE is shrewd in taking note of that tendency, but in other ways, I think, this document remains wanting. There is this sentence, for instance: “From the economic point of view the position of very many Catholic schools has improved and in some countries is perfectly acceptable.” I’m not sure which countries the authors had in mind, but whatever was true in 1977 would undoubtedly have to be sharply revised now.
But there is another aspect of Catholic schools that the report, in its laudable focus on the effect on youth, shortchanges: the impact on the larger faith community.
Pastors may understandably groan at the economic burden of a Catholic school (after all, they didn’t become priests to become accountants and managers), but the effort to maintain the school draws on the talents and energy of a parish in a way that nothing else can. Families come to know each other far more closely than they would otherwise.
Did Archbishop Hughes guess that when he advocated “to build the school-house first, and the church afterward”? Probably not, but it emerged as a happy consequence of his position.
Bishop Fitzgerald was unafraid to buck prevailing opinion (he was one of only two bishops to vote against the doctrine of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1869), but even he came around to the need for schools under his jurisdiction. By his silver jubilee as bishop in 1892, 31 schools had been built or were under construction in the Little Rock diocese.
Nowadays, of course, so much has changed. The hostility to Catholicism so prevalent in the 19th century no longer obtains, one argument runs. Why maintain parochial schools at all, particularly when anywhere from one-fifth to one-fourth of its students are not even Catholic?
Supporters of the system—including those in the Church hierarchy—point out, rightly, that the closure of so many parochial schools will leave displaced minority students at an extreme disadvantage with so many substandard public schools. But another constituency will be—and, I believe, already has been—affected by school openings: parishes themselves.
In the future, if parishioners will need to make an overwhelming commitment in money and energy in maintaining elementary and high schools, pastors and archbishops will need to give up something of their own that may be harder to yield: autonomy in overseeing them.
Catholic schools are facing an environment of unprecedented challenges, but that does not mean they are inevitably part of the American Church’s past. That should not discourage or deter anyone. The Church has endured two millennia, but only by confronting problems with the same level of reflection, hope and courage required in this instance.
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