Sunday, April 25, 2010

Quote of the Day (Wayne McDowell, on the Decision to Close His Old Parochial School)


“My faith is being tested. I can’t believe this is my archdiocese doing this.”—Wayne McDowell, board member of Cardinal Gibbons School, Baltimore, formerly St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, where Babe Ruth learned how to play baseball, quoted in Richard Sandomir, “A Fight to Save The House That Built Ruth,” The New York Times, April 18, 2010

McDowell is so incensed at Baltimore Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien that he is considering wearing a sign saying, “Save Cardinal Gibbons, Fire the Archbishop.” Alumni of other parochial schools that have closed—including the present blogger—will find all too familiar a tale in how the archdiocese has proceeded against Cardinal Gibbons School (in the image accompanying this post):

* insisting that, as a prerequisite for keeping the school open, that the budget be balanced—then closing the school anyway;

* providing parents and administrators no warning that the closing will occur—not even discouraging schools from sending out letters to freshmen;

* turning a deaf ear to entreaties to keep the school open; and

* not revealing an ulterior motive—the possibility of selling the land to a developer.

As far as testing faith is concerned, the closure of a school does not rank with the current sexual abuse crisis. But the two situations do have a few things in common: a failure of foresight on the part of archdiocesan administrators to plan for a future involving massive change and real danger, and paying no heed to the people who comprise the Church in the first place.

Parents raised their children in the Church because they believed it had soul. In the case of the church-abuse crisis, they found that the Church hierarchy had the souls of lawyers and public-relations specialists; in the case of school (and church) closings, the hierarchy displayed the souls of accountants.

As in the church-abuse cases, the hierarchy have been oblivious to the deep resentment they’re causing. Parents don’t take well to religious institutions that act like a multi-state chain retailer closing stores left and right.

Cardinal Gibbons is one of two high schools with a fine athletic tradition now being closed. Another, in New Jersey, where I live, is Paterson Catholic, a powerhouse for the last two decades in football and basketball, now told that it, too, would have to shut its doors—and leaving students and prospective students in a mad scramble to be placed in the remaining parochial schools in the area.

I wish a good history of parochial schools in the last four decades could be written. Its conclusion would be simple and sad: It didn’t have to turn out the way it did, with wave after wave of school closings.

Changing demographics, it has been said, spelled doom for these schools. But remember: the Catholic school system survived even the Great Depression. Now, in an era when Catholics enjoy an affluence unlike any other time in its history, too many schools do not employ the most elemental principles of marketing. But the real fault is the lack of commitment at the highest levels of the archdiocese--the failure to use every ounce of persuasion, eloquence, and inspiration to make Catholics believe in the importance of parochial schools.

Time and again, archdioceses have thought they could save on the bottom line in closing these schools. But all too often, in how they went about the business--in rupturing bonds of tradition that united generations and made parish church, school and community a dynamic whole--they squandered something infinitely more precious: parishioners’ good will and faith.

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