Posted on 04/03/2008 7:53:08 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
My old Catholic elementary school has been struggling, and that's not good for anybody.
St. Germaine School in Pittsburgh, Pa. will merge with another Catholic school because of declining enrollment at both schools. St. Germaine's enrollment dropped from 172 students just six years ago to 86 this year.
Sister Dale McDonald, Director of Public Policy and Education Research at the National Catholic Educational Association, told me that declining enrollment is a national trend. Though there is some growth in the South and the West, Catholic schools are shutting down at the rate of more than 100 per year.
Why? Catholic families are having fewer children. Costs have gone up -- health care, teacher salaries, liability insurance -- driving tuitions up. And Catholic families aren't as attached to their parish as families were when I was a kid.
Lucky for me, I came out of a rich Catholic tradition that was set in motion by millions of European immigrants who immigrated to America 100 years before I was born. They paved the way for me to enjoy a terrific experience at good old St. Germaine.
I entered the school in the first grade. I knew right away things were going to be different from the public school where I attended kindergarten. The sisters were clearly in charge of St. Germaine. The place was so orderly and clean you could eat off the floor.
The school was packed with kids. The church was built to service our growing suburban community. Many of the families that lived in our neighborhood moved there to be near the church and the school. Our parents were determined that we receive a good education and be taught solid values.
And, boy, did the sisters deliver.
Every day they taught us to embrace the virtues: prudence, temperance and courage. They demanded we fend off the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth. They made us sit up straight and keep our shirts tucked in.
When they weren't pounding values into us, they worked us hard in math, science, reading and writing. Unlike many of today's public school teachers, the sisters didn't dwell on boosting our self-esteem; that was something we had to earn by producing results.
I didn't know it then, but the sisters gave us the gift of clarity. They portrayed the world as it really is -- a battle between good and evil. Every moment of every day, we are moving toward one and away from the other. The sisters were determined to give us the fortitude we would need to make the right decisions and move in the right direction.
My years at St. Germaine were eventful. The lead-ups to Christmas and Easter were always giant affairs -- the ceremonies, the planning, the excitement.
The sacraments of Holy Communion and Confirmation were huge deals that involved a special Mass and a family gathering -- a giant celebration that confirmed something important had occurred.
The sacrament of Confession was a big one, too. Confession is where you examine your conscience and soul and admit, out loud in front of another human being, exactly what you did wrong. I always tried to disguise my voice so that Father Kram wouldn't know who I was, and just when I'd think I got away with my disguise, he'd say, "God bless you, Tommy. Your penance will be three Hail Marys, three Our Fathers and…"
There were many times when my elementary school experience was unpleasant. The sisters demanded a lot from us, and I often failed to live up to their standards. But the fact is the values and lessons they hammered into me as a kid are in me still -- they guide me still.
As the world gets more confused every day -- as we lose our grasp of right and wrong and some people debate whether such concepts even exist -- we need more kids to have the elementary school experience I had.
Like I said, it's not good for anybody that so many Catholic schools are struggling.
May of these schools were the vestige of the golden age of Catholic immigration, where each ethnic group had their own parish and adjoining parochial schools. Once the grandchildren of the immigrants went on to live their lives in white collar bliss out in suburbia, these schools died a natural death.
Contraception is, quite literally, Satanic.
I attended Church of the Resurrection Catholic grade school in Pittsburgh, which sadly closed several years ago. My story is exactly like that of the author.
It was hard to let such a beautiful place go. Those Nuns and Priests were the most wonderful people in the world to me. When I was a kid I thought the whole world was Catholic.
Ah, the new springtime of Vatican II...
Tis a shame.Glad to hear that they are hanging in there in the south.Beats hell out of gubment schools.
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I blame the parents for many of the problems within my generation.
Instead of investing their money in quality private education sources, they buy Lexus or BMW vehicles for themselves, and deposit their kids into the government controlled publik skoolz with "teachers" like James Corbett.
Recent Article:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,345274,00.html
I remember learning about charity in school...we always had a mission we were sending our little dimes to....
and processions....we were always having processions..( Easter, First Communion, a May procession where we would crown the statue of Mary with flowers...).the Sisters actually had a stash of white fancy dresses for all the girls plus some lacy thing for our heads, and we are talking about many, many dresses.....and the nuns always had a stash of ties for the boys.....
we couldn't use real baseballs or softballs, so what we had to play with....mostly the boys...were these hand sewn "sock balls"....the boys would pitch it like a real baseball and the hitter would swing with his cuffed hand.....
since it was required that we girls always wear a dress, we froze waiting for school to open in the mornings...the bus would let you off and then you would wait.....we were so cold, it became a game for the girls to stand by the nuns front door and run up to them as each one came out so we could go inside to clean the chalk boards,etc...but mostly to get warm....it was quite a contest....
can anyone imagine living that way now?.....
sad but maybe the best years are behind us in this country...
No, we just stopped being Polish, Italian, German, Irish, etc. and became Americans like the rest of the population...
Sadly, effective charter school reforms also help reduce demand for Catholic schools.
No, I don’t think it was solely an immigrant thing. Catholic kids went to Catholic schools not only in New York and the big ethnic centers, but all over the country, including places where their families hadn’t been “immigrants” for over a hundred years.
There might have been some decline in urban areas, but certainly, the “old” immigrants would have been replaced by new ones, such as Hispanics, if it was simply a matter of ethnic identity.
What happened was that the schools changed. Most of them are no longer staffed by nuns or religious orders, which changed the environment and also made the schools more expensive. Most of them abandoned Catholic doctrine and were distinguishable from public schools only by the slightly better behavior of their children, whose parents obviously cared enough to send them to Catholic school. I had my kids in Catholic school years ago and took them out because I figured it was better for them to hear bizarre leftist pap from a public school than from some place where they might make the mistake of thinking it was Catholic doctrine.
At my local parish school, the majority of the kids (and lots of the teachers) are not Catholic. Catholics feel no urgency to send their kids to Catholic school because in most cases there is no longer anything specially Catholic about it.
Furthermore, the inherent racism of the liberal mindset is on display. Catholic schools in black areas, for example, often attracted non-Catholic students whose parents wanted to spare them the dangers of public school (and large scholarship funds were set up to pay for them). But no effort was made to convert these children and their parents, and in some schools that I knew, the kids did not even have to participate as spectators in the religious activities. That was during a disastrous period when the Church stopped preaching the Truth; now, at least, in most schools parents do have to agree that their children will participate in religious activities.
The problem was not “becoming American.” It was the liberal takeover of the Catholic Church, which destroyed the religious orders and took away the heart of the Catholic school system. There was no longer any point in sending your kids to Catholic school, and that was what killed it.
When government gives away a FREE product, government distorts the market!
Government schools are price-fixed monopoly that gives education away for **free**. If a group of CEOs were to collude to do this in any other industry those CEO would be facing LONG prison terms!
BINGO!
It is the **main** reason I am no longer Catholic. It lost its heart. I am pleased to see many today are trying to reform the institution and bring the Church back to its roots.
My husband also attended tuition free Catholic schools in New Jersey. His parents, all of his cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents attended tuition-free Catholic schools.
I met my husband while attending Villanova University. Sadly, even in the 70s it was a hot bed of Liberation Theology. In my opinion it was Catholic in name only.
A lot of this simply comes down to a failure in Catechesis that has taken hold since the 60s. (No, I am NOT blaming V-II for this, but how V-II was hijacked by the “liberals” and used to hijack the teachings of the Church)
The Church “adapted” (was hijacked) to the modern world and many within the Church adopted modernism as their true religion. We see the results, not only in decreased family size, but in vocations, the downfall of formerly holy religious orders, homosexual priest abuse, representatives of the Church taking on political views that are diametrically opposed to the Magesterium, and so on.
The local particular Churches need to be taken back...forcefully...from those who hijacked them. Those of us who actually believe the teachings of the Universal Church need to become activists for the Truth.
In my town, the sisters ran Catholic schools that were free and were supported mostly by a fair held once a year. This is the South, and we’re talking about pre-integration times, so they ran separate schools for blacks and whites. There were two separate fairs - and the black fair always produced twice the money that the white fair did!
The posts here make me appreciate the Catholic school my daughter is going to even more. It is definitely a very “Catholic” Catholic school. I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten in other places. In fact, my daughter going to this school has convinced my husband to return to the Catholic church of his childhood. We had put off taking her out of the public schools for many years, because we believed to some degree the liberal lie that the private schools are “not much different” than public schools. We started her in the Catholic school in 8th grade and it is incredibly different and worlds better than the public school where she was. As an advanced student, she actually gets recognized as such, and religion is a part of everything they do. So I hope the trend mentioned in this article can be reversed at least in some areas.
That’s wonderful, and I think there are definitely great Catholic schools out there. The good ones are bustin’ at the seams, of course.
The bishops are always eager to blame the laity, sociological forces, or anything but themselves for the decline of (a) Catholic schools, (b) Mass attendance, (c) vocations - well, you name it. But the reality is that places where the Catholic faith is taught and practiced, whether schools or parishes, are doing just fine.
We have a couple of excellent Catholic schools here. I am considering sending my two year old to one of them when she is school age.
We are not Catholic, but these schools offer the best education in town combined with values I fully support.
I just have to figure out how we’ll pay the extra $1000 yearly fee for non-Catholics. :)
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