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.
It’s a result of a number of converging causes.
The so-called “Spirit of Vatican II” had two bad results: Huge declines in most of the religious orders of Sisters, and the evisceration of catechetical texts. Instead of the four cardinal virtues, you got a lot of fuzzy feelgood “we are church.”
The immigrant neighborhoods in the cities were destroyed, deliberately, by liberals who brought blacks into the old ethnic neighborhoods. At the same time, the old prejudices against Catholics and ethnics began to break down. The Irish and the Catholics and the Poles and other Catholics moved out to the suburbs and mingled with the formerly Mainline Protestants, who mostly didn’t go to church any more, or did so with less commitment to traditional values.
So, parochial schools that used to be filled with Italians or Irish are now admitting anyone who applies. But the old parishes are not as strong as they used to be, and many are closing for lack of members.
We have been working hard to renew our parochial school here in central Vermont, but it’s a hard battle, and it’s undermined by past decades of Vatican II nonsense. Most of the teachers, as elsewhere, are lay teachers, who are committed to the project but need salaries to live on.
Yep - the local Catholic elementary/middle school is bursting at the seams, and this weekend will break ground for a new campus. A Catholic high school (not formally connected with the Archdiocese) opened a few years ago with a small but steadily growing enrollment.
“We are not Catholic ...”
Neither are we, but we have sent our daughter to Catholic school since second grade. She will attend the Catholic high school next year. The tuition (even for non-Catholics) at the elementary school was about half the amount for the “elite” private school in town, and the classroom materials at the Catholic school were about one grade level ahead of those used in the private academy in every grade.
I went to a 2 room Catholic school and it was the BEST education!! VERY POOR KIDS got the same education as the richer ones. Those days will NEVER come back....sadly.
AMEN!!! BIG Houses...EXPENSIVE Cars......Extravgant Vacations....designer Clothes.....all seem to be more important than a RELIGION FOUNDATION to so many parents these days!
Ahem.....we have ALL lived thru the Liberal Takeover but most of us have kept the FAITH......you sadly gave up on Jesus being in control. HIS Church has had many, many trials....and will have many, many more.
Wow, Catholic schools are popping up like mushrooms where I live.
Convert! ;0)
My daughter is now in 10 grade, she has attended Catholic schools since pre-school, I have/will have shelled out about $67,000 by the time she graduates in 2 years. This doesn’t include uniforms, books, etc, but EVERY PENNY was/is worth it!
The Catholic elementary school I attended closed a few years ago, which saddened me to no end. It had been opened by Polish immigrants in 1911, along with my church, which is still going strong (but with noticably fewer families there, I wonder why?). I am not Polish, but my grandfather joined the parish when he moved his family into the community, and sent his children (including my father) to the Catholic school.
The Catholic high school I attended is still going strong, but it has to. Ten years before I went to high school, all of the Catholic high schools in the city merged into one high school.
I am thankful every day that my parents saved wherever we could to pay for me and my sister to attend Catholic school. This is, of course, also part of the problem. Sometimes people cannot justifiably meet the cost, and I think something should be done to assist them. However, in some cases, parents aren’t sending their kids to Catholic school and buying themselves a nicer car. That’s sinful behavior, in my opinion. Wait until the kids are out of school before you drive the nice car. That’s what my parents did. Now that my sister and I are out of college, my parents are remodeling rooms in the house and driving a Trailblazer SUV. And they’ve earned it.
Oh, and my house only costed 65,000 when I bought it.
I attended a Catholic School in Middlesex County, NJ, back in the late 70s/early 80s. My mother attended this school as did my grandmother.
This Catholic school closed its doors for good last year due to a declining enrollment.
I just wonder if you could clarify this statement for my education. Did they do this through federal housing subsidies or what? I'm still trying to figure out how Detroit was destroyed. My parents grew up in Detroit and lived there until the riots in the late 60's, walked around freely downtown as children, etc. Their stories about life there in the 40's and 50's are literally incredible when you think about how it is there now. My teenage students laughed at me when I told them Detroit used to be a nice city. They really thought I was kidding.
E. Michael Jones has written about the process of how the old ethnic neighborhoods in the inner cities were destroyed. It is a VERY touchy subject, and although he used to be a friend I confess that I broke with him over what I thought was an antisemitic streak in some of his later writings.
Nevertheless, his book on the destruction of the cities, “The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing,” which is the top one listed here, is well worth reading:
http://www.culturewars.com/books.htm
Basically, the process began with FDR, who moved large numbers of black workers into Chicago and the other northern cities during the Second World War, to work in the defense plants. Stalin was doing similar things, moving populations around to break up cultures and fragment opposition to his policies, and I think FDR took a leaf from his book.
It continued with the “urban planning” initiatives put forward by Democrats in federal, state, and local governments, after the war. And it became entangled with Martin Luther King’s movement, which started out with desegregation in the South but in its last years included MLK’s visits to such places as Chicago.
Federal judges decreed school bussing measures in the northern cities, forcing white parents to flee to the suburbs. And the Quakers seem to have played a role disproportionate to their numbers.
Some of it was well-intentioned, no doubt. But some of it seems to have involved the Country Club establishment, which was then WASP, and its desire to deal with what was seen as a political threat from Catholics, who were growing in numbers and morally conservative, and opposed to the kind of “sexual liberation” the establishment was working for.
problem was, the whole scheme was TOO SUCCESSFUL.....we didn't want to work in the shoe factory, we wanted either college or training of some sort....we wanted money, we wanted a little nicer house, better furniture, better cars, and we wanted to spoil our little children rotten, and we did all that....
we had to move away, to the suburbs or bigger city to do it...our old schools and churches suffered for that..
to this day, the best memories I have of any school I attended were of my grammar school and my church.....both still exist buy not as it once was....
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