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 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...
Sadly, effective charter school reforms also help reduce demand for Catholic schools.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
Wow, Catholic schools are popping up like mushrooms where I live.
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.
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.