“In the wake of Vatican II, “Radical reformers tore at every aspect of Catholic life, questioning time-honored practices and beliefs,” Phillip F. Lawler writes in The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture. “Catholic schools jettisoned their religious education programs; the old reliable Baltimore Catechism quickly became a collectors item. From what he found, it looks like too many parochial schools, while posting superior SAT scores vis-a`-vis public institutions of lower learning, are in danger of becoming Catholic in Name Only, or CINO.”
Catholics who hung on to the “old” ways were hounded out of the Church. Oh BTW, the danger is long past. When Catholic school children can’t name the four evangalists, the money spent on tuition would be better spent on beer.
Catholic schools today seem to be nothing more than private schools with a crucfix out front. I think there’s also a “follow the money” aspect to it in that a non-Catholic student pays an higher unsubsidized tuition rate so the schools want as many of them as they can get without regard to “faith”. It used to be that the schools were seen as a means of “propagating the faith”, but that’s gone.