Controversy over sale of Catholic high school in California

CNA ^ | November 21, 2007

[NYer]

Los Angeles, Nov 21, 2007 / 06:02 pm (CNA).- The pending closure of a Catholic high school in Los Angeles has driven parents to fundraising activity and has raised allegations that the school is only being sold to cover lawsuit settlements in child abuse cases, the California Catholic reports.

Last Saturday about 200 parents, students, and alumni of the 53-year-old Daniel Murphy High School marched from Pershing Square to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.  They carried signs reading “Don’t Make the Children Pay” and “No More Victims.”

In October the Archdiocese of Los Angeles announced it would close the school, citing "severe financial challenges" and a decline in the student population.

Though the archdiocese said “efforts to increase student enrollment over the past ten years” had failed, a parent's letter to Pope Benedict XVI, received by the California Catholic Daily, claimed that the archdiocese has in the past capped freshman enrollment.  The letter claimed that “there has been no official Archdiocese involvement with enrollment at Daniel Murphy,” and said parents did not know about the school's financial trouble or its subsidies from the archdiocese until the announcement that the school would close.

Parents have committed to higher tuition and more fundraising if the school stays open.  They have agreed to pay an additional $1,000 to the school's $5,100 annual tuition, which will bring in an extra $240,000 per year in funding.  They have also agreed to two mandatory raffles they hope would bring in $80,000 a year.  The money would replace the archdiocesan subsidy to the school of $180,000 per year.

The parents claim archdiocesan officials rebuffed their fundraising plans at a meeting last month, and that the archdiocese has forbidden school supporters from meeting on school grounds and forbidden faculty and staff to assist them.

They say the archdiocese is set on selling the school's 2.7-acre site, which they claim could bring in $25 to $40 million.

Proceeds of the sale could help pay off the archdiocese's $373 million portion of a $660 million settlement with victims of molestation by priests.

The archdiocese has said it will not change its decision to close the school, but in a statement it said that they “will continue to work with parents and students to help make the transition to new schools as easy and as affordable as possible."

[NYer]

First it was the old nuns losing their Convent; now it is the children losing their High School. The solution is quite simple.

SELL THE CATHEDRAL!

[MrEdd]

After they discarded the "keep pedophiles away from children" solution decades ago, they weren't left with any good choices.

[FloreatIacobus]

SELL THE CATHEDRAL!

As you say, the solution is quite simple.

[steve8714]

No, sell the Chancery...

[steve8714]

Oh, wait, it was sold along with Mahony’s soul.

[madprof98]

SELL THE CATHEDRAL!

I don't think they can legally do that. I understand the cardinal sold burial plots inside of it for all the pro-abortion politicians whose support he has cultivated.

[Jeff Chandler]

SELL THE CATHEDRAL!

The one designed by Picasso?

[Antoninus]

I agree. Sell the Cathedral. I hear Southwest is looking for more hangar space in LA anyway.

[bboop]

Hmmm, used to be the Catholic Church offered FREE educations to their parishioners, did they not? So as to raise up a solid next generation. Now Mahoney keeps the things dearest to him and SELLS all the rest — the schools, the convents/ anything that would build and protect the flock. Shame and shame again on him. May our good Pope boot him out soon.

[Mrs. Don-o]

AFAIK, Catholic schooling was never tuition-free, but it could be affordable for all parishioners and perhaps free for the poorest, because parishes could subsidize costs. This was because for most of their existence, Catholic schools in the USA were staffed by teaching orders of sisters who were paid very little. Often they just got housing/utilities (a parish-owned convent or sister-teachers' residence), food, a small grant to the convent for general expenses, and a very small stipend for each Sister.

The census of teaching sisters' orders has crashed --- the whole sad history of this has yet to be written --- and most Catholic schools are now staffed by laypeople who need to be paid actual wages. Nationally, Catholic school teachers make anywhere from $5,000 to 15,000 dollars less per year than their public school counterparts, and their benefits are worse, too. But they have to be paid enough to live on, anyway --- and that has quadrupled and quintupled Catholic Schools' tuitions compared to the 1950's.

Incidentally, a recent publication by the United States Department of Education has admitted that the average cost of public education per pupil is slightly more than double the cost per pupil of a private education, even though public schools have more students per teacher. Therefore private (including parochial) schooling is about as economically efficient as it is humanly possible to be.

[Salvation]

Actually we need to be praying for the true conversion of Roger Cardinal Mahony’s soul to orthodoxy rather than the liberalism where he is now stuck.

[steve8714]

Sadly, it ain’t happening.