Catholic? Schools
I still remember the debate that hot afternoon in the school library. It was the Fall of 1981 and I was a new teacher at St. Joseph High School in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Various factions of the faculty and administration had, at a routine faculty meeting, become rapidly and almost unknowingly caught up in a heated discussion over what makes a Catholic school Catholic.
Was it a Catholic curriculum? A mostly Catholic curriculum? A somewhat Catholic curriculum? A Catholic faculty? A mostly Catholic faculty? A Catholic administration? A mostly Catholic administration and a somewhat Catholic faculty? Was it the presence of nuns or a priest? Or was it a certain percentage of Catholic students? Etc., etc.. Nobody seemed to know the proper ratio. I doubt whether the debate has changed much in the past 20 years simply because few seem to want to admit that the debate is really more about economics than religion.
Prior to Vatican II, Catholic schools, Catholic students, Catholic curriculum, Catholic teachers, the nuns, the parish priest, the parish church, were all synonymous with Catholic education. With Vatican II (though not directly because of it) came a meteoric drop in religious vocations and disaffections in droves from the religious orders upon which the rock of Catholic education rested. Catholic administrators were then forced by prevailing circumstances to hire lay teachers.
But whereas the nuns could be counted on to work for little more than room and board, these secular faculty had families to feed and thus demanded a real salary causing the business of Catholic education to become just that, a business. And whereas the once “nun-run” schools of yesteryear’s Catholic lore could focus solely on the education and salvation of souls to someday fill the streets of Heaven, the new salary hungry lay-run schools of more recent times must of economic necessity focus on the procurement of tuition-paying bodies to fill desks; many of which have been increasingly filled by non-Catholics.
This new migration fit nicely with the concurrent post-Vatican II hubbub over ecumenism and I’m sure many a school principal accepted these newcomers in the name of that movement. But the reality, at least in my view as a teacher in a Catholic school, was that what was being done on the surface under the banner of ecumenism was really being done in the back office in the name of hard-core economics. The school needed cash flow. And since non-Catholic cash looks the same as Catholic cash....
My purpose here isn’t to give a whole history of the Catholic school since Vatican II, nor is it to criticize the non-Catholic immigration or the new fiscal focus. After all, I was a lay teacher with a family to feed too and I never questioned which percentage of my paycheck was non-Catholic. Rather, my intent here is to propose what I see as the major question Catholic schools must continue to sincerely answer if they are to be worthy of the “Catholic” in their name.
I believe that the real measure of a Catholic school cannot be reduced to a ratio or a quota.. It can, however, be deduced to its ultimate ends. Ultimately, the true Catholic school must define for the souls entrusted to its care that the final reality is not graduation, but salvation; not getting into college, but getting into heaven; and not where we’ll stand on commencement day, but where we’ll stand on Judgment Day.
Any aim less than this and we have nothing but a public school that charges tuition.
Tim Rohr