Timothy M. Dolan, The Catholic Schools We Need

America

I don't think this is the first time Archbishop Dolan has made a plea for diocesan schools, and in this essay he makes stronger claims for them than Greg Sisk did this past June and July (I haven't re-read Sisk's series to check):

The reasons for the decline are familiar: the steady drop in vocations to the religious teaching orders who were the greatest single work force in the church’s modern period; the drastic shift in demographics of the late-20th century that saw a dramatic drop-off in Catholic immigration from Europe; the rising cost of living since the late 1970s that forced nearly every American parent to become a wage-earner and put Catholic education beyond their budget; and the crumbling of an intact neighborhood-based Catholic culture that depended upon the parochial school as its foundation.

The most crippling reason, however, may rest in an enormous shift in the thinking of many American Catholics, namely, that the responsibility for Catholic schools belongs only to the parents of the students who attend them, not to the entire church. Nowadays, Catholics often see a Catholic education as a consumer product, reserved to those who can afford it. The result is predictable: Catholics as a whole in the United States have for some time disowned their school system, excusing themselves as individuals, parishes or dioceses from any further involvement with a Catholic school simply because their own children are not enrolled there, or their parish does not have its own school.

Since all Catholics benefit from a good diocesan school system, they all have a duty to support it:

The truth is that the entire parish, the whole diocese and the universal church benefit from Catholic schools in ways that keep communities strong. So all Catholics have a duty to support them. Reawakening a sense of common ownership of Catholic schools may be the biggest challenge the church faces in any revitalization effort ahead. Thus, we Catholics need to ask ourselves a risky question: Who needs Catholic schools, anyway?

Hence in his closing he reiterates: "Catholic education is a communal, ecclesial duty, not just for parents of schoolchildren or for parishes blessed to have their own school. Surely American Catholics have sufficient wealth and imagination to accomplish this."


I think that it was said with reference to the Archdiocese of New York that it operates the largest system of parochial schools in the United States? It therefore has the opportunity to model reform in Catholic education, instead of adhering to outmoded modes of thinking that may still be influenced by Americanism and the desire to please their Yankee neighbors (bad assimilation). Can there be a renewal of diocesan schools without a renewal of the diocese and of the parish? What is the Church in the United States going to do to stem mobility and social fragmentation? How is it going to work against the political economic system if it shares many of the same assumptions that govern American public education, which serves that system? (And does it not embrace many of the same modes of teaching and learning?)

Throwing out the textbooks, which may be anti-Catholic like those used by their peers attending secular public schools, but in a more subtle manner, would be a good first step, along with a focus on the learning of the arts at the primary level, followed by a rethinking of secondary education and university education. Unless these sort of concrete changes are taken by the bishops, defenses and exhortations, like this one by Archbishop Dolan, will lack credibility.