Catholic Schools In Name Only

An English Catholic bishop makes what to some of us is an obvious point: Bishop asks if church should stop funding schools that are ‘Catholic in name only” . The Bishop of Lancaster, Michael Campbell, wrote in his new year’s day pastoral letter that parishes needed to “address some demanding questions that will grow larger the longer we put them off”:

Is it right or sustainable to expect our Mass-going population of 21,000 to support our schools and colleges in which often the majority of pupils, and sometimes teachers, are not practising Catholics? Is it time for us to admit that we can no longer maintain schools that are Catholic in name only?

Faced with fewer priests and smaller congregations, where should our parishes and schools of the future be located? Where should we consolidate and merge others?

Granted, the schools can be organs of evangelization — one of the arguments for reducing their overt presentation of the Catholic faith — but they are also, as schools , primarily ways of passing an intellectual and cultural heritage and therefore a way of maintaining an identity through generations. Only when do they do this well can they be effective ways of evangelizing others. As the Bishop of Nottingham who chairs the Catholic Education Service of England and?Wales, Malcolm McMahon, said  in a statement quoted by the Telegraph :

The Church has established her own schools because she considers them as a privileged means of promoting human formation and education in the Catholic faith; as such, Catholic schools contribute to the common good of society and support the Church’s evangelising mission, and are a valuable investment in our young people.

Unfortunately, many Catholics, including the bureaucracies of several English dioceses, seem to see their schools more as social work enterprises than as inherited blessings letting the Church pass on the Catholic heritage and thereby institutions that can offer those blessings to (that is, evangelize) others. They flinch (I have actually seen this) when someone argues for asserting the school’s Catholic identity and immediately start chattering about “diversity” and “sensitivity” and “the needs of X, Y, and Z,” as if yu were suggesting a purge or pogrom, when you’re only suggesting the kind of effort — pride, if you will — every other group takes for granted. The Telegraph  story reports that

Westminster reported the highly successful Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School to the admissions watchdog, claiming parts of its policy for 11 year-olds were “unlawful” and “unfair”. Southwark also complained about the entry rules at Coloma Convent Girls’ Schools, which give more “points” to families to take part in parish activities, on the grounds that they discriminate against single parents.

The diocese reported their own school, note, to the government. One wants to be sensitive to the challenges single parents face, but parents — including some single parents — who sacrifice their time and energy for their parish should be rewarded for doing so. That is, among other things, a way of measuring how committed they are to the Church and to educating their children in her tradition. Not a perfect measure, but a good one and one of the few semi-objective ones a selection committee will have.

Readers interested in this subject will want to see the book by Charles Glenn, who wrote Disestablishing Our Secular Schools for our January issue,  The Ambiguous Embrace (Princeton 2000).