Monday, September 20, 2010
Archbishop Dolan's plan for New York's Catholic schools
I linked, a few days ago, to Archbishop Dolan's wonderful essay in America on the importance of Catholic schools. Today, the NYT is reporting on the Archbishop's plan to "save" Catholic schools by moving away from the parish-school model (in terms of governance and funding):
Each elementary school has until now been financed mainly by members of its local parish. But in the proposed reorganization, the cost of educating roughly 56,000 grade school students would be spread among all the parishes, and all the plate-passing churchgoers among 2.5 million Catholics in the archdiocese. . . .
Some of the implications of this plan?
[P]arishes forced to close schools have long been allowed to keep the money from the sale or rental of those properties, since in most cases the buildings were constructed and maintained with parishioners’ dollars. The windfalls provide a financial cushion that has helped sustain many struggling parishes.
Under Archbishop Dolan’s plan, however, all proceeds would go into a common fund for the education of children throughout the archdiocese.
Parent groups and principals also worry that centralized financing of schools will eliminate justification for a small tuition break now granted to students who live in the parish, a common practice in many parochial schools. With publicly financed charter schools already nibbling at the enrollment and viability of some Catholic schools, many school administrators — as well as parents working multiple jobs to pay tuition — are loath to give up any incentive, no matter how small. . . .
So, creative thinking and action like this is, in many places, essential. That said, the parish model is, in my view, the gold standard. To be sure, this model requires an engaged and energetic pastor, a congregation that appreciates the centrality of the school to the parish's (and the Church's) evangelical mission, and -- ideally -- smart managers who know how to pool resources with other schools to take advantage of economies of scale, etc. In today's world, it probably cannot be the only model. But, the move away from it is a loss.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/09/archbishop-dolans-plan-for-new-yorks-catholic-schools.html
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Archbishop Dolan's plan seems reasonable and perhaps unavoidable. But it seems to me that he is in much the same position as the pope has put himself in Europe. Both decry waning religious belief and declining influence, and yet their only plan seems to be to exhort people to do something to reverse the trend. Also, they make charges of anti-Catholicism.
Archbishop Dolan says in America Magazine: "Instead, the Catholic Church is now confronted by a new secularization asserting that a person of faith can hardly be expected to be a tolerant and enlightened American. Religion, in this view, is only a personal hobby, with no implications for public life. Under this new scheme, to take one’s faith seriously and bring it to the public square somehow implies being un-American."
I think that those who charge anti-Catholicism or want to portray Christians as a scorned minority are identifying *something*, but they haven't come up with the language or the concepts to define it. And I think in charging anti-Catholicism or anti-Christianity, they may just be making things worse. There is (according to Wikipedia) only one atheist in congress. There are six Catholics and three Jews on the Supreme Court. Yes, I suppose America is increasingly secular, but on the other hand, Americans don't look too kindly on those who profess no religious beliefs. I think until those who want to charge anti-Catholicism and anti-Christianity figure out how to explain the schizophrenic nature of the American embrace of, but suspicion about, religion, they run the risk of making themselves look silly, or look like aspirants to victimhood, in claiming to be persecuted.
It was interesting, though, that Archbishop Dolan put most of the blame for the plight of Catholic schools on Catholics themselves: "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." Although he does not rank other causes, surely another candidate for first place is "the steady drop in vocations to the religious teaching orders who were the greatest single work force in the church’s modern period."
But how are these things to be turned around?
There were some very interesting comments posted by Rick Garnett involving a book named Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. If religion wanes and secularity increases as a population becomes more "existentially secure," what hope is there to stem the trend toward secularity. How is it going to be done? Will the pope exhorting people to return to an embrace Christianity have any effect?