The costs and responsibility of Catholic schools

This is the letter I never wrote to the daily papers of Philadelphia and its suburbs when the archdiocese announced its plan to close nearly 50 schools, displacing thousands of elementary and high school students. I thought it might help to look at some long held, unspoken but unverified presuppositions. It might show how so many people could be so far apart.

First, there are three, not two main groups involved. Media coverage had only the parents affected and the archdiocese officials. They were pitted against each other, with the emotional confrontation making for raw media copy. The one group understandably expressed anger and sadness that the schools they had sacrificed and worked and paid for were now no longer to be available because there were too few students and therefore too high a tuition to pay for some schools to survive. Archbishop Charles Chaput expressed sadness too, adding that consolidation should have been done years ago before it got this serious, and that the archdiocese had already contributed to hurting schools three quarters of a billion dollars over the last 10 years.

Some parents countered that even more should be given for so worthy a need. This presumes that there were such resources, a common presupposition being that “the church has all that money.” It does have resources, most of which are in real estate which, as everyone knows, gains or loses value over time. True, there are rich parishes that can afford wonderful amenities while inner-city ones go wanting. Parishes are independent financially. Maybe they should not be. But the fallacy sometimes is that the diocese has huge holdings when, it turns out, Catholics donate only 1 percent of their income in the basket. Without comparable schools, Protestants contribute 2 percent while Jews give 4. Maybe we were unaware if we have not been given clear financial information, or if a particular archdiocese, like Los Angeles, had to pay 66 million dollars to settle only some of its clergy sex-abuse claims.

The breath-taking cost of running a Catholic school hit home when, as has happened at least twice in the Camden Diocese, parents on their own try to run an independent Catholic school slated for closing because of too few students and too great a drain on the parish. The diocese limits parishes’ school subsidies to no more than 30 percent of their annual budgets. This is so that other parish needs do not suffer. Schools are costly entities that have to be subsidized somehow. The tuition, which is back-breaking for more and more families, pays for less than half of what it costs per child. This fact amazes many, especially those used to the tradition of religious sisters giving their lives for nearly no pay, back before the time when insurance was not a budget factor. Talk about broken backs.

So the two groups at odds, according to the media, are the school families and the archdiocesan officials. Who is the third group, on which falls so much of the blame even if this has slid under most media radar? It is the families who have decided to abandon the local parish or high school. Some say they cannot afford it. These may or may not know that tuition aid is available if parents are willing to divulge their IRS 1040s. But many times more have abandoned not just the school but the church.

We Catholics are the largest single religious denomination in the U.S, at 74 million. The second largest is the ex-Catholics. Some leave for conscientious reasons such as the clergy abuse scandal or doctrinal disputes like birth control or abortion or second marriage without annulment or an argument with a pastor or principal. But many leave because of sloth. Others have bought into the national religion of capitalism whereby hunger for materialist baubles outweighs tuition. Many of these enjoyed the benefits of a Catholic education in their time, only to turn their backs now. But they leave the church to which their sacrificing parents struggled to stay faithful. The media tell of dismal mass attendance in the U.S.

I have not seen any editorials or letters to the editor of the dailies chiding these departures, especially those whose Catholic education catapulted them to wealth. Greed turns out to be its own punishment since studies prove that people with firm religious roots are happier. Since it takes a whole parish to teach a child, those who desert hurt the common cause.