Spiritual Direction: The State Of Catholic Education Today

What are Catholic Schools and Religious Education doing today to win back a generation of students who appear for the most part to be lost, bewildered, and in some cases non-believing?

The answer is a resounding- the exact same thing they have always done.

It may be a shock to some that less than seventy years ago Catholic Schools were thriving and so was Religious Education. Seldom if every student ever goes through their school experience without experiencing all of the Sacraments: First Communion, Confirmation, and then Marriage. Today with enrollments plummeting to less than 30% of the school population of the 1950s attending Catholic School it should not surprise anyone that there are more students out there missing one or more of their Sacraments than ever before in our history. Before the COVID pandemic, Church attendance among school-age students was hovering around 20% each week. This was before COVID, what is it now? What will it be when this pandemic is finally over with? Will we have to lose an entire generation of students before we wake up? Brothers and sisters, wake up right now. The generations we are losing are your sons and daughters, your grandchildren, and your nieces and nephews. These are not random statistics, they are real human beings with eternal souls.

What We Can Do About It.

Do not forget about it-we must make a stand now. Any more delay will result in irreversible harm to the Church and our Community. The Church can stand without people but for how long? The Church can stand without people, but where is their concern for the lost souls of this generation? The Church can stand without people, but should it? These are questions that must be asked and answered immediately. Entire parishes are merging and or closing down, why? Could it be a lack of attendance? In the 49 years since Roe v Wade more than 60 million people have been killed, are we trying to do the same with the Church by not engaging our youth?

Catholic Schools Can Not become Public Schools. If the Catholic School is going to teach like a public school they will lose out. It is a simple case of why would you pay for something that you could get for free? The Catholic Church Schools were better back 70 years ago than the public schools because they taught their students: standards, morals, faith, religion, how to think, and had high expectations. Today, this is not the case but a closer look at history reveals that this has always been the case. Catholic schools have been part of the American experience, possibly since 1606, when Franciscans landed with the explorers at St. Augustine, Florida, but not always this country’s public education. And there’s a reason why. Prior to the mid-1800s, there was no nationwide public education system in the United States. New England had a fairly developed public school system by 1850, but schools in the rest of the country were less developed, and many cities and towns had no public school at all. Mann’s education reform included the requirement that all children attend school and that the curriculum included instruction on the Bible. However, being a Unitarian who did not believe the Bible to be inerrant, he established a non-sectarian approach to Bible instruction. In other words, he focused on the things on which all or most Christians agreed and avoided the parts of the Bible where various denominations disagreed. In essence in the mid 19th century, educational reformer Horace Mann changed American culture by designing a school system to which every American youth was required to attend. In addition to a cursory religious education, students were taught to be upstanding moral citizens and hard workers. The result was that the state took over the primary role of educating all children and that education expanded beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic to religion and morals. When the Catholic bishops saw that this was going to harm faith and families, they quickly concluded that it was time for a large Catholic school system as well. At that time the Bishops put faith before any worldly advancement or ideas of assimilation because to err at such a young age in faith could have eternal consequences. This became even more urgent as millions of Catholic Irish and Italian immigrants began to pour into the country due to conditions in Europe such as the Irish potato famine as well as other political and economic conditions in Europe at the time. The immigrants entering the U.S. in the mid to late 1800s were mostly Catholic, and almost all of them were also very poor and uneducated. They would have been very susceptible to leaving the Catholic faith in a Protestant culture that still looked down on Catholicism and which ran a school system that was designed to assimilate children into a Protestant culture. Mann’s model still prevails in the public education system in the U.S. However, the U.S. is no longer Protestant, nor is it Christian. In fact, many public school administrators and boards fear lawsuits and public outcry so much, they often suppress Christianity in their school and give preferential treatment to LGBT groups, atheists, radical feminism, and other ideologies which conflict with Christianity. When a Christian or a Christian group attempts to challenge a school administration’s discrimination against a Christian, people often use fear of Satanic clubs and groups as justification: “If we allow you to use school property for your Christian activity, we’ll have to allow the use of our property for Satanist clubs.”

The Catholic School Crisis in America today is a direct result of the Religious Education System of the Catholic Church trying to copy the public school systems and getting away from what they do best: teaching the faith of the Church.

Teaching the principles of the Church, and most of all provide the proper support for families to support religious education at home. With the Church, Parents, and Students involved-how could this fail? When you add prayers, Daily Mass, and God-how can it fail? Brother and sisters the answer is simple: why were they successful in 1960 with over five million students-today there are about one million students with half of the number of schools sixty-two years later. What does this say? Can we finally admit that this experiment to become a public school has been a failure? When we do and when we realize that we should get back to teaching our children our faith-maybe then we will once again develop an educational system that is second to none. Amen.