Catholic Schools Dying a Slow and Painful Death

Just this past week, it was announced that two more Catholic schools in my hometown of Jersey City would be shutting their doors for good. Despite merging a few years ago, St. Patrick's and Assumption-All Saints School can no longer sustain their finances. Two legends of Jersey City, Father Francis Schiller and Sister Maeve McDermott, have managed to keep the school open all this time through skillful, innovative fund-raising. But both will be retiring this year, and that is what ultimately sealed the fate of the K-8 school that has stood at the intersection of Bramhall Ave. and Grand St. for exactly 100 years.

Also closing their doors will be St. Mary's High School, located in Jersey City's downtown section. The school was already on life support, barely getting by with enough students to justify its existence. But when a recent open house brought only 15 registrants, it was clear that there was no way St. Mary's could remain open.

And so the trend continues. With each passing year, more and more Catholic schools have to either a) merge with another school or schools in order to remain open, or b) close up shop altogether. It's not something that just happened overnight. The decline in enrollment has been evolving slowly but surely for the past several decades.

I come from three generations of relatives who attended Catholic school in Jersey City. My grandfather was a proud graduate of St. Paul's grammar school in the Greenville section, class of 1926. My mother and her two brothers also attended Saint Paul's, and I actually enrolled there for first grade in 1976. Only when my family moved to the west side of Kennedy Boulevard did the tradition end, as we now resided in another parish with its own school. Thus my parents enrolled me in Our Lady of Mercy grammar school in 1977, and I would be there from second through eighth grade, making all my sacraments before finally graduating in 1984.

The stories my grandfather and mother would share with me frightened me to death. They'd tell of priests and nuns who would smack you in the head if you so much as stepped out of line in the hallway. If you got caught chewing gum, then you'd have to wear it on your nose for the rest of the school day. The nuns teaching in the classroom would march up and down the aisles with a yardstick in hand, ready to whack the first student who misbehaved.

But there was no denying the results. Kids learned, and they behaved. My mother's classes were filled to the brim with fifty students. Fifty. Today, that would be considered an outrage. Over the years, educational research has shown that smaller classes mean higher levels of student achievement and better classroom behavior. But for whatever reason, that wasn't the case all those years ago. Maybe those nuns were on to something.

When my mother attended Catholic school, every classroom was occupied by a nun. But she graduated during the 1960s, and it was around this time that things really began to change. There was a lot of upheaval both in the Catholic Church and in our country. Across the United States, young people organized all sorts of protests in an all-out social revolution. They railed against sexism, racism, and the Vietnam War. They rebelled against the notion that sex was merely for procreation. The 60's gave birth to the feminism movement and the civil rights movement. The music of this era reflected the mood of the protesters, as did films and television. There were also several assassinations that took place: JFK, RFK, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King all met their untimely demise during this chaotic decade.

But it wasn't just American culture that was rapidly changing. Inside the Roman Catholic Church, Pope John XXIII began his own revolution. He felt that massive reforms were needed in order for the Church to adapt to the present day. Thus he convened the Second Vatican Council in 1962, and Church leaders spent the next three years formulating ways to renew Catholicism and initiate a dialogue with the contemporary world.

The Second Vatican Council would forever change Catholicism as people knew it. The traditional Latin mass was discontinued in favor of a liturgy that would employ the vernacular (i.e., the language of the community where the mass takes place). Lay people were given a much bigger role in the Church. The college of Bishops were assigned a more prominent place in the Church's leadership.

In the end, the massive changes that took place both inside the Church and across the United States had a devastating effect on religious vocations and the role that religion played in society. Vocations sharply declined and religous faith and morals became less and less relevant. It was at this time that two trends began to emerge in Catholic education: less nuns in the classroom and less students enrolled in the schools.

When I attended Our Lady of Mercy, nuns were still a presence, but not nearly to the degree that they were when my mother attended Saint Paul's. There were three homerooms in every grade, and generally speaking, each grade had one nun and two lay people teaching. Classes of fifty students were a thing of the past. Most classes had anywhere from 25 to 30, though overall enrollment in the school was still very healthy. For the most part, there were families in the parish who valued Catholic education and wanted their children to have religion incorporated into their everyday lives.

But how things have gone downhill since. Just as vocations and Catholic school enrollment declined from my parents' era to my era, it has fallen even more steeply over the past 25 years. Forget about having a nun teaching in every grade. Now you'd be hard-pressed to find a Sister of Charity or Sister of St. Joseph teaching anywhere in Catholic schools. Grades of three homerooms? Gone forever. Now you're lucky that you even have one. When I attended OLM, it enrolled approximately 750 students. But when I was contacted last year and asked to join the school board, all in an effort to salvage the school's existence, I discovered that enrollment had dwindled to just over 220.

Let me be clear in stating that the growing financial burden placed on families is also a major factor in making Catholic schools a dying breed. I don't want anyone to think I believe that the erosion of faith and moral values is the sole culprit. But I truly feel that the growing rift between religion and society is the underlying cause. Yes, school tuitions have skyrocketed over the years. Yes, property taxes have also skyrocketed, especially in the great state of New Jersey, where we pay higher property taxes than anywhere else in the country. This makes it increasingly more difficult to justify paying both property taxes to support the local public schools and tuition to send one's children to Catholic school. I totally understand. That is why I fully support a school voucher system, but I'll save that issue for a later blog post.

Nonetheless, I would put forth this argument. There are still enough Catholic families who would have enough money to send their children to Catholic school if they were willing to make sacrifices. This is where the diminishing value of religion comes into play. If they could go without a vacation, a new car, or the latest technological gadgets, then I'm sure the money would be there to cover the cost of tuition. My parents never owned a new car while I was growing up. Never. Our annual vacation was a weeklong excursion to Seaside Heights. We didn't fly overseas to Europe or to the Caribbean. We didn't go to Disney World. There were no extravagant trips, and no luxury items found in our home. My parents sacrificed because they placed a value on the Catholic education that my brother and I received. This is why it's hard for me to fathom how parishes with well over 2,000 families only have 200 students enrolled in the parish school.

But as they say, it is what it is. The bottom line is that Catholic schools are hurting, and we're running out of options in our bid to save them. In Bayonne, all five Catholic elementary schools were merged into one. Now, the Archdiocese of Newark is planning to implement a similar strategy in Jersey City. Currently, representatives from the Archdiocesan Vicariate for Education are making the rounds, visiting all the schools to assess which ones to close and which sites would be the most viable for hosting mergers. The proposed plan is to merge the eight remaining elementary schools into three, but of course that can always change depending on what the Archdiocesan task force recommends.

I don't know what the final result will be, but obviously I am holding out hope that my alma mater will be spared. It's a helpless feeling, because I accepted the invitation to serve on the school board with a great deal of enthusiasm. At the first meeting, I submitted four pages worth of ideas and suggestions for building enrollment and raising revenue. Now, all we can do is watch from the sidelines and wait to see what happens.

As always, I remain optimistic that Catholic education will manage to survive in one form or another. Being a proud graduate of St. Peter's Prep, I am one-thousand percent sure that I will not see the school close during my lifetime, if indeed it ever closes. Its long history of successful graduates has resulted in major gifts, in some cases millions of dollars, that will sustain the school for many years to come. But let there be no doubt that institutions like St. Peter's are the exception, not the rule. I still believe that society will one day recognize its errors in falling away from religious practice, and that we will once again value faith and morals over material goods. Will I see it in my lifetime? Probably not. But with God, there is always hope, and it is that hope I will forever cling to as I strive to do my part in keeping Catholic education alive.