CEF Symposium Keynote Address

CATHOLIC EDUCATION FOUNDATION SYMPOSIUM
Friday, March 23, 2007

Reverend Kris D. Stubna, S.T.D.
Secretary for Education, Diocese of Pittsburgh

Today Catholic elementary and secondary schools in the United States serve nearly 2.5 million students. However, the peak was reached in the mid 1960‘s when nearly 5.5 million students were enrolled. Since 1990 more than 400 new Catholic schools have opened in the United States, but during that same period there has been a net loss of more than 760 Catholic schools. Unfortunately, most of that decline has been concentrated in urban, inner city and rural areas. Both the accessibility of Catholic education and its affordability, especially for the poor, have been compromised.

Concurrently, Catholic education has experienced a radical shift from a religious to a lay leadership and staff. In 1965 there were 180,000 religious sisters in the United States; today there are fewer than 75,000, of whom more than 50 percent are over seventy years of age. In 2005, religious women constituted less than 4 percent of the full-time professional staff of Catholic schools, while 95 percent of teachers are lay persons.

This represents a particular challenge for Catholic education that touches upon its very identity. For decades the leadership and presence of a vastly religious staff served as a “built-in” guarantee for the school’s Catholic identity. This was assumed and taken for granted. The shift to an almost entirely lay apostolate requires an ecclesial response of some urgency. To be effective bearers of the Church’s educational tradition, lay persons need a religious formation that is equal to their cultural and professional formation. This a special challenge because of the highly secular nature of the culture in which we live.

In their recent pastoral statement, Renewing Our Commitment to Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools in the Third Millennium, the United States bishops make it clear that Catholic schools afford the fullest and best opportunity to realize the fourfold purpose of Christian education, “namely, to provide an atmosphere in which the Gospel message is proclaimed, community in Christ is experienced, service to our sisters and brothers is the norm, and thanksgiving and worship of God is cultivated.” They say quite boldly that the vitality of the Church is inextricably linked to the health and success of its Catholic schools because the schools provide the most effective way to form holy men and women who make God known, loved and served.

I was reading some material on Catholic schools in our diocesan archives and found a beautiful description of Catholic schools in the Pittsburgh Catholic, America’s oldest Catholic Newspaper in continuous publication. “Education trains the child, and that training must be complete. Education must train the heart and soul, the will and conscience, as well as enlighten the mind and strengthen the body. The training of the conscience of the child must be part and parcel of his education, and not an adjunct applied by some casual, external source. For the sake of the child, and because it is his constitutional right, the Catholic American citizen maintains the parish school system. No slighting or curtailing of the intellectual and physical training of the child is considered or tolerated. The child must grow strong in body and cultured in mind and must be prepared to meet the conditions of his life, but he must also be trained in the things that appertain to his soul, his will, his conscience. This is an essential part of the education of the child. To supply so essential a training, the parish school system is erected and maintained at a great sacrifice on the part of the American Catholic citizen. By so doing, he performs a sacred duty and renders a meritorious service to the State. The school is the home of the virtuous citizen. He who molds the character of the child makes the history of the future.” This was written in 1921!

I read, as well, the keynote address given in April 1961 by Bishop John J. Wright, then Bishop of Pittsburgh, to the NCEA convention being held in Atlantic City. In speaking to the distinctive qualities of Catholic schools, he said this: “We need men whose intellectual view embraces the history of the race, who are familiar with all literature, who have studied all social movements, who are acquainted with the development of the philosophical thought, who are not blinded by physical miracles, and industrial wonders but know how to appreciate all truth, all beauty, all goodness. And to this wide culture they must join the earnestness, the confidence, the charity and the purity of motive which Christian faith inspires. We need scholars who are saints and saints who are scholars. We need men of genius who live for God and their country; men of action who seek for light in the company of those who know; men of religion who understand that God reveals himself in science, and works in nature, as in the soul of man, for the good of those who know and those who love him.”

While there have been some significant changes in some aspects of our Catholic schools and we are facing some contemporary challenges, the lessons of history, for me, simply re-affirm what has always been and needs to be for the present and future some distinctive characteristics or benchmarks for Catholic schools if they are to be vital instruments of grace for the Church. I briefly point to eight (8) of them today as the focus of my reflection:

1) Catholic Identity – Catholic schools were founded and sustained for one purpose. To teach our children the saving truths of faith and in so doing both make them faith-filled disciples of Christ in building up the Kingdom of God, and lead them to eternal life. As Archbishop Michael Miller said in his Teaching on Catholic Schools: “A Catholic school should be inspired by a supernatural vision, founded on Christian anthropology, animated by Communion and community, embellished with a Catholic worldview throughout its curriculum, and sustained by Gospel witness.” Specifically, then, we must continually assess, “Is this Catholic school adhering to the mind of the Church?” Does it reflect in every dimension of curricula, and activity of life, the wisdom and heart of the Church’s life? Is Christ and His truth the ever present reality at work? With secularism and moral relativism rampant, authentically Catholic schools provide a privileged environment in which Christian education is carried out in every dimension of its life and ministry, leading students to a living encounter with Jesus Christ. Interestingly, in the most recent CARA study conducted in 2006, 81% of parents said that strong Catholic identity and authentic faith formation was a critical factor to their enrollment decision. Fostering Catholic identity is crucial to our long-term viability.

2) Academic Excellence – Catholic schools must provide excellence in academic pursuits. Most importantly, Catholic education aims above all to develop a student’s natural human potentials and to nurture a student’s relation to divine grace. These potentials refer to one’s cognitive, affective and physical faculties. In a word, Catholic education forms the mind, body, spirit and heart. In this way our academic program differs substantially from that offered in a secular world. Catholic schools do far more than convey information to passive students. They aspire to teach love for wisdom. Unlike skeptics and relativists, Catholic educators share a specific belief about truth; that it can be attained and communicated to others. As Pope John Paul II wrote in Veritatis Splendor: “The greatest contribution that Catholic education can make is to restore the conviction that human beings can grasp the truth of things and in grasping the truth can know their duties to God, to themselves, and to their neighbors.” This reality lies at the heart of our concept of academic excellence – acquiring the truth.

Academic excellence, of course, requires that all personnel meet the highest professional standards, curriculum and methodology integrate the highest standards, including technological advances; the program must have high expectations for every student; it must foster continuous improvement, be open to educational assessment and provide transparency to its constituents. For example, in 1990 the Diocese of Pittsburgh was the first diocese in the country to have all its elementary and secondary schools accredited by the Middle States Association.

3) Foundational Role of Parents and Family – Catholic schooling is grounded in the belief that parents are the primary educators of their children. It is the privileged and awesome responsibility of parents, assisted by the Church and its programs, to lead their child to holiness and the virtuous life. In strong contrast today to a public educational system that often wants to replace the parent or usurp their fundamental rights, Catholic schools see their role as one of assisting parents in their charge to prepare children for life on earth and in heaven. In a true sense Catholic schools are extensions of the home. Parents are involved in every dimension of school life, including discussions about curricular activities and home support.

An article appeared in the July 1858 edition of the Pittsburgh Catholic that could be written today: “Catholic homes must contribute to the training of our children more than our Catholic schools. The children must learn truthfulness, obedience, self denial, cleanliness, politeness, and fear of God, at their own firesides. Schools may finish learning, and by proper discipline avert the corruption of good morals. But they can never supplant the place of home teaching.” Pope John Paul II affirmed this in his 1999 Letter to Families: “Subsidiarity thus complements paternal and maternal love and confirms its fundamental nature, inasmuch as all other participants in the process of education are only able to carry out their responsibilities in the name of the parents, with their consent, and, to a certain degree, with their authorization.” With the breakdown of family structures, both parents working, nearly a 51% divorce rate and other factors, this tenet presents a large challenge for Catholic Schools. How do we re-engage the family as the fundamental cell through which the civilization of truth and love will ultimately pass?

4) Responsibility of the Church Community – In Renewing Our Commitment, the United States bishops insist that supporting Catholic schools is “the responsibility of the entire Church community.” It is critical that the voices of the Church’s leadership, particularly its bishops and clergy, engage in a vigorous effort to cultivate enthusiasm for Catholic schools. The report from the Notre Dame Task Force on Catholic Schools addresses this point strongly; “Compelling arguments about the centrality of Catholic schools to the Church’s foundation and evangelization mission must come relentlessly and irrevocably from all her leaders…we must find ways to promote Catholic schools without anxiety over offending those who may not share our passion.” Catholic schools are a source of vitality to parish life; they are in the words of Pope John Paul II “a great gift to the Church and the nation.” The Body of Christ must once again come to see Catholic schools as essential instruments of human and spiritual formation contributing to the future of the Church. Long before someone penned a book with this title, it has been the Church’s conviction that it takes a village to raise a child. Our children are the responsibility of the whole Church.

5) Parental Choice in Education – The Second Vatican Council declared “that the public power, which has the obligation to protect and defend the rights of citizens, must see that public subsidies are paid out in such a way that parents are truly free to choose according to their conscience the schools they want for their children.” The Compendium of Social Doctrine of the Church, published in 2005, teaches that “the refusal to provide public economic support to non-public schools that need assistance and that render a service to civil society is to be considered an injustice.” Almost every major country in the world provides this support with the exception of China, Mexico, Cuba, North Korea, Italy and the United States!

To advocate for parental school choice and personal and corporate tax credits is an important obligation for the Church. We need to help the faithful understand that school choice is not just a policy option or a political question; it is an issue of religious freedom and social justice. In the early 1960’s, Cardinal Wright, then bishop of Pittsburgh, testified at hearings being conducted by the Kennedy administration on this very issue: “A government mindful of the purposes of the Constitution will resist pressures which would destroy educational freedom and parental choice…our government should not use its power to tax or to appropriate tax moneys without first making certain that its action does not deal a mortal blow to the fundamental rights of those taxpayers whose children are in voluntary schools. America will be poor indeed, however rich, if we sap away by taxation the hard earned resources of American families that used to be freely given for that moral and religious education which has played no small part in building up the national common good.”

This goes to the heart of our efforts to provide affordable and accessible Catholic schools for as many of our families as possible, including the poor, many of whom are in urban settings where our schools are facing financial crisis. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Educational Improvement Tax Credit legislation, passed in 2001 has resulted in nearly $15 million dollars of tuition assistance for students in the Diocese of Pittsburgh alone in six years. Of the 184 approved scholarship organizations in the Commonwealth, the Diocese of Pittsburgh’s Scholastic Opportunity Scholarship program has been the number one recipient of tax credit dollars every year the program has been in existence. We are proud and encouraged by the numerous area businesses that have used the tax credit program to support children and youth who desire to attend Catholic schools.

6) Cultivating the lay apostolate – The declining number of priests and religious has not simply had a tremendous impact on the cost and staffing of the schools, the decline has had a clear impact on the Catholic culture in our schools. In seeking to form the new generations of teachers and principals to step into these positions vacated by so many religious and clergy, we need to recognize the loss of explicit religious formation and identity, as well as community mission and support, so effectively and naturally provided by religious communities. However, we now must seize the opportunity to cultivate a more fully developed lay vocation in the Church, one that strives for an authentic and passionate ecclesial identity for lay teachers. As Archbishop Miller commented in his Teaching on Catholic Schools, “To be effective bearers of the Church’s educational tradition, however, laypersons who teach in Catholic schools need a religious formation that is equal to their general, cultural, and professional formation. We can no longer assume that Catholic school teachers have a sense of vocation, that they know or even embrace the basic teachings of the Church, let alone have a deep sense of the Church’s evangelizing mission or are immersed in a life of prayer. For example, in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, every Catholic School teacher must complete a two year program of formation that includes the Catholic Philosophy of Education and an intensive review of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (a course designed around the four pillars of faith teaching). Foundational and ongoing faith formation for Catholic school administrators and teachers is integral to preserving the strength of the Catholic culture and life in our schools.

7) Faithful citizenship. Catholic schools have always worked to assist young people in the pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty, that is, the appropriation of the virtuous life. The school is meant to build up the civilization of love, a world in which the men and women imbued with faith will demonstrate the virtues learned in Catholic education: faith, hope and love (theological) and prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude (cardinal). An authentic Catholic education leads one to become a virtuous, productive citizen in building a world that is reflective of God’s Kingdom. In an article on this subject in the June 1921 edition of the Pittsburgh Catholic, Bishop Hugh Boyle wrote, “To strengthen our national life, to perpetuate our liberties under the constitution, to guard against insidious attacks upon republican institutions, we advocate a vigorous and holy spirit of Americanization in our schools, a deep and intelligent love of our national institutions, reverence for our flag and our laws. The lessons of patriotism based on religion and the natural law should be made part of the daily school life, so that our educational system will maintain a strong national character and help develop our true national ideals and way of life by producing faith-filled, virtuous citizens.” This has been an integral component of Catholic education to our present day. We train our students to love their country and its ideals, to respect authority, to honor the flag, and to be responsible citizens. Service to those in need, especially the poor is not something nice to do but integral to the mission of our Catholic faith.

8) The notion of sacrifice – Every Catholic school story in the every parish in our great country revolves around this notion of sacrifice. Men coming home from 12 hour shifts at the mill only to work another three or four hours erecting the parish school, brick by brick. Women sponsoring bake sales, card parties, you name it, in an attempt to raise the needed dollars for the school to operate. Religious men and women teaching our children for little salary and no benefits, being provided for by the goodness and kindness of parishioners, often out of their own need. I am of the mind that many of our problems exist today because we live in a world and society in which people have too much of everything. Today, many parents expect the Church to provide a Catholic school education for their children as one of their “rights”. I had a mother call me once to complain about being denied any tuition assistance for her children. I asked her if I could look into it and call her back later in the day. She said she was calling with her family from a beach in Jamaica and the reception on her cell was not great – I could
call her in two weeks when they returned. Are we helping our parents appreciate the real costs involved in Catholic education? Do we not tend to apologize for what we need to charge, many times with tuition not even funding more than 50 percent of the cost? What efforts are we putting forth to help our parents see the intrinsic value of the product? This is the best investment in their child’s future that they could ever possibly hope to make. Nothing comes easily and this notion of sacrifice, the need to set priorities, to forgo luxuries and pleasures for a greater good, is a real challenge for many of our parents today.

By way of conclusion, I refer to the Notre Dame report once again and its concluding reflection: “Perhaps the best way to appreciate the power of Catholic schools is to imagine the Church in the United States without them. What would it look like? Would it be as robust and vital? How would it produce generous leaders? How would it serve immigrants? How would it provide avenues of educational opportunity to the poor, especially those in our cities? The rise of evangelical Christian schools shows that other Christian communities have learned what many Catholics have forgotten or are willing to ignore – that there is no substitute for spending 35 hours each week in an educational environment permeated by faith and Gospel values. To those who wonder how we can afford to make the investment necessary to sustain, strengthen, and expand Catholic schools, we respond by turning the question on its head. How can we afford not to make this investment? Our future depends on it more than we may suspect.”