The proper agent to bail out Catholic schools is the Catholic Church

April 19, 2008

Guest Post by Morbo

Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States has sparked a lot of hand-wringing about the state of Catholic secondary education.

Shortly before the pope arrived, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation issued a report lamenting the fact that many Catholic schools have closed over the past few years. This was accompanied by calls in the media that something be done to stop this. For many conservatives, this “something” seems to take the form of a government bailout.

It’s ironic. Conservatives worship at the Church of the Free Market. One of the basic laws of that church is supply and demand. In the case of Catholic schools, the supply has outstripped the demand. Thus, schools are closing. I’m sure this is a cause of concern to church officials. I see no reason why it’s any business of the state.

Why are so many Catholic schools shutting their doors? My guess is that Catholic education has been affected by the changing face of American Catholicism. When I was a kid growing up in a heavily Catholic area of Pennsylvania in the late 1960s and ’70s, Catholic parents were expected to send their children to Catholic schools. Most did so even if the local public schools were well regarded. Catholic families at that time also tended to be larger. Families of fix or six kids were not uncommon, hence there were more customers for the schools.

Times have changed.

Polls show that most American Catholics now believe they can be members of the faith in good standing without following every rule and bowing to every pressure. The vast majority disregard church teachings on birth control. (So they’re having smaller families.) Most American Catholics are pro-choice. One recent survey even showed that 68 percent of all Catholics surveyed said they believe they can be faithful members of the church without attending mass weekly, and 45 percent said they never go to confession. This would have been simply unthinkable in western Pennsylvania in the late ’60s. A good Catholic attended mass every week (as church dogma commands) and met with a priest for confession at least once a month.

With blind adherence to dogma declining, it’s not surprising that most Catholic parents no longer see the need to send their children to schools infused with church teachings, especially if there are serviceable public schools nearby. This theological and demographic shift won’t spell the end of Catholic education in America — there will always be some demand — but it does mean more schools will close. The church will have to adjust to this.

Two more thoughts on this: The federal government can bail out a troubled airline, auto manufacturer, financial firm, etc. Whether it ought to do this is open to debate, but there is no constitutional barrier to such assistance. In the case of Catholic schools, which exist to impart Catholic dogma (and, often, the church’s political views), a bailout raises obvious constitutional concerns.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I did not mention that the church’s response to the clergy sex-abuse scandal has been far from adequate. Huge payouts to victims have undoubtedly hurt the church’s bottom line and made it even harder to keep some school open. Taxpayers have no obligation to help the church climb its way out of that mess. To even ask is in many ways another insult to the victims.

April 19, 2008 at 10:40 am

How interesting. If you send your kid to an independent, non-parish-subsidized Episcopal or Friends school, you not only pay the full cost of education (typically 20k and up per year), you don’t even get a tax deduction. So now, not only will you pay for your kid’s education and contribute toward the local public school, you’ll be kicking in toward the local Catholic school — and still no deduction. Essentially, the government would be favoring Catholicism over other denominations.

As a non-practicing Catholic who went to both a well-regarded public school (K-6) and nearby two parochial schools (7-12), I agree with Morbo’s premise on all counts. I think he may be underplaying the fallout from the sex abuse scandals, which were financially devastating to many dioceses — I believe that the costs are borne at the diocesan level, meaning even healthy parishes bear some brunt of the cost.

I’d add that, in areas with underperforming public schools or where the Catholic schools are well-regarded, enrollment doesn’t seem to be much of an issue. Where Catholic schools are competitive with other options (and/or an affordable option), they do very well.

I’m waiting for the Church to auction off its erotica collection that should bring them in some extra dough.

Separation of Church and State means Separation of Church and State.

Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s (Matt 22:21)

What could be clearer?

While a I agree that government support for Catholic education is a violation of the separation of Church and State, and that we should not support Catholic schools with public funds; I think it is naive to suggest that the problem is one of supply and demand. Inner city Catholic schools are closing because the sisters who staffed them no longer exist. These sisters were paid very little, making it possible to charge low tuition. As they have been replaced by lay faculty (who aren’t paid very much, but more than the sisters), costs have risen beyond what inner city residents could afford. This is unfortunate, since the inner city Catholic schools often provided a sound education that was not available at the local public schools.

Ultimately, the church hierarchy has to bear much of the responsibility for this loss. Had sisters been treated with more respect, perhaps the working orders would not have undergone such a steep decline. Had the needs of the laity been valued over the protection of abusive priests, we would not see dioceses falling into bankruptcy. However, as a Unitarian who taught for years in Catholic high schools, I mourn the loss of these schools which did much good work among poor and working class students.

Another reason for the decline of Catholic schools is the loss of free labor represented by nuns and priests. Now they actually have to pay something approaching a living wage to their staff.

Perhaps the declining enrollment of Catholic schools is due to people finally realizing that the Christian faith is, always has been, and must be anti-education to survive. The Bible is profoundly anti-knowledge and anti-reason. The first sin was eating from the Tree Of Knowledge. Jesus, Paul, and all the church fathers openly condemned all learning other than religious learning, starting with denouncing the “wisdom of the wise”, up to and including Tertullian’s famous “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?” Given these historic positions, the idea of “religious education” is shown to be an oxymoron. The proper term is indoctrination.
Attending a “school” (which is supposed to teach you how to think) whose most important doctrine is to “have faith” (not think) should be so obviously contradictory to the attendees that it is no wonder enrollment drops.
Then again, once the concept of faith (not thinking) is accepted and reason is abandoned, contradictions can be piled on top of contradictions to your heart’s content, so maybe this isn’t the cause after all. It just should be.

What should we do about it? Cheer.

T Hurlbutt @ 7:

Thank you for confirming the fundamentalist atheist mindset.

Nothing wrong with the atheist mindset, Andrew, @8; at least it teaches you to think for yourself, instead of taking everything on faith and making you easier to manipulate. As for it being “fundamentalist”… I have yet to hear about “fundamentalist” atheists, advocating mayhem in both this life and after, as an effort to “convince” the unbelievers to cross over to your brand of faith (whichever it happens to be) and hew to it, rigidly. And that goes even for the worst of Stalinist period in USSR and Eastern Europe. Various “faiths”, OTOH, have a rather dicey history in that department.

Libra… did you forget about those “fundamentalist” atheists who are always clamoring for the day they bask in the glorious end of times?

Nothing wrong with the atheist mindset, Andrew, @8; at least it teaches you to think for yourself, instead of taking everything on faith and making you easier to manipulate.

I call bullshit. First, that is the most pathetic definition of faith I have yet seen. It seems to assume a person of faith cannot think. That would have been news to Georges Lemaître. Second, anyone can be manipulated, regardless of basic worldview orientation.

I have yet to hear about “fundamentalist” atheists, advocating mayhem in both this life and after, as an effort to “convince” the unbelievers to cross over to your brand of faith (whichever it happens to be) and hew to it, rigidly. And that goes even for the worst of Stalinist period in USSR and Eastern Europe.

So, during the worst of the Stalinist period, because it was not about convincing people to turn atheist, atheism as a worldview is clean? Interesting. That is one I have not heard before.

Yeah it’s true. If you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster you’ll believe just about anything.

And that goes even for the worst of Stalinist period in USSR and Eastern Europe.

Stalinism has almost nothing in common with modern atheism. Stalinists simply switched from an unthinking belief in theistic dogma to an unthinking belief in marxist dogma. I know plenty of atheists, not one of whom is a marxist.

Had sisters been treated with more respect, perhaps the working orders would not have undergone such a steep decline.

I think the vow of celibacy plus the lack of any opportunities for advancement into the church’s explicitly patriarchal hierarchy doomed the sisterhood. If the church wants to survive they’ll need to end celibacy and ordain women, though even that may not be enough to perpetuate an explicitly nondemocratic organization in an age on popular empowerment.

In the case of Catholic schools, the supply has outstripped the demand. Thus, schools are closing.

It might also have something to do with competing against a school system that offers its services for free.

Beyond that, there’s also the church/state rulings of the 1960s that ended the Protestant domination of public schools, which is why Catholics set up their own school system to begin with.

A few points come to mind.

Assuming for the moment that the US, State or local governments spent taxpayer money propping up Catholic schools that are failing financially.
Do they finance other religious based schools?
If so how far into wingnut religious distortions can the government go with my money and against my wishes?

Room for choosing and abusing the chosen and not chosen is enormous.

There is of course the Constitutional requirement of separation of Church and State. An ideal that Churches want to run only in their favor and not the other way around. Oh thou hypocrite, thou viper’s brew.

What programs, available to all taxpayers, do you cut to favor a given religious teaching?

And of course, in the case of the Catholic Church, they have been robbing the poor, on at lease 4 Contenants, to pay themselves for 2000 years. The institution is rich as God. Let them pay for their schools themselves, it the schools are irreplaceably important to Catholicism!

To clarify, I refer to “faith” (a very flexible term, of course) in the epistemological sense. To accept faith as a valid epistemological process is to abandon reason and show contempt for truth.
How can you tell if a statement is true? Complete the sentence- “A statement or proposition is true if………………..(quick look in dictionary)………….if it conforms to reality, if it correctly describes the way things really are.” Please note this requires comparing the aforementioned proposition to the real world. That is called “gathering evidence.”
What does it mean to accept a statement or proposition “on faith?” That means you accept the proposition to be true without comparing it to reality. You accept it if there is no evidence; you accept it even if evidence contradicts it.
Ergo-faith has nothing to do with truth. If you value truth, you must reject faith.
This view has been called explicit or critical atheism; if you want to call it fundementalist atheism, that’s your business and I won’t quibble. I fundementally value truth so I reject faith. To adopt a faith-based worldview is is to adopt a worldview divorced from reality. It means you live in a fantasy world. Granted, your fantasy world is probably nicer than the real world, but it’s still a fantasy.
Of course, if someone ever wants to stamp “There is no god” on our coinage, I’ll sign the petition against the bill. But I shouldn’t have to pay to support Pope Joe’s indoctrination camps.

“Once upon a time in the great land of American education, there was a public school and a parochial school. The public school wasn’t functioning as it should, because everyone kept trying to fix something that wasn’t broken until it was actually broken beyond the point of repair. The parochial school wasn’t functioning as it should, because the Diocese decided to make up for shortcomings in the collection plate take by jacking the tuition through the roof.

But these problems didn’t matter, because it was a known fact that everyone had to go to school, and the public school and the parochial school were the only two choices on the pedagogical menu.

That is, until some damned, uncouth upstart came up with the idea of an e-school. The e-school used state funding and offered a curriculum that wasn’t neck-deep in fossilized, Philistine-smiting dogma, so the parents started pulling their kids out of the parochial school. The e-school provided computers to their students, and a curriculum that was contemporarily Internet-based instead of relying on textbooks that were, on average, nearly as old as the students using them (making the kids happy), offered a learning environment that was free of drugs, crime, bullies, broken bathrooms, Apple 2-C computers with dot-matrix printers, and a menu that made C-Rations look appetizing (making the parents happy), and offered a per-student price that averaged about $2,000/year less than the cost of operating a brick-and-mortar school (making state legislators ecstatically happy)—so parents started pulling their kids out of the public school.”

Now, the moral of this story, while it helps to explain why parents and legislators and kids approve of the concept of e-schools, isn’t really about public schools so much as it is about parochial schools. Parents are given the opportunity to choose for themselves—and their children—the amount of religious education to be given to those children, rather than some distant archbishop or papal who-ever. It is a choice that they never really had before the advent of the e-schools.

But is is a choice that they now have….

@5 Ricks

Nice pick up on the connection to the declining of the monastic orders (monks and nuns). While it just one reason for the issues, the situation in the US is mirrored in the catholic system in Australia to a lesser degree. When I went through Catholic schooling the local population of nuns had already declined to four or five rather elderly ladies, who were moved out of the on-site nunnery to suburban accomodation to make room for school administration, and one elderly monk.

It is unsurprising to see the decline of the monastics, without looking at the numbers I would think I suspect that it would be more pronounced than the other clergy. There are so many vocations available to people today, amongst just other options, without the all-consuming nature of the monastic life. That doesn’t even take into account the general disillusionment already covered by so many.

alabossiere@cpservices.net

A. this discussion, which seemed to have potential, rather devolved – people spouting off their personal opinion while concealing the data that led them to have that opinion has never successfully substituted for research, which might actually contribute to an understand of how important the possible reasons mentioned here, and a bunch that weren’t, actually ARE in the decline.

B. re ” that is the most pathetic definition of faith I have yet seen. It seems to assume a person of faith cannot think.”

Not CAN not, WILL not. That is the DEFINITION of faith – I hold this to be true (or false) and NO future experience, NO new data, will change my mind. It has its place, but let’s not kid ourselves that AT BEST, when CONSCIOUSLY WIELDED, it is a SUBSTITUTE for thinking, which you might not be willing to trust in all circumstances. I know when I’m under stress I have faith that my previous thinking and committment to a course of action is more trustworthy than rethinking the entire plan in the midst of the most difficult part, but that’s not a permanent faith – it’s just a conscious decision that THAT thinking was better quality than THIS thinking will be. When NOT consciously wielded, faith is delusion, pure and simple. It may be irrelevant to others if the delusion is never tested (i.e. God has a long white beard and a Semitic nose), helpful to others (all humans are potentially divine and deserve to be treated with the utmost respect), or dangerous to others (our group is blessed by God and has a superior claim to resources).

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