SCHOOL MINISTRY

History

Catholic Education VI

This is the final in a series of six articles about the history of Catholic elementary education in the United States.   These articles celebrate Catholic Schools Week - this past week - January 23 through 30.

Sunday Stewardship: Key to Catholic Education

Whatever the future may hold for us here at OLP, and whichever essential direction we may take to fund our school ministry, we all need to understand one point very clearly. The key to affordable tuition is generous Sunday stewardship. People are often surprised to hear this. Still, OLP has only two revenue streams: tuition and Sunday stewardship. They are directly connected. Faithful and generous Sunday stewardship on the part of all is what makes Catholic education affordable.  

Sad Facts of Parish Life

One of the very sad facts of life in a parish with a school is that there are those in the school ministry parent community especially who step back from participation in Sunday worship and parish life, and who step back from generous Sunday stewardship. The families who take this posture are shooting themselves in the foot.   They are doing so on several levels.

The Consequences of Stepping Back from Worship

The families who step back from worship are missing the very heart of Catholic parish community life and the core experience of a Gospel community. A family who is sending a child to a Catholic parish school and who stays back from Sunday worship is sending contradictory messages to a child. They are paying for a Catholic education on the one hand, and proclaiming that it has little or no connection to the worshipping community on the other. A child can only be confused by this message, and for the long run.

The Consequences of Stepping Back from Parish Life

The families who step back from active participation in parish life are caught in a contradiction as well. They are taking advantage of the parish community's personal and financial generosity in its support of the school ministry, while they are doing nothing to assist and support the hands that feed them. The success of any parish school rests on the whole community's participation in parish life, and parishioners' willingness to encourage others to the same. It is the vibrancy and vitality of parish life as a whole that makes a school ministry successful.  Without that, a parish's school ministry will inevitably whither. Every family with a child in the school ministry needs to participate in parish life for the whole to work.

Stepping Back from Generous Sunday Stewardship  

All families who step back from generous Sunday stewardship, including those with children in the school ministry, cripple the parish's ability to keep tuition affordable. That is to say, the greater our Sunday stewardship collections, the less will be our tuition in the school ministry. The lower our Sunday collections, the more we will have to raise tuition. It's that basic, that forthright, that simple.  

In sum, if the whole of the parish community - all families, including those with children in the school ministry - participate in worship, parish life and generous Sunday stewardship - and invite others to the same because of their enthusiasm - school ministry tuition would most certainly go down for everyone, and the whole parish community would thrive. Insofar as parishioners step back from these things, they cripple the whole of our parish life, and directly drain the wallet of the families with children in the school who will suffer increased tuition.    

Our Parochial School Future

Our Catholic schools have been highly successful. We offer a strong, focused elementary education by highly qualified teachers. From the beginning of their education with us, our Catholic school children are aimed for private high school education and college. We provide a wonderfully caring environment grounded in the Catholic tradition. We teach about life with God, life in the Church, responsible citizenship and just being a good human being. Our expectations are high. Our students outperform public school students in all areas generally.   The non-Catholic population in parochial schools nationally is over 13%. We are a remarkable success story, built on over a century of experience.  

Our challenges: finances, capital improvement, endowment expansion, continuing high-quality staffing and adequate programs for special needs. These challenges demand significant culture change for us Catholics, who carry with us the baggage of the past: entitlement and a sense of Sunday stewardship that leaves us giving about 1% of our gross income.

But with faith in God, regular Sunday worship, participation in parish life, conscientious stewardship and hard work toward change and growth, we will most certainly meet the challenges.