Catholic Schools are Booming

Catholic Schools Are Booming — New EWTN Poll Sheds Light on Possible Reasons by Zelda Caldwell at National Catholic Register. The poll found that 74% of Catholic voters are concerned about children suffering from an educational “COVID deficit” caused by the shift to online learning during the pandemic…. Nearly 47% of respondents with children in public school said they have considered, in the past year, moving their children from a public school to a private or parochial school because of concerns about the quality of the education received. A majority of Catholic voters also support parents of K–12 students helping determine what is being taught in schools (64%), oppose biological boys who identify as girls competing against biological girls on school sports teams (76%), and oppose introducing Critical Race Theory (CRT) into the classroom (60%). Read Where Are the Catholic Schools in a Synodal Church? by Rev. Peter M.J. Stravinskas at The Catholic Thing. Parents living in the real world know the challenges they face in rearing offspring today, even under optimal conditions. Presumably, that is why a recent EWTN/Real Clear Opinion Research survey revealed that 47 percent of Catholic parents with children in government schools are seriously considering moving them into our institutions, so dissatisfied are they by the lunacy now deemed “normal” in most state schools. Furthermore, I have a hunch that the rise of the “Nones” among Catholics is a direct result of that generation’s being the least served by Catholic schools.... A statistic was floated just last week that of the one million children in New York City public schools, 400,000 are Catholic. That should shock anyone with a Catholic sensibility. That means that nearly half a million of our kids are being exposed to critical race theory, gender-bending propaganda, and abortion promotion. Read Truth is the Telos of a Catholic University by Michael Pakaluk at The Catholic Thing. Along with every other university, the purpose of a Catholic university is truth. But a Catholic university enjoys this further advantage over other universities, that it also strives for truth through revelation. This last point is highly important. Sometimes members of Catholic universities are put on the defensive, as if the Catholicity of their institution was a limitation or “fetter” on the search for truth. But it really works as the opposite of this. A true Catholic university cares so ardently about truth that it will not neglect any reliable path of truth. It won’t scruple that some fundamental truths (about the Trinity, about the Incarnation) are in effect handed to it, not attained through human efforts alone. Read Mothers of Men by Mary Cuff at Crisis Magazine. Modern education’s goal is to produce what the elementary school near my childhood home proudly termed “future producers”—essentially cogs in a mechanized society where it is beneficial to reduce gendered human nature to mere fashion. When you are educating producers, you want them all to be essentially of the same shape and size, so that they are easily fitted, like pegs, into prefabricated slots. Gender, in this scenario, is only the gratuitous paint job on each peg. And this is modern success: to rid ourselves of our masculinity and our femininity in service to an inhuman state that—as the past two years have more than demonstrated—does not care about us. Read Forty-five Percent of Montgomery County Students Identified as Nonbinary in Survey by Jeremiah Poff at Washington Examiner. Bethany Mandel, a Montgomery County resident and activist, told the Washington Examiner that "this data proves that they are in fact keeping track and that there has been an explosion. The manner in which it was revealed indicates that the county is proud of the fact that there is such a rise in gender confusion among children." "They are also tracking parental support and know full well that they’re undermining parents’ wishes," she said. "They don’t care. But it’s the parents who will be left to pick up the pieces when this passes for kids." Read Public School Fires Substitute Teacher for Raising Concerns Over Book Depicting Same-Sex Couples by Virginia Allen at The Daily Signal. Barr says she explained to the principal that she and her husband would like to be the ones having conversations with their kids about issues such as same-sex marriage, rather than the school…. Not long after the conversation, Barr said, she tried to log into the online portal the school uses for substitute teachers to pick up more work. She could not do so. She emailed the principal, asking whether she had been removed as a substitute teacher, but did not hear back. “The next thing that I heard from the school was from the human resources director asking me to come in for a face-to-face meeting in regard to my role as a substitute teacher,” Barr told The Daily Signal. Read Throwback Thursday The Holy See’s Teaching on Catholic Schools, remarks given by Archbishop J. Miller at the Solidarity Association in Washington, DC, on September 14, 2005. The enduring foundation on which the Church builds her educational philosophy is the conviction that it is a process which forms the whole child, especially with his or her eyes fixed on the vision of God. The specific purpose of a Catholic education is the formation of boys and girls who will be good citizens of this world, enriching society with the leaven of the Gospel, but who will also be citizens of the world to come. Catholic schools have a straightforward goal: to foster the growth of good Catholic human beings who love God and neighbor and thus fulfill their destiny of becoming saints. If we fail to keep in mind this high supernatural vision, all our talk about Catholic schools will be no more than "a gong booming or a cymbal clashing" (I Cor 13:1). Read