Parochial schools, still:

...But Rhoda Goldstein, Director of the Data Bank of the NCEA, could still write in 1977: "[Catholic schools] seem to have weathered such storms as the loss of almost 60,000 religious community members, the movement of millions of people to the suburbs, a changed theological attitude regarding Catholic children attending Catholic schools, and the financial crunch of additional lay teachers in a period of inflationary wages and costs...

...What is the reason...

...They find themselves being asked to support the Catholic schools financially, or, more important, to enroll their children in them, without having anything to say on how these schools are run...

...Often, in the last decades, Catholic parents have rallied opposition to the decision of bishops and pastors to close schools...

...In the seventies it became apparent that public schools throughout the nation were in financial trouble and declining in quality...

...It is possible that the schools played much the same role for Catholics shifting from the neighborhoods to the suburbs...

...In 1970 Father C. Albert Koob, president of the NCEA, and Russell Shaw, director of information at the U.S...

...It was a docile laity which accepted the necessary sacrifices in the beginning, but, as years passed the schools, more than anything else, gave a special flavor and mark to American Catholic life...

...The needs of adult Christians were not met...

...They also fostered unity among Catholics in a large and diverse population and instilled pride in the history of the church and its intellectual tradition...

...Why do Catholics cling to their schools...

...Even lay-run and lay-staffed, the schools, they seem to feel, must continue to exist as an alternative, as a choice...

...Parish life centered around the school...

...They also felt that the structure of the Catholic school system tended to insure a mediocre, if not an inferior, education...

...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS, STILL A FOCAL POINT FOR CATHOLIC IDENTITY As MEMBERS of the National Catholic Education Association began filtering into Washington for their April convention and the attendant assessment of the state of the Catholic schools, it occurred to me that one question about Catholic schools is seldom raised any more...

...Christian family life was not properly fostered...

...And John Cogley, discussing the schools, wrote in Catholic America in 1973, "In increasing numbers they [young Catholic parents] are no longer willing to make the financial sacrifice necessary to maintain a separate school system, especially at a time when the costs of education have skyrocketed...

...The question when it broke out a little more than a century later had a different emphasis...

...That is: should the schools exist at all...

...They argued privately that they were unnecessary and might hurt the church by isolating Catholics from the mainstream and thus diminishing their influence in the life of the nation...

...Many of these critics saw these schools as usurping the rights of parents to a great extent...

...parishioners without ties to the school were second-class parishioners...

...As Cogley noted, the most amazing thing about Catholic schools is that they came into existence at all...

...There is reason to believe, then, that in the days ahead the Catholic educational establishment will diminish dramatically...

...In many a parish the direction and financing of the school had become the chief preoccupation of the clergy...

...And now in 1983 as parents and educators gather, although the decline has continued, although polls show that half of the country's Catholics no longer attend Mass regularly, although 75 percent of the schools' teachers are now lay, the schools persist as a force in the church...

...There was a time, when lay movements were burgeoning, that the question used to be raised regularly...

...Their schools, unlike Catholic schools in Europe, Latin America, and Canada, had to be supported by voluntary contributions...

...They detected an unwillingness on the part of the Catholic laity to continue to carry an ever-increasing financial burden...

...The parochial school system, as we know it, was mandated by the First Provincial Council of Baltimore in 1829, but even at the time there were a few bishops who thought that separate Catholic "common" schools were a mistake...

...Psychologically," said Cogley, "the very existence of the schools . . . was probably liberating for a people who might otherwise have come to feel culturally inferior in a confidently 'Protestant' nation...

...They became a focal point for Catholic families and a source of identity...

...They wrote: ' 'Many laymen seem to have lost confidence in the Catholic schools, or to be on the verge of doing so, because they perceive, quite correctly, that these schools are not theirs in any real sense but are, rather, extensions of the authority (and even the personality) of a clerical or religious decision-maker...

...Catholic Conference, tackled the problem in a book entitled S.O.S...

...Catholics these days are as prosperous as their neighbors, but "when the parochial school system got under way, most of them were members of the working class, poorer than other Americans, and barely literate...

...Those who did not question the existence of the schools doubted that they could survive in the face of the exodus of teaching sisters and brothers and the spi-raling costs of education...

...for the Catholic Schools...

...The majority of the hierarchy, however, were convinced that in a country in which Catholics were a small minority of the population (4 percent), and where Protestants were milit-antly in control of the schools, Catholic schools were necessary to protect the faith of the people, especially of the immigrants...

...In addition, in the sixties the Carnegie-sponsored Notre Dame study and the Greeley-Rossi study effectively dispelled the notion that Catholic schools were inferior and divisive...

...Not only were the Catholic schools isolating, argued their critics, but they drained the parishes of vitality...

...They documented a decline in the number of schools in the years immediately preceding their writing-by 3 percent in one year alone-and in the number of students (by about 5 percent in the last year...

...One of the most articulate and thoughtful of those who took this position was Mary Perkins Ryan, author of Are Parochial Schools the Answer...