Pandemic spawns pivotal moment for Catholic schools

It's been challenging. The pandemic drained the budgets of Catholic schools and left school administrators reeling, whiplashed by state mandates to close the schools, go virtual, offer hybrid options, and ramp up to re-open (maybe).

Unpredictability has consequences. Unlike government schools, tuition-driven Catholic schools have no government funding stream. Thomas Carroll, superintendent of education for the Archdiocese of Boston, warned this summer of “a direct cause and effect between the shutdown and the looming collapse of some Catholic schools serving those most in need.” Now more than 100 Catholic schools nationwide have closed for good, unable to survive the pandemic-weakened economy. More will surely follow.

Some might argue the pandemic merely hastened the inevitable demise of the Catholic school system, that the only viable market for Catholic schools is a niche for pricey prep schools plus a few philanthropy-supported schools in impoverished areas. Catholic schools enrollment has fallen dramatically, from 5.2 million in the ’60s to 1.7 million today. Even pre-pandemic, for every new Catholic school that opened, three more closed elsewhere. That’s the market economy, right? News of Catholic school closures provoked Twitter comments such as, “Do we actually need Catholic schools?”

Here’s my answer: we need Catholic education now more than ever, for reasons both practical and profound. This is a breakthrough opportunity for Catholic education if we have the will to pursue it.

The practical reason is simple: if we fail to pass the faith on to our children, our churches will soon be empty. Nine out of 10 Catholic children attend public schools, and they overwhelmingly stop practicing their faith by adulthood (five percent of millennials who never attended Catholic schools attend weekly Mass as adults versus 39 percent of millennials who attended Catholic secondary schools, found a major 2015 survey). Today’s government schools have shifted radically toward gender ideology, a vision of the human person incompatible with Christian anthropology. They have become God-free zones, habituating our children in practical atheism, where God is as irrelevant to personal morality as to life’s big questions. Surveys show that young Catholics’ views on moral issues are virtually indistinguishable from their peers. Numbers don’t lie: without Catholic education, Catholic kids are less likely to become Catholic adults.

On a deeper level, Catholic education is essential to our life of faith and evangelization. Vatican II’s Gravissimum Educationis teaches we have “a right to a Christian education.” We cannot be who we are called to be without a Christian (Catholic) education. It helps us mature, cultivates our faith, teaches us to worship, conform our lives to the truth, bear witness, and to assist “the Christian formation of the world.”

When Catholic schools close, the losses are not measured primarily on accountants’ balance sheets but in children’s lives. Catholic families are deprived of what Vatican II calls a “sacred right” for their children: “a true education [that] aims at the formation of the human person in the pursuit of his ultimate end” and the good of society. In today’s post-Christian culture, families need more than ever the human, spiritual, and intellectual formation Catholic schools provide.

The pandemic opened an educational window and created a market opportunity. It demonstrated the resilience and creativity of Catholic educators as they shifted to virtual learning with remarkable ease; it sparked innovation as more flexible options emerged to meet families’ needs; and it got parents’ attention, providing a chance to market the “Catholic advantage” anew. This is a pivotal time, an invitation to those with entrepreneurial vision and evangelistic hearts to step up and make this a breakthrough moment for Catholic education, for the glory of God.

Mary Rice Hasson, J.D., is the Kate O’Beirne Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. She co-authored, with Theresa Farnan, Ph.D, Get Out Now: Why You Should Pull Your Child From Public School Before It’s Too Late, among several books she has written.