c. 2005 Religion News Service

CHICAGO _ Here, where Cardinal Francis George has likened closing Catholic elementary schools to “closing a child’s world,” the influential cardinal has had to do just that, this year shuttering nearly two dozen.

The closings, and the reasons behind them _ demographic shifts, declining enrollment and financial problems _ are not unique to Chicago. The Brooklyn Archdiocese announced 22 school closures this year, and New Jersey dioceses have announced them this year in Newark, Elizabeth and Madison.

For those concerned with Catholic education, every closure contributes to an alarming problem that began about four decades ago, stabilized in the late 1990s, and worsened again in 2000, especially in old urban bastions of Catholicism in the Northeast and Midwest.

“In the last five years, we’ve seen a radical change in numbers,” said Michael Guerra, president of the National Catholic Educational Association. “We’re opening 35 new schools a year (around the country). But we’re closing an average of 135.”

During its bishops’ conference here (June 16-18), Catholic prelates voted to approve a document laying out ways to improve the state of their schools by re-emphasizing a Catholic focus, raising more money, organizing meetings of community leaders and stressing advocacy for tax credits for parents.

Nobody thinks changing direction will be easy. Nationwide, since 1970, the number of Catholic school students has decreased from 4.4 million to 2.4 million, and since 1991, about 1,250 Catholic schools around the country have closed, with only 400 opening.

The network of 7,800 Catholic schools, spread across 195 dioceses nationwide, remains the country’s biggest nongovernmental education provider. But as bishops consider their future, they are dealing with schools that look very different from decades ago and present different challenges.

For one thing, 95 percent of Catholic school teachers are now lay people. And the percentage of non-Catholic students has risen considerably, to nearly 14 percent this year from 2 percent in 1970.

In some urban areas that many Catholics left decades ago for the suburbs, the Catholic schools remain, with rates of non-Catholic students now above 90 percent.

Those increases clearly concern many bishops who are forced to weigh the specter of spending Catholic money on non-Catholics against the reality that many non-Catholic parents view many of these schools as better options than public schools.

At the bishops’ meeting here, the prelates considered that issue when discussing the document suggesting ways to improve Catholic schools. The committee that drafted the document noted in the introduction that “it is the responsibility of the entire Catholic community” to make Catholic schools “available, accessible and affordable to all parents and their children.”

But after debate, 58 percent of the bishops supported an amendment by Bishop Earl Boyea of Michigan that added the word “Catholic” before “parents and their children.”

Some of those bishops said the church should be more concerned with building schools in areas where Catholics have only recently become a significant presence and lack strong networks of Catholic schools.

“More and more we are confronted with Catholics who cannot, or will not, use Catholic schools. I think the emphasis ought to be more on them than on evangelization (to non-Catholics),” said Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb of Mobile, Ala.

“Our primary purpose can easily be lost if we’re not sufficiently emphatic that the reason we have the schools is to enhance the faith where it exists.”

That sentiment is not the only problem faced by many urban Catholic schools. As costs have risen and students have left, average tuitions have more than doubled since 1990, making new public schools seem like better options for more people.

“We’ll have a school building that’s 100 years old, and all of a sudden a public school gets built nearby for $30 million,” Rocchio said. “And here you have this family that just came from Sri Lanka _ what are they going to see when they walk down the street? They’re going to see the $30 million school, and then they’re going to see the school that’s 125 years old.”

Solutions for Catholic schools in the United States, the document says, involve more financial support from Catholics, even if their parish is not connected with a school, and from non-Catholics.”

There are people out there who don’t have kids in the schools but who benefit from the schools, said the Rev. William Davis, deputy schools director for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“We have a business community that benefits,” he said. “If we’re closing inner-city schools that are educating significant numbers of minorities and non-Catholics … if we want them to succeed, (non-Catholics) need to help us.”

MO/JL END RNS

(Jeff Diamant covers religion for the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for a file photo of George to accompany this story.