Abandon Parochial Schools?

Msgr. George W. Casey, 65, is a Boston Irish Catholic who looks on the folklore of Boston Irish Catholics just about the way that a small boy with a pin looks on a cluster of balloons. In his lively column for the Pilot, weekly newspaper of the Boston archdiocese, Father Casey has lampooned South Boston's "convivial, congenital, incurable" Irish for boozing it up on St. Patrick's Day, criticized parish priests for being "tyrants," and even suggested that nuns wear modern clothes --all to howls of Hibernian protest.

Last week Columnist Casey's latest shock was front-page news in Boston. He blandly urged U.S. Catholics to abandon parochial grade schools and concentrate instead on high schools and colleges. "Since it is quite clear by now that Catholic schools are not going to get any financial aid from the federal government," Father Casey argued, "we should move our resources to the front of greatest challenge."

Casey challenged the assumption that primary grades are the best time and place to carry out the chief mission of Catholic schools, "preservation of the faith." While "neatness, sanitation, table manners and so on can be ingrained in these early years, it is not evident that doctrine and abstract ideas can be." More important are the crucial years of high school: "Let us have priests and the Sisters around in the grades where boy meets girl, and where they both meet the Reformation, the Inquisition, Communism, Darwinism, Freudianism and all the other religions and philosophies. They are much more needed there than where the boys and girls meet spelling, times tables and long division."

Sending Catholic children to public schools, argued Casey, will help "avoid most of the less pleasant by-products of separatism and inbreeding." Moreover, ''we will all be relieved of the financial strain that so distorts our devotions and parish programs. The parishes will not have to erect the enormous bingo signs that disfigure all the church lawns in certain areas, nor run a lot of novenas for palpably profit motives. Sunday Mass will not take on the quality of a fly trap designed to hold the people until three collections are taken up."

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