Schools Under Strain

The parochial-school system, which for the past 80 years has been the wellspring of the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S., is changing its patterns. In Cincinnati, Archbishop Karl J. Alter announced that because of high costs and overcrowded classrooms the parochial schools in his archdiocese would close their first grades next September: 10,000 children in an area that includes Cincinnati, Dayton and Springfield will enroll, instead, in public schools.

In suburban Milwaukee, the Rev. Oscar Winninghoff of St. Aloysius' parish, said that his school would discontinue the first four grades in September 1965. Having failed to persuade the local public-school board to build a new 24-room school to educate children of his parish in secular subjects, Father Winninghoff said: "I'm going to quit talking. I'm saying, 'Here are 600 kids --you solve the problem. And I'm giving you a year and a half to solve it.' " Some parochial-school classes have been closed in Green Bay, Wis., Saginaw, Mich., and in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.; in Williamsport, Pa., the 50-year-old St. Mary's High School shut down last year, leaving 208 pupils to be absorbed in public schools.

Go Out of Business? Cincinnati's Archbishop Alter says that three-fourths of all Catholic children in the arch diocese already attend kindergarten in public schools, and "adding one more year to their presence in the public schools will not interfere too seriously with their religious training." And a new book, by a Catholic mother of five boys who have variously gone to public and Catholic schools, suggests that the church should go out of the school business altogether. Mary Perkins Ryan, author of Are Parochial Schools the Answer?, argues that providing a general education for all young Catholics has proved an impossible task for the church, that in trying to carry it out the church has neglected to provide "anything like adequate religious formation for all those not in Catholic schools."

According to Mrs. Ryan, the 5,900,000 pupils in Catholic elementary schools, high schools and colleges in 1963 constituted less than half of all Catholics of school age. The best evidence on how they fare, comparatively, comes from the Rev. Joseph H. Fichter, S.J., head of the sociology department at Loyola University. Testing social standards, social skills, family relations and school and community relations in typical parochial and public schools in South Bend, Ind., he found that pupils were nearly identical: both "accept and demonstrate honesty, obedience, gratitude, self-control and kindliness in about the same proportions."

"Supreme Bean." But by the logic of the Catholic school system, children trained in it should get notably better religious formation. Mrs. Ryan thinks they do not, partly because parochial schools are anachronistic. No longer, she argues, are the Roman Catholic Church and its schools in the "state of siege" that has existed since the Reformation. No longer must Catholics be equipped with weapons of defense against Protestant teachings. What is needed, she feels, is workable religious instruction to make all Catholics better Christians in the community.

Most youngsters, she says, get little meaning from the catechetic systems of religious instruction in many parochial schools: "One not untypical school, for instance, requires the children to recite the Rosary while they file out for recess." At another, one little girl, who insisted that God was a "supreme bean," tearfully exclaimed when her father corrected her: "Don't bother me with what it means. It's what we have to say when Sister asks us who God is."

The money spent on maintaining this school system, an estimated $1.8 billion annually, and the more than 183,000 teachers it employs could be put to better use if concentrated on improved religious education, Mrs. Ryan contends. Msgr. George W. Casey, an outspoken priest who writes a column in The Pilot, Boston's archdiocesan newspaper, agrees with her in part: "I have been advocating that the church wash out of the elementary grades. Her idea is that we should get out of general education entirely. The book is just a little too sweeping. I don't think her proposal is feasible, because the Catholic school is too firmly entrenched, too interwoven in our lives. But she poses a very real challenge."

"A Foolish Book." To prove his point, Msgr. Casey is building a $500,000 "Christian Confraternity School" next to his church in Lexington, Mass., a town where there is no Catholic school. To be opened next September as the John F. Kennedy School of Religion, it will provide 1,900 Catholic students who attend Lexington's public schools with a weekly class of religious instruction after regular school hours. "It will settle a lot of problems if it works," he says.

Many Catholic clergymen disagree with the Ryan book. Msgr. O'Neil C. D'Amour, associate secretary of the Department of School Superintendents of the National Catholic Educational Association in Washington, D.C., calls it an "incredibly naive book, a foolish book. I feel Mrs. Ryan asked a lot of the right questions, but came up with all the wrong answers." In Brooklyn, the conservative Catholic weekly paper, The Tablet, snorts at the liberals who support Mrs. Ryan's views. "The battle lines are clearly drawn. The book finds Catholic schools 'an obstacle' to the current spirit of renewal and says they must be shut."

The House Committee on Education and Labor has invited Mrs. Ryan to testify at hearings on proposed legislation that would finance a three-year experiment in which parochial-school pupils could spend part of their day taking nonreligious subjects in public schools. Except for a few areas where well-financed parochial-school systems are thriving and even growing, some such recombination of religious and educational responsibilities seems likely in many parts of the U.S.

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