This Sunday’s readings have a lot to say about the responsibility of those with much to share generously for the common good. The Archdiocese of New York is talking in similar terms in a new initiative designed to shore up its struggling network of Catholic elementary schools.

In speeches and articles over the last few months, Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan has sketched the broad outlines of a plan that includes radically changing the way parochial schools are financed. Each elementary school has until now been financed mainly by members of its local parish. In the proposed reorganization, the cost of educating roughly 56,000 grade school students would be spread among all parishes and all 2.5 million Catholics in the archdiocese.

In a column in Catholic New York on September 9, Dolan said that the view that Catholic schools are only the duty of parents who have children attending was “non-Catholic.” “Support of Catholic schools is a duty of the entire church, even if you may not have a child now in one, or belong to parish without one,” he wrote in preparation for the October release of his plan, “Pathway to Excellence.”

Dolan cited statistics from the National Catholic Educational Association which tell a sobering tale about Catholic schools in the United States: “From a student enrollment in the mid-1960s of more than 5.2 million in nearly 13,000 elementary and secondary Catholic schools across America, there are now only half as many, with just 7,000 schools and 2.1 million students enrolled.”

But in his recent statements the archbishop has made it clear he plans to fight the trend. Parochial schools have been ailing so long that administrators have adopted “a hospice mentality,” he said, as if to say “the best we can do is making their passing comfortable.” To which he added, “Malarkey!”

“Everybody [else] has tried something piecemeal,” said Rev. Joseph V. Corpora, an administrator and consultant at the Alliance for Catholic Education, a project at the University of Notre Dame that is developing strategies to save Catholic schools. “But what Archbishop Dolan is talking about goes way beyond that, to something all-encompassing.”

Source: Articles by Paul Vitello for the New York Times, Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan in America,
and Associated Press