Catholic Candle note: The article below is by one of Catholic Candle’s more senior editors who has always been Traditional Catholic. This article provides a small glimpse into the state of the Catholic education of children in Mid-Twentieth Century America.
As a “cradle Catholic” and one who benefitted from 12 years of Catholic schools (plus 2 years at a Catholic university), I was an unwilling witness to the dissolution of Catholic schools in America. It was something that in my wildest nightmares I could not have anticipated.
Good Catholic families from local parishes had always been expected to send their children to the parish schools. Many did so at a significant sacrifice. (Families who couldn’t afford it were often given “discounts”.) The point is that we all assumed that these schools would always be there to teach the children more about their Faith, how to be better Catholics, and how to save their souls. And, oh yes, give them a superior education besides.
It wasn’t until about the 1960s that things began to change. You might begin to suspect that there could be some connection to a critical event that took place in that period. (Hint: think VC II). Yes, Women’s Lib was among the trenchant influences, too, with its attendant push to convents and religious orders to shed their habits and “think for themselves.” These were worrisome things, of course, but I don’t believe there was any panic that this was the death knell for Catholic education itself. When the changes first began, they were a trickle, hardly causing passing concern. Many of us were at first surprised, then uneasy, but not yet alarmed when Catholic schools began to innovate under the banner of modernism.
Looking back now, I believe the changes seemed unreal at first, and beyond anybody’s power to derail them – sort of like trying to stop a locomotive with your bare hand. I think it is fair to say that most Catholics didn’t understand the scope of the changes in our Catholic schools that were being proposed – no, demanded. We were used to trusting the self-sacrificing nuns and good priests to educate our children in our Catholic Faith, and now we were told that the erudite professors themselves must be allowed to decide what to teach.
As a busy young mother of a growing family, I didn’t really understand how it came about so suddenly. We had a strong network of solid Catholic schools one year, and the next it was beginning to disintegrate; and ten years down the line, many were fading into pale copies of public schools. How on earth did this happen? How did we reach this point? The question became: did we just have to learn to live with these revolutionary changes? Some, perhaps naively, imagined that if these changes “just happened,” might they be the natural progression of steps to improve the education of our children? The answer is “no.” They were the result of a specific concrete historic event. And that event was the start of a rebellion against the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.
This historic event took place at St. John’s University in Queens, New York in January, 1966. Two hundred professors went on strike for 1½ years to challenge the teaching authority of the Church. St. John’s had been founded by the Vincentian Fathers in 1870 to give explicitly Catholic education to Catholic students, in submission to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. Now, suddenly there was a claim to a nebulous “right” to, in essence, teach what they wanted to. Professors from all over the United States threw their support to the St. John’s protesters, claiming that academic freedom was violated if they were not allowed to contradict the teaching authority of the Church. In the previous century, nobody apparently thought about that; they were too busy claiming scientific freedom. Which had been quickly suppressed by a number of popes, including Pius IX, Leo XIII, and St. Pius X.
It turned out that this latest toxic claim, however, was not easily suppressed. The rush to jump on the academic freedom bandwagon had begun. Several months later, in April 1966, a conference of Catholic university presidents and other education leaders was held at Notre Dame, including some from Seton Hall, Boston College, Georgetown, and other Catholic universities.
The theme of the conference, the first of many, was “Academic Freedom in the Catholic University.” Following this, the president of Notre Dame, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, a Holy Cross father, asked modernist Jesuit Fr. Neil McCloskey to write a statement outlining a supposed academic freedom. It was called the Land ‘O Lakes Statement as it had been put together in Land ‘O Lakes, Wisconsin. It was a declaration of rebellion against the authority of the Church. The influential manifesto, which would spread its poison from coast to coast, and beyond, proclaimed:
To perform its teaching and research functions effectively, the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind: lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.[1]
No effort was made to disguise the fact that The Statement was greatly inspired by the liberalization of Vatican II. The Statement had enormous influence on Catholic higher education. In the following decades the great majority of Catholic colleges and universities relinquished control of their own institutions to independent Boards of Directors. (Hard to believe but sadly, they did). The Statement had recommended replacing priests with completely independent lay people who weren’t obliged to obey ecclesiastical authority (the Church). These institutions still called themselves Catholic and may have appeared to be Catholic, but more and more they began to operate independently, and at times in opposition to Church teaching.
A few wary Catholics wondered out loud if a university like Notre Dame was still Catholic! It was true that there was still beautiful Catholic art exhibited, and various Catholic symbols and statues still remained around the N.D. campus, but were these just remnants from the past rather than evidence of a living Catholic Faith?
There were some efforts by Catholic leaders to reverse the damage caused by the academic freedom offensive, but nothing that seemed to take hold. Rome, of course, expressed its opposition to this flagrant challenge to the authority of the Church, and local bishops were generically urged to be vigilant as to what was taught in their dioceses and exert more authority to insure orthodoxy.
They suggested that if you called your school “Catholic,” the word must not just be a noun, part of the title, but rather, the word “Catholic” must be a descriptive adjective and must always be a real expression of a profound reality; in other words, it must mean something. It must identify the speaker or the university as upholding the truths of the Faith and being in conformity to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.
This was a nice expected response. And of course, nothing much came of it. Unless you count the eventual closing of hundreds of Catholic institutions or their becoming independent of the Church.
It wasn’t until 1990, a full 24 years after the first salvo by the academic freedom liberals, that Rome issued Ex Corde Ecclesiae, an apostolic constitution by Pope John Paul II, defining the role of the Catholic university. In it, the pope repudiated The Land ‘O Lakes Statement, examined the problem, and set forth a set of regulations that were meant to ameliorate the situation, such as:
➢ Compelling Catholic teachers both in Catholic and non-Catholic universities to be in complete submission to the Magisterium of the Church; and
➢ Obliging non-Catholic teachers to respect the teachings of the Catholic Church, (not compelling them to believe them, but not to publicly oppose them).
Many Catholic teachers vehemently disagreed. The president of Notre Dame is supposed to have said, “If the pope says Notre Dame is not Catholic, who would believe him?”
Whatever measures the Church took to stem the tide of this disaster proved ineffectual. This might be hinted at by the following random statistics (which I have collected from various places, over time):
❖ In 1958, the number of American children attending a private elementary school was 15%. In 1970, this number had fallen to 10%; in 2015, to 9%.
❖ In 1965, 89% of American children in private elementary schools were in Catholic schools. By 2013, that number had fallen to 42%, less than half of what it had been.
v From 2000 to 2010, more than 1000 Catholic schools were closed; 174 of them were closed or consolidated during 2009-2010 alone.
v From 1970-2010, the number of Catholic schools in the U.S. dropped by 37%.
An equally sad statistic is that from 1970-2010, the number of religious vocations dropped by 70%! Here are some specifics:
† The Jesuits (a teaching order), decrease (approximately) from 59,000 to 38,000;
† Christian Brothers (another teaching order) decrease from 2,212 to 589; and
† The number of nuns decrease from 160,931 in 1970; to 48,546 in 2015; and then to 45,605 in 2018.
It is difficult to assess a cause-and-effect statistic of the shrinking of the religious orders in the U.S., and how it relates to the destruction of Catholic schools. Certainly, the worldliness of society, the general weakening of morals, the targeting of our youth by the entertainment industry, a “kept” media – all of these, and more, contributed to the breakdown of our Catholic school system. When the parents of the ‘60s and ‘70s “gave up” on it and began to send their children elsewhere, it is little wonder that when their children married and had families, they weren’t so quick to send them to those same declining schools. “Declining” meaning where the schools were “declining” to adhere uncompromisingly to the Magisterium of the Church.
So, all in all, one might be tempted to think it hopeless to believe it’s possible to reverse the damage.
And on our own, it surely would be. But Our Lady will not stand by indefinitely while Satan holds sway over the education of our children. Just as she promised four hundred years ago in Quito, Ecuador, when referring to the Great Apostasy, in the end her Immaculate Heart will triumph. However, she added that her triumph will only occur when all seems hopeless. Here are her words:
When everything will seem lost and paralyzed, that will be the happy beginning of the complete Restoration. This will mark the arrival of my hour, when I, in a marvelous way, will dethrone the proud and cursed Satan, trampling him under my feet and chaining him in the infernal abyss.[2]
Our present situation in the human struggle to restore our Catholic schools does seem very bad. However, it does not yet seem completely lost and hopeless. Thus, it seems we must endure some additional years before the victory promised by Our Lady of Quito.
On our part, we must make a greater effort to be more fervent in our prayers and to continue to say our daily rosary. (Or better yet, the fifteen decades.)
While we pray for the triumph of Our Lady, we must also fight for Christ the King as best we can. So must the Church hierarchy. The first thing they must do is to correct their own softness and liberalism.
As to the tangible steps that might be taken after that, it is not beyond the power of the local ordinaries to regain control of our Catholic schools. They would need to have the will and the courage to meet the challenge. It would not be easy, but with the help of the Holy Ghost and Sts. Thomas Aquinas, and John Bosco (patrons of Catholic schools), the liberalism that was astoundingly allowed to spread its poison across the United States could eventually be neutralized, and our Catholic schools could once again do their crucial job of educating children according to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church.
We must pray fervently and fight for Christ tirelessly! This is God’s Will, even though the reality is that this Catholic restoration of education will not occur except as part of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and through Her intercession.
Our Lady of Quito and of Fatima, Pray for us!