Church Battling Tide of Closures

It was once almost an article of faith for new Roman Catholic parishes: They built the parochial school first and held Sunday Mass in the auditorium. The church building could wait until later.

That is the way they did it at Most Precious Blood parish in northeast Baltimore. The altar and pews were placed right in the middle of the two-story brick school building, which opened in 1960. The church, the parish figured, would rise later on the vacant lot across the driveway.

But the baby boom ended, the church was never built, the parishioners aged and their children moved to the suburbs to start their own families.

Casualty List of 4,300

Next month, Most Precious Blood school will join a casualty list of 4,300 Catholic schools that have closed since the mid-1960s.

Even with tuition starting at $1,100 a year, the school ran a deficit last year of $86,000, made up from the dwindling resources of a parish of 400 families.

Mary Barlow, a nurse who sent her three children to the school, was on the committee that recommended closing the school. There was no fight.

“It’s not that we gave up easily, but we had to take the interests of the few and think of the whole parish,” she said. “How do you ask an older group of people to raise a $100,000 subsidy? It’s impossible. It’s un-Christian.”

Schools like Most Precious Blood have been squeezed in the vise of rising costs and declining enrollments that persist despite some studies that show Catholic schools achieve better academic results, especially for minority students, and send more students to college than their public counterparts.

Catholic schools have lost 3 million students since 1964, including 103,000 last year alone, when 110 schools closed. This year’s enrollment of 2.62 million is down 3.8% from a year ago and off 53% from the peak of 5.6 million in 1964.

The Catholic population actually has grown over that same period and become more prosperous. But as Catholics moved to the suburbs, the schools did not follow them.

Pastors “no longer have the large armies of sisters and brothers, especially the sisters, to staff the schools,” said Sister Catherine T. McNamee, president of the National Catholic Educational Assn.

Nuns and priests taught 75% of the classes in Catholic schools in 1960. Today, nearly 83% of the 140,000 teachers at 8,992 Catholic schools are lay women and men.

“Neither the parishes nor the dioceses nor the Catholic people as a whole were really prepared to absorb the costs that came about after Vatican II,” as many nuns left their orders and some of those who remained chose ministries other than teaching, McNamee said.

Last week, McNamee and the leaders of 21 other Catholic organizations gathered in Dayton, Ohio, for a weeklong summit to try to forge a common vision for the future of Catholic education in America.

“The issues on the agenda are gigantic,” said McNamee, whose organization began working with the U.S. Catholic Conference three years ago to lay the groundwork for the symposium, called the Catholic Education Futures Project.

They will be exploring ways to spare other inner-city parochial schools the fate of Most Precious Blood, perhaps through new financial arrangements and organizing Catholic schools by region and clusters of parishes instead of as single parish entities.

The Baltimore archdiocese has already started trying to revamp its parochial schools. In a 1986 pastoral letter, Archbishop William D. Borders spoke of the need to adopt an “inter-parochial school structure” and to set tuition at full cost, with tuition assistance for families unable to pay the full expense.

The schools are to be run not by individual pastors or parish councils but by independent Catholic school boards in each of 12 regions of the archdiocese, which stretches from the Chesapeake to Cumberland, Md.

‘Somewhat Unpopular’

“We’re being looked at by other dioceses all over the country,” said Lawrence Callahan, the archdiocese’s superintendent of schools. “We really have taken a position that has been somewhat unpopular among our people.”

Baltimore, the first archdiocese in the United States, was the site of three 19th-Century plenary councils that gave impetus to creation of the world’s largest system of Catholic schools.

The American bishops at their third plenary council here in 1884 proclaimed: “Near every church, when it does not already exist, a parochial school is to be erected within two years from the promulgation of this council, and to be kept up in the future, unless in the judgment of the bishop the erection and maintenance of the school is impossible.”

Any priest “gravely negligent in erecting the school” or running it “can and must be removed from that church . . . ,” the bishops decreed. “All Catholic parents are bound to send their children to parochial schools.”

Catholic schools existed as far back as Colonial days, but their numbers grew in step with Catholic immigration in the mid-1800s and beyond to the big cities of the East. There, according to University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter, they “provided havens for Catholics committed to preserving their ethnic and religious heritage” in a Protestant-dominated society.

But in the modern era, as Catholics prospered and grew more comfortable with life in a pluralistic and secular United States, they came to rely less on their parochial schools, Hunter said.

The bishops’ injunction to Catholic parents fell by the wayside.

“The fact of the matter was we didn’t have enough room,” said Father Thomas G. Gallagher, the U.S. Catholic Conference’s secretary for education. ‘You couldn’t go out and tell everybody to put their youngsters in a Catholic school, and you can’t lay a guilt trip on parents who can’t afford it.”

The Catholic school enrollment slump has hit elementary schools the hardest. High schools often were organized by region or diocese to begin with or sponsored by such orders as the Jesuits or Sisters of the Sacred Heart, and they drew from a wider base than parish schools.

In 1965, Baltimore had 113 elementary schools with 61,000 students. Today it has 86 with 24,000. A quarter-century ago, 80% of its teachers were nuns drawing stipends of $600 a year. Today, the archdiocese pays the nuns $7,000, while lay teachers’ salaries start at $12,416, almost $6,000 below the scale in Baltimore public schools.

As recently as 1970, most Baltimore Catholic schools charged less than $100 tuition a year. Even at tuition rates of $1,100 and $1,200 a year, Callahan said, it is hard to pay a living wage to teachers who have families of their own.

The superintendent also believes Catholic leaders have not done enough to encourage parents to use the Catholic schools. “Today you rarely hear anyone talk about the values of Catholic schools from the pulpit,” he said. “So many people have children in public schools they don’t want to offend anyone.”

Secretary of Education William J. Bennett told the National Catholic Educational Assn. convention in New York last month that Catholic schools are closing in part because they have failed “to make their case to the public.”

“You can’t wait around for tax credits or tuition vouchers or other forms of new government funding. . . . They are not imminent,” said Bennett, a Catholic who attended public and parochial schools.

Catholic and other religious schools have been stymied in the courts and in Congress in their efforts to secure more government support. Three of the last four presidents--Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan--promised wider help. None has delivered.

Reagan has frequently extolled the idea of tuition tax credits, but he has been unable to obtain them. The Administration also believes strongly in giving parents wider choice in education, but lately it has been talking primarily about choice among public schools.

The 1965 legislation that provided remedial aid for disadvantaged children specifically allowed religious schools to take part. But a 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court drove the remedial classes out of Catholic school buildings and into vans or other sites off the premises.

Minority enrollment in Catholic schools has doubled since 1970. Blacks, Latinos and other minorities account for 22% of all students. Sixty-four percent of the 234,300 black pupils are not Catholic.

Studies by James Coleman, a University of Chicago sociologist, and others have found Catholic students outperforming their public school counterparts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading and writing tests. The gap between the average performance of black and white pupils is narrower than in public schools.

Coleman, in a study on the high school Class of 1982, found that the dropout rate between the sophomore and senior year was 14% for public school students, but only 3.4% for those in Catholic schools.

Valerie Lee, a University of Michigan education professor, said, “There is an institutional pull toward academic pursuits in Catholic schools for all students, regardless of their ethnic, social and academic background, that we do not see in the public schools.”

Fifty-four of the 149 students at Most Precious Blood are black. Among them is 13-year-old Alethia Henson, a seventh-grader. “All the schools I go to close down,” she said.

This is the third Catholic school that has gone under for her.

Father Joseph Hughes, the third pastor at Most Precious Blood in as many years, said, “One reason we hate to see our school leave here is that this is our greatest evangelization tool. . . . Most of the people moving into the community are black, so it would be a real opportunity to start building, but we couldn’t possibly afford to hang in there long enough to do anything like that.”

Before becoming a priest, Hughes was a cost analyst for the Rouse Co. “As soon as I arrived and started looking at papers, I realized that, oh, my goodness, this doesn’t seem like this is very responsible in a parish this size carrying this much of a financial burden.”

The principal of Most Precious Blood, Dorothy Parker, said enrollment had dropped from more than 200 four years ago to 149 this year.

She expected most of her pupils to transfer to St. Anthony of Padua School, 2 1/2 miles away. The parishes and parents’ groups have arranged a union. St. Anthony has 416 students and a capacity of 700; its tuition is somewhat higher.