BillLawrenceOnline

“A lot of this should have been
done 10 years ago…(but)… naivete and an unwillingness to face reality”
kept many pastors and archdiocesan leaders from halting long ago the
“death spiral” of declining population and rising tuition at so many
schools, he said, according to Philly.com.
“They would say, ‘I can make this work … But we had to come along and
finally say, ‘God bless you, but this has got to stop.’ ”

Fast
forward one month to the church’s about-face, and Quindlen’s comments
tell a starkly different story. “I celebrate the results and pray they
all survive in the long term … Neither the commission nor the
archdiocese was in a rush to close schools. Our focus was on how to
sustain them.”

What? Did he seriously say that with a straight face?

How
can you make the leap from a “death spiral” to “celebrating the
results” and talking about sustainability in less than one month?

Give
the archdiocese credit for one thing: if they are trying to anger as
many Catholics as possible in the most bumbling manner while ignoring
all rules of good communication and PR, they are succeeding beyond their
wildest dreams.

Let’s cut through the emotions tied to school
closings and look at this situation objectively. In doing do, one has to
ask: Why the games? Why did the Church say one thing – that in
retrospect now seems very suspect – and then almost completely reverse
itself, all the while talking in platitudes that didn’t remotely address
the questions and concerns of many?

It has left many scratching their heads, and even more seething.

So
here are the questions that absolutely must be addressed in order for
the archdiocese to have any credibility moving forward, and to prevent
the exodus of loyal, but very bitter, Catholics:

1) Is Catholic
education too expensive to sustain in most if not all of the 49 schools
that were originally slated for shuttering? If yes – which is what the
archdiocese has been telling us, and selling us, for quite some time –
then how can three out of four appeals have been successful? What
changed? Did a billionaire step up and write a big check to keep the
schools open? If so, we don’t need a name, because charity should be
anonymous, but we do have a right to know if that happened (extremely
unlikely as it is).

2) If the opposite is true – that those
schools are in fact affordable – then why have we been told something so
radically different for so long? It’s like being pregnant: you are or
you aren’t. Either the church can operate these schools efficiently, or
they can’t. There is no in-between. But that’s exactly where this
situation is – in no-man’s land, and their equivocation has just added
to the confusion.

3) Is incompetence to blame for the
contradictory messages? We were told that appeals would only be
considered if factual errors were made in determining which schools
closed. Well, by that logic, that’s a heck of a lot of errors. If a
student makes “factual errors” on 75 percent of a test, his grade is a
25. Which, unless you attend a public school in Philadelphia, is an F.
Not exactly a stellar track record.

4) Were we lied to from the
get-go? And if so, why? Was the threat of closings a grand conspiracy to
flush out big contributors as well as lighten the wallets of the
rank-and-file even more? Don’t scoff. The archdiocese has a history of
not being straightforward.

Just look at its red face regarding
its mishandling – and lack of truthfulness – involving one of its
schools in Philadelphia. According to a news report, a group starting a
public charter school stated that it was assured by the archdiocese that
it could rent Our Lady of Mount Carmel school for that purpose – two
months before the commission recommended closing the school! Mount
Carmel appealed its closing. Any guesses as to how that turned out? It
begs the questions as to why the archdiocese would even allow the school
to appeal when its fate had apparently already been determined.

Since
we are on the topic of education, perhaps a refresher is in order. The
8th Commandment tells us that we should not bear false witness against
our neighbor. In layman’s terms, playing loose with the truth – and
outright lying – doesn’t bode well for a Church preaching morality and
in desperate need of credibility and trust.

5) What about the
folks at all the other schools who wanted to appeal but were dissuaded
from doing so because the odds were so long for success? Common sense
tells us that if they had known such a large number of schools would win
their cases, many others would have appealed. Now, those parents and
students feel even more burned than they did a month ago – a remarkable
feat in itself.

6) The appeals have thrown schools that were
thought to be “safe” into chaos. Nativity BVM in Media, for example, was
originally intended to stay open, absorbing students from St. John
Chrysostom in Wallingford. St. John’s won their appeal though, and now,
in a stunning reversal, Nativity is shutting its doors and the new
school will be located at St. John’s.

Not only do parents and
teachers feel completely betrayed by this out-of-nowhere blindside, but
there’s an even more unjust twist: Nativity apparently does not have the
ability to appeal like all the other schools did. Talk about rubbing
salt in the wound.

And it’s exactly that type of move,
accompanied by virtually no communication, which drives fuming
parishoners to leave the Church. Hence the decline in church attendance
and school enrollment.

7) How can the church push for school
choice when it does not allow choice for its own members at the
elementary school level? So some families in Annunciation parish in
Havertown, for example, whose school closed because its pastor refused
to file the appeal that so many parents begged him to do, must send
their children all the way across town to St. Denis, when in fact they
live within walking distance to Sacred Heart? How ironic that the very
church fighting the image of hypocrisy born from the sex scandal now
engages in more hypocrisy: fighting for school choice as long as it
doesn’t apply to its own flock. When will they learn?

8) There
are no guarantees in life, but what assurances can the church give that,
in the next few years, those 24 schools, as well as any others, will
not close? Since it is impossible to believe that the problems of
declining enrollment, rising costs and overall unsustainability have all
been solved in the last 30 days, woe to those parents who take the
recent reprieves to be a sign of long-term viability, for they may well
be revisiting this exact situation in the near future. And that just
isn’t right.