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School closings follow long failure of Catholic leaders

Why have Philadelphia's recent shutdown bishops failed to equal their builder-predecessors?

    by Joseph N. DiStefano
    Published 
Update: West Catholic and St. Hubert's high schools in Philly, Prendergast/Bonner in Delco, Conwell/Egan in Bucks to close, 44 parish schools to be shut or consolidated, Inquirer says. #phillyeducation Full list of parish schools to be closed here.

Earlier: My old high school, Archbishop Carroll, is expected to escape the axe today when the Archdiocese of Philadelphia announces it's closing up to one-quarter of the remaining Catholic diocesan and parish schools - which have already been cut by one-third, over the past 20 years, as my colleague Martha Woodall reports.

For parents and kids who still patronize these schools, for teachers who work there, for those graduates who feel part of that vast Catholic school alumni community that still identifies neighborhoods by parish name, the closings are a private tragedy.
But for the tax-paying public, it's a costly failure, to the extent thousands of former Catholic-school kids continue to transfer to public district and charter schools, where they'll cost something north of $10,000 per kid per year to educate, which means you'll be paying higher property taxes.
(That's not counting the additional value that parishes slated for closing may give by, for example, opening their food pantries and confessionals to people who might otherwise be more of a public charge.)
The shutdowns are also a lesson in management. The even larger crisis in Catholic neighborhood institutions, of which the priest sex abuse scandals, the multi-million-dollar payouts to victims, and the relentless school and parish closings are the most public symptoms, is a failure of leadership - a repeated inability of the modern church hierarchy to sustain, grow or reorganize the institutions its predecessors founded and its members built over generations.
This has been a slow, historic reversal. For most of the 1900s the Philadelphia region, like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and other big cities, enjoyed a set of parallel Catholic institutions that, whatever their relative merits compared to publicly-supported competitors, saved taxpayers millions and helped move generations of immigrants and migrants into the American mainstream.
Maybe it’s easier to find builders than turnaround specialists. The archdiocese in recent decades has been run by men whose spiritual qualities I'm not equipped to judge; but as managers they have been pygmies, unable to measure up to their larger-than-life predecessors, unable to find creative ways to modernize and preserve, let alone extend, the network created over the previous century.
The parallel institutions - the Catholic churches, colleges, hospitals and schools that stud the region - were built under the leadership of some very forceful bishops: erudite Kenrick and missionary Neumann in the first half of the 1800s, and the classic prince-of-the-church Denis Dougherty, who from 1918-51 mixed easily with Protestant politicians and Jewish real estate developers to get his suburban parishes built, even as he sternly warned the faithful to avoid those racy moving pictures and other modern temptations.  
Cardinal John Krol, who ran the archdiocese from 1961-88, struck his critics, including some of his own pastors, as a narrow conservative, but he followed in the Dougherty tradition; he had the personal skills to use church clout to earn the cooperation of politicians and businesspeople; he kept inner-city schools and churches open even as mainline Protestants fled Philadelphia.
At the start of the '80s, when longtime business writer Peter Binzen joined the Inquirer, he surveyed city executives about the most important leaders in the city; all of them named Krol to the short list.
But by the time Binzen repeated the exercise 25 years later on the eve of his retirement, nobody named then-Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua to the list of Philadelphia leaders. Unlike the ubiquitous Krol, Bevilacqua's public role seemed to be limited to closing institutions his predecessors opened, fighting Philadelphia's plan to give city employees gay partner benefits, and organizing expensive damage control for dangerously wayward priests.

What changed? The archdiocese, like Catholic churches across the U.S. and Europe, ran out of young people willing to commit their lives to the care of others through church institutions, either as priests, the church's front-line managers, or as nuns, its low-cost labor force and institution-builders. The church’s former effectiveness gave it an outsize reputation that masked both declining lay participation and the failure to denounce corruption in its own ranks. Too many of the remaining priests turned out to be unfit pastors.  
The problem starts at the top, in Rome. Leonard Swidler the Temple University religion professor who trained with both conservative Pope Benedict and arch-liberal theologian Hans Kung in Germany long ago, recalls how Benedict's ally and predecessor John Paul II changed the way bishops were recruited, relying on orthodoxy and the recommendations of major donors, instead of searching, as Paul VI and John XXIII did, for creative pastors. 
The church in its most expansive periods was built by enthusiastic young people like Ignatius, Teresa, and Francis, who, for all their loyalty to Rome, were constantly getting in trouble with their more immediate church superiors.
Vatican II is supposed to have liberalized the church; but the conservative reaction to it seems to have left us with a leadership that was unable or unwilling to inspire the old-fashioned personal commitment needed to run so many institutions, or to replace the declining number of sworn religious with able lay people, whom many bishops feared. British historian Thomas Macauley wrote that Catholics always understood how to harness the energy of its own "enthusiasts"; too often the current generation of bishops has merely succeeded in driving them out of the church.
The result of 40 years of promoting docile bishops has been a church more than ever run by careful old men, not by people who see the Gospel as a template for asking basic questions and exploring new approaches. The awful irony is these bishops, as a group, turn out to have not been careful enough to stop priest-molesters - or to cope effectively with the near-disappearance of young priests and nuns by expanding the ministry, as other churches have done, instead of letting it shrink.
Could it have been different? Almost from the start of the church in America, there were active lay Catholics who asked for more of a say in choosing leaders and running institutions. Holy Trinity parish, the German- and French-oriented church whose members included millionaire Stephen Girard's family, sued the diocese in the early 1800s for the right to own its building and hire its own staff.
The decision by a Pennsylvania judge to give Bishop Neumann personal control over Holy Trinity and all later Philadelphia parishes helped Neumann consolidate and regulate his growing Catholic school system. But it also left the laity dependent on a caste of specialists that has aged and shrunk.
Lay boards, too, are capable of mischief and failing to act. But the more able people who are part of the process of tackling an ugly problem, the more likely someone will demand action, find a way to act, or at least make the problem public so it can be dealt with.
The most robust surviving Catholic institutions - the hospital chains run by consortiums of St. Joseph and Mercy and Franciscan sisters, the universities run by Jesuits (St. Joseph's) and Augustinians (Villanova), the suburban sisters' colleges like Immaculata and Neumann - have integrated lay administrators and used the worldly experience of outside professionals, creating management models that might look closer to what the failed Holy Trinity reformers were seeking, than it is to the Philadelphia tradition of priest-run parishes.
There are signs Archbishop Chaput is adopting a similar model to help keep his remaining schools afloat. He's urging them to set up the same kind of lay-led boards that the ecumenical, business-led BLOCS Catholic-school fundraising group under recent chairman Michael O'Neill has already organized at a handful of schools in North and West Philadelphia and Delaware County to boost enrollment and build endowments. (A similar board helped save Carroll from closing when the archdiocese was organizing the new John Paul II high school in Montgomery County a few years back.)
New networks of free, inner-city Catholic and Catholic-influenced schools are slowly spreading, also with high levels of lay support. But it'll be a long time before these reach the mainstream working- and middle-class Catholics who used to be the backbone of the church's secular kingdom, here in Philadelphia.
Though I was briefly expelled from Carroll (the principal called me a Communist), I've paid for a total of 66 years of Catholic schooling (not in the Philadelphia archdiocese) for my own six kids. I like the schools' general discipline, their speedy problem-solving, their level-headed approach to Christian education, and the nice kids of diverse background the schools continue to attract, especially in high school. I've also saved my neighbors a lot of money. I hope my own kids will have the option of choosing well-run Catholic schools, when their time comes.
 
    JN
    Joseph N. DiStefano