Fr. Richard Cipolla is offering a Missa Cantata tomorrow night at 7:00 at St. Pius Church in Fairfield, CT for the Feast of the Exhaltation of the Holy Cross.

St. John the Baptist Church in Allentown, NJ will be offering a Solemn Mass for the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel. With the impending election and unrest in American cities, the parish decided to do a special solemn mass and novena to St. Michael (see below).

It is just one more chapter in a long, sad story. Untapped New York reports on the 26 Catholic schools of the New York Archdiocese and of  the Brooklyn diocese that are closing this year. 1) Others closed in 2019 – and many more before that! No restructurings, refinancings or other new programs seem able to stop the hemorrhaging,

But what caught my eye is that two of the schools highlighted in the Untapped New York report  – the former parochial schools of St. Anselm and of Our Lady of Angels – are in my home town of long ago, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.  St. Anselm’s was my own school up to the third grade. My mother had attended it too.  Many other relatives of mine on my mother’s side had attended nearby Our Lady of Angels. Like many other parishes in the New York area, St. Anselm’s had built its school – in the 1920’s –  some thirty years before its church. That’s how important the Catholic school was to the diocese and the parents at that time. Later, St. Anselm’s added a more modern kindergarten in the back. 

It seems now like a fond memory of a distant vanished age. My teachers were mostly School Sisters of Notre Dame who at that time still wore their original beautiful habits.  Like myself, most of the children walked to school.  I remember so well the rehearsals for our planned grand entrance into the church on the occasion of our first communion. Unfortunately it rained heavily that day – so we substituted a much more interesting (for me) trek through the linked cellars of the school and the church. I so enjoyed the few years I spent there – and was unhappy to have to leave the school when my family moved out of Bay Ridge. 

What will be done with the buildings after the Catholic schools have closed? Nicholas Loud notes that a number are the work of Gustave Steinback, (1878-1959) prolific architect of Catholic churches and institutional buildings. He was the architect of Blessed Sacrament church on the Upper West Side, perhaps the finest Catholic church building in Manhattan neither a cathedral nor the establishment of a religious order.  Speaking of Blessed Sacrament parish, Blessed Sacrament school,  apparently successful and apparently still affiliated with its parish, took over in 2019 the building of the  former parochial school of Sacred Heart of Jesus parish on West 52^nd street to create an “upper school.”2)

Why is this happening? Officially blame is being placed on the coronavirus.  It seems to me, however, that clearly lack of faith (or as Nicholas Loud puts it, a “declining of religious participation”) is the root cause. For the Catholic parochial school system was created to pass on the faith in an indifferent or even hostile American society. Regardless of what a “Priest In-Residence and Post-Doctoral Fellow at Notre Dame University,” quoted in Nicholas Loud’s article, implies, the parochial school was emphatically not intended primarily as a kind of poor relief for immigrant families  – although it of course it did and does give them educational opportunities.  Bay Ridge in the 1950’s was not a poor neighborhood by any stretch of the imagination,  yet the parochial schools were flourishing. But when the level of “religious participation” has fallen to 15-20% of the nominal Catholic population the side effects on Catholic education will be immense.

That precipitous drop in the practice of the faith came, of course,  in the wake of the Second Vatican council. That’s when the sisters first modified their habits and then discarded them entirely.  And a short time after that they themselves disappeared from the classrooms. The growing reliance on lay teachers caused costs to skyrocket. An increasingly religiously  indifferent Catholic community no longer perceived a need for this education  – certainly not at this now substantial price. Those who indeed were poor found Catholic eduction increasingly difficult to afford. And many of the minority who did remain committed in principle to Catholic education were increasingly dissatisfied with the evolution of the religious and secular content, thus giving rise, for example, to the Catholic home schooling movement.

As I mentioned above, the New York City Catholic school began to be perceived as a secular welfare program. In many cases much or even most of the student body became non-Catholic – inevitably leading to conflicts and compromises. This had the effect of further restricting the potential pool of students.

Over the years all kinds of new structures have been devised to try to stem the tide – yet the decline of the school system goes on. It is in some ways amazing – in these decades in which the even more catastrophic decline of the public schools should have opened up opportunities,   the Catholic school system instead seems gripped by an irresistible process of decay.

The story of my own former school is instructive. St. Anselm’s and Our Lady of Angels’ parochial schools had previously been converted into “charter schools”: St. Anselm Catholic Academy and Holy Angels Catholic Academy  In 2019 it was suddenly announced that St. Anselm Catholic Academy and Holy Angels Catholic Academy would join together to become Bay Ridge Catholic, an academy operating out of St. Anselm’s building.  Its leadership offered this not totally coherent explanation:

“Over a 10-year period enrollment has declined, but there has been some recent student growth at St. Anselm and there is positive energy,” St. Anselm Board of Directors Chairperson John Quaglione told the Eagle. Still, there are troubling signs, Quaglione said. “We saw projections that enrollment would continue to decline. The student population will continue to go down. The pool as a whole is shrinking,” he said.

By combining the two schools into one entity, leaders at both schools said they believe they can help save Catholic education in their section of Bay Ridge. 3)

Bay Ridge, for those unfamiliar with Brooklyn,  remains,  as it has always been, a decidedly middle class – even upper middle class –  place. (To be fair, a third Catholic academy in Bay Ridge (or Fort Hamilton), the St. Patrick Catholic Academy, stated in 2019 it was doing well.)

And what is the curriculum of the new combined Bay Ridge Catholic Academy? The school’s website claims it will be centered around faith, arts and engineering.(!) But it is the latter that receives all the emphasis:

The curriculum will be focused on engineering and inspired by the arts.

• The model builds on STEM, STEAM, and STREAM, with a focus on the engineering thinking skills needed for the 21st century world.
• The engineering thought process requires higher level thinking skills to plan, test, try again and analyze results, even in kindergarten. 4)

It seems so very different from the St Anselm’s I knew in the early 1960’s!  Please excuse my pessimism, but I foresee only continued decline of the once grand Catholic school system.

1. Loud, Nicholas, Decline of a NYC Institution: 26 Catholic Schools Closed During Pandemic (Untapped New York 8/12/2020)
2. “SBS/SHJS Merger 2019
3. Katinas, Paula, Two Bay Ridge Catholic Schools to Merge (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 11/1/2019); Katinas, Paula, ‘We were blindsided,’ St. Anselm parent says of school merger (Brooklyn Reporter, 11/18/2019)
4. Bayridgecatholic.org/academics/

This morning Fr. Michael Novajosky celebrated at Missa Cantata for the Feast of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist at St. Augustine Cathedral in Bridgeport, CT.

Which Canon Jean-Marie Moreau, ICKSP, has been building up in Sulphur, Louisiana. From Hurricane Laura.

Most Holy Trinity church in Mamaroneck, Westchester county, scheduled to be closed has been saved after a decison by the Vatican – the consequence of a tenacious campaign by the parishioners.

Whereas on May 26, 2018, we gave a decree relegating the church of Most Holy Trinity in the Parish of Saint Vito-Most Holy Trinity, Mamaroneck, New York, to profane but not sordid use according to the prescripts of canon 1222 §2 for the grave causes mentioned in said decree;

The decree of May 26, 2018 relegating the church of Most Holy Trinity in the Parish of Saint Vito-Most Holy Trinity, Mamaroneck, New York, to profane but not sordid use according to the prescripts of canon 1222 §2 for the grave causes mentioned in said decree is herewith rescinded.

Decree of the Archdiocese of New York of July 2, 2020.

A Vatican-appointed priest assigned to oversee the case recently ruled that the arguments put forth by the parishioners had merit, Maver said.

Then, last month, Dolan wrote in a decree that, “after prayerful consideration, having weighed all the reasons and causes” he had decided to rescind the 2018 ruling closing the church.

Source. (NY Post 8/12/2020); see also Patch (8/13/2020

It is a remarkable reversal of fortune – one much more significant than it first appears, given the direct Vatican involvement. For in July of this year the Congregation of the Clergy suspended the massive diocese-wide parish restructurings of least two dioceses of Germany. We covered this development HERE. The instruction, The pastoral conversion of the Parish community in the service of the evangelising mission of the Church, among other provisons, reiterated at VIIa 46-51 that procedures and canon law must be followed in carrying out the suppression of any parish. This, and the Mamaroneck decison above, indicate that for the time being a much stricter review of diocesan parish reduction programs can be expected.

Thanks to James P. Maver, Esq. ( a leader of the parishioners’ fight to save their church.)

From the post on the great site Ephemeral New York

St. Monica’s – my old parish in 1982-83, and now, after Making all Things New “The parish of St. Monica, St. Elizabeth of Hungary and St. Stephen of Hungary.” As you can see below, a section of old tenement buildings on the corner has been torn down, exposing the brick side of the church to view for the first time in ages.

I have to differ from the erudite author of Ephemeral New York in one respect, though. St. Monica’s, like many other Manhattan churches, was meant to be viewed only from the front. Like many others, only the facade of St. Monica’s is finished in stone. The church was thus intended from the beginning to be a part of streetscape over which it presided but did not overpower or crush.

Thus, the current appearance of the church is anomalous. But what may come is far worse. For it could well be that a gigantic high rise may be built on the now empty lot. The neighood is already up in arms about that possibility. If such a bulding is erected, it would dominate and overpower the immediate neighborhood – including St Monica’s. Depending on what is built, it might also cast into permanent darkness the wonderful windows of St Monica’s on the west side of the nave – and perhaps some of those of the apse as well?

Our 2011 article on this parish.

(Below) St Elizabeth of Hungary- one of the splendid windows of St Monica’s church. St. Monica’s has some of the most beautiful decoration and furnishings of any Manhattan Catholic parish.

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