Good Counsel Academy RIP

In case you haven’t heard – a “final” decision was reached last month to close the “Our Lady of Good Counsel Academy.” It has resided at its quaint White Plains campus since 1896. An elementary school also run by the Sisters of Divine Compassion was able to relocate to a closed Catholic parochial school in the nearby town of Valhalla. The announced reasons for the closing are the obvious ones; the Sisters of Divine Compassion has a dwindling number of aging sisters requiring care and almost no new members.

I should mention my daughter graduated from this school five years ago. At that time, only a few sisters still remained involved with the school  and their average age was not unsurprisingly high. The philosophy of  Good Counsel Academy was that of your standard middle-of-the-road to progressive Catholic educational institution. At my daughter’s graduation I recall there was much said regarding empowering women; almost nothing on “God” or “Christ.” Thus,  the fate of this school seems to me entirely predictable. It is a shame, though, for all the faculty, parents and students involved – many of the latter coming from poorer circumstances. It is also a tragedy for White Plains to lose a landmarked site like this campus.

The attitude of these sisters was somewhat different only 20 years ago.  Pace had acquired in the 1970’s a college that the sisters also previously conducted on another part of their campus and now wanted to close it because of lack of enrollment.   The sisters challenged that change of purpose. At the time, The New York Times reported, Pace university used reasoning much like that of the Catholic Church today:

What is more, officials at the university have questioned why the sisters — who are close neighbors of Pace on property off one of the main thoroughfares in this city — are holding fast to values that may no longer be relevant.

”You can’t freeze time,” ”and you can’t live in the past,” said Stephen Brodsky, a lawyer for the university. ”There are changing patterns of enrollment to consider now and monetary concerns to factor in.”

And Pace made this nasty but true point:

Defending its position to decide policy on the basis of financial needs, the university also argues in its legal papers that the sisters were motivated by similar concerns when they transformed the Catholic College for Women, in a series of steps from 1955 to 1971, into a nonsectarian, co-educational institution. Pace has claimed that the nuns did so in part because they wanted to be eligible for state educational funds.

So wee see that the fate of the high school and the loss of the White Plains campus were, in a sense, already foreshadowed and preprogrammed by the policies adopted in the first years after the Council. And the representative of the sisters herself told the New York Times that the sisters were part of ”a vanishing breed” — there were only 124 nuns in the order (in 1997) compared with 224 in the peak days. Things have not improved in the last 20 years.

And the Archdiocese? Catholic New York reported on the closing, referencing statements of Cardinal Dolan and the Sisters of Divine Compassion. The whole reads more like a lawyer’s brief than the words of a religious organization. It is reiterated that the high school is totally separate from the Archdiocese and the decision to close was taken solely by the sisters. But then the Archdiocese magnanimously tried to find an alternative locations, none of which worked out (obviously because only six to nine months were available to find a solution, given the actions by taken the sisters).

“At this point the archdiocese has done all that has been asked to assist this private school in remaining open.” (Cardinal Dolan)

Naturally the committee of parents and others which had been desperately fighting to save the school has a somewhat different view of the matter….

We should conclude by noting that the Vatican, under Pope Francis, has recently specifically endorsed the orders of American sisters – like the Sisters of Divine Compassion – with only a verbal slap on the wrist.