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/