Catholic Schools and the Future of the Church

Kathleen Engebretson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781623561666
• eBook ISBN: 9781623567132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

During the first decade of the 21st century the Catholic Church in the developed world has faced a decline in its moral authority, increasing accusations of irrelevance to a secular age, and a steep and steady decline in commitment among successive generations from the 1960s on. Despite this Catholic schools have multiplied and grown in popularity and educational achievement. The book sets out a programme for the contribution of Catholic schools to the future of the Church, covering such topics as the religious education curriculum in its cognitive and affective aspects, the sacramental life of the school, selection of staff, the issue of staff and Catholic witness and many other topics. Engebretson argues that Catholic schools are a powerful key to the future of the Church and shows how, within their diversity, Catholic schools can be ecclesial communities, which have at their heart the building up of the Church.

1

A Church Cannot Last Without Its People

The Catholic education achievement

In this second decade of the twenty-first century, the Catholic Church operates the largest non-government school system in the world. Approximately 93,000 Catholic elementary schools and 44,000 Catholic high schools educate more than 48 million children (Centre for Applied Research in the Apostolate [CARA], 2012). In Australia the Catholic education system is second only to the government education sector, with more than 650,000 students and around 21 per cent of all high school enrolments (Australian Government, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2008). Australia’s neighbour, New Zealand, has 193 Catholic primary schools and 49 Catholic high schools (New Zealand Catholic Education Office, 2011). In the United Kingdom there are 2,315 Catholic schools and colleges (United Kingdom Catholic Education Service, 2008) while the United States has approximately 7,841 Catholic schools, around 5,636 of these being elementary schools and 1,205 being high schools (CARA, 2012). Canada has 109 Catholic schools (Catholiclinks.org, 2011) and in India 14,429 children attend Catholic primary and high schools, even though Catholics comprise less than 2 per cent of the population (Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, 2011). Even these few statistics indicate that Catholic education is and continues to be a monumental achievement of the Church, one in which it has invested colossal resources and commitment. Catholic schools vary greatly in their history, ownership, the extent to which they are financially supported by their country’s governments, their size and wealth, and the numbers of their students and staff who are Catholic, but among a range of purposes they have in common the purpose of educating Catholic children in their baptismal tradition (Ormerod, 2008).

A declining church?

Catholic schools have multiplied around the world as the Catholic Church itself has declined in the developed world. In 1976 the American theologian and sociologist Andrew Greeley co-authored a book entitled Catholic Schools in a Declining Church, which he based on interviews with 1,128 adult American Catholics (Greeley, McCready and McCourt, 1976). Yet the American Church he described, just ten years after the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), appeared to be anything but declining. Greeley described a Church where the majority of adults approved of liturgical changes that were introduced as a result of the Council, where 50 per cent of Catholics attended Sunday Mass, 17 per cent still attended ‘confession’ weekly, Church visits to pray were made by 15 per cent and 60 per cent reported that they prayed daily. There was general approval of the work of the Pope, bishops and priests, although quite a decline in the numbers who supported papal infallibility. In Greeley’s research 50 per cent of those who responded would support their sons becoming priests or their daughters nuns. A major change was that 83 per cent supported artificial birth control as opposed to 45 per cent ten years earlier. Attitudes to pre-marital sex and abortion had also become more liberal. Nevertheless, Greeley described a strong and active Church:

Fundamental loyalty to the Church continues, parochial schools are vigorously endorsed, there are no signs of anticlericalism or of any vigorous antipathy to Church leadership. Church attendance is down among adults (although it remains high among teenagers) and communion reception is up. Some traditional forms of piety have declined but other, newer forms seem to have attracted surprisingly large numbers of people. (Greeley, McCready and McCourt, 1976, 39)

Twenty-four years later, research undertaken with young American Catholics illustrated a marked dissipation of cultural Catholicism, the deterioration of the Catholic cultural enclave and the rise of spiritual individualism (Fultan et al., 2000). The pattern is repeated in western countries around the world (see Abela, 2000 on Malta; Duthie-Jung, 2012 on New Zealand). In the Catholic Church in Australia, as in other secularized countries, the most significant decline in religious practice has been among teenagers and young adults. The latest National Attendance count, conducted over four Sundays in May 2006 (Dixon, Kunciunas and Reid, 2008), showed that 13.8 per cent of Australia’s Catholic population attended Mass, a figure that was down from 15.3 per cent in 2001 and further down from 1996. The 13.8 per cent was made up of a disproportionate number of women and older Catholics. Women comprised 60.4 per cent of Mass attendees over 15 years of age, and while the median age of Catholics in Australia over 15 is 44 years, the average age of attendees in 2006 was 58. It is reasonable to predict even lower figures in the future as the highest number of attendees in 2006 was for the 65–9 year age group, and the only increases over the ten-year period between 1996 and 2006 were in the 70+ age group. In contrast, the lowest number of attendees in 2006 was in the 25–9 age group, which represented just 2 per cent of total attendance across all age groups. This is the age group who will be the parents of future generations of Catholics, and the drastic decline in their attendance suggests that the generations that come after them will also attend in very small numbers. The average decline in all age groups up to 45 was 35 per cent and the decline in attendees aged between 25 and 34 was more than twice the average. Despite an increase in the rate of attendees in the 60+ age groups (perhaps due to greater longevity), there was an overall reduction in Church attendees in the 0–59 age group, and this was quite drastic in some age sub-groups. Most striking are the facts that between 2001 and 2006 attendance by children under 14 fell by 34,000, attendance by young people between 15 and 19 fell by 8,000, and the 15–19 age group accounted for only 4 per cent of overall attendees.

Why use Mass attendance as the criterion?

A predictable response to the statistics provided above is to ask why Sunday Mass attendance is used as evidence of commitment to the Church among young people. Are there not other ways of demonstrating Catholic commitment? Is not subjective religious commitment, meaning intuitive identification with the tradition and an emotional connection with it without feeling the need to participate (Starke and Finke, 2000), also a valid way of being Catholic? Davie (1994) has described this as ‘believing without belonging’ (94) and more later (1999) pointed out an ‘ethic of consumption’ in place of an ‘ethic of obligation’.

I go to church … because I want to … to fulfil a particular rather than a general need in my life and … I will continue my attachment so long as it provides what I want, but I have no obligation either to attend in the first place or to continue if I don’t want to. (148)

A British sociologist of religion, Davie could have been writing about Australia. Similarly, a 1999 Gallup survey in America revealed that 77 per cent of a sample of self-described Catholics believed that someone could be a ‘good’ Catholic without ever going to Mass on Sundays (see also Hamer, 2004, 5). In support of the fact that believing is increasingly becoming disconnected from belonging, Overstreet (2010) cites Gallup poll statistics to demonstrate that the belief that one can be a ‘good Catholic’ without going to Mass has increased for all generations over the past two decades.

Religiosity among young Catholics is more often than not held in this subjective way, but the first contention of this book is that the easy acceptance of this reality needs to be challenged. Clearly, no religious institution can in the long term survive the lack of external involvement of most of its members, particularly the younger generations. It is obvious that a Church cannot last without its people. In addition, we must ask whether someone can claim to belong to any religion if he or she has no objective commitment to it (Starke and Finke, 2000); that is, he or she never attends services, makes no contribution financial or otherwise to the religion and his or her life is, apparently at least, unaffected by its teaching and values.

One reason, perhaps the least important, for using the objective commitment measure of Mass attendance is that of Canon Law, which requires that Catholics participate in the Eucharist on Saturday evening or Sunday. Sunday, Canon Law declares, is the primary holy day of obligation and its observance is one of only a very few obligatory ritual observances for Catholics. More important is the theological imperative that the Eucharist is at the heart of the Church’s life. The celebration of the Eucharist was declared by the Second Vatican Council to be the ‘fount and apex’ (Lumen Gentium, 1964, 11) of Catholic life. It is the sacrament that both celebrates communion with Christ and calls believers into the community of the People of God. Theologically, the sacrament cannot be separated from the life of the community, and this theological truth must critique the ‘believing without belonging’ phenomenon. If one does not participate in the most central and meaningful ritual of the community, can one be said to belong to that community?

Some ways to understand the decline in Catholic commitment among young people

Secularization1

Despite a radical decline in church-going across the western world, western countries, although aggressively secular, are not necessarily anti- or un-religious. Indeed, Berger (1999), famously the sociologist of the secular, now declares that the postmodern age is more religious than ever. In proposing his theory of secularization, Charles Taylor (1999) also makes this point vigorously. Taylor sees secularization not as the decline and gradual death of religion, but rather as the result of privatization of religion and the rise of the other spheres for truth and values. He argues that secularization is actually a moral and spiritual movement, and that it began to develop when people realized that they could be moral, even spiritual, without belief in God. This, he continues, began with the separation of Church and state that was a legacy of the Reformation. For those who followed the Reformists, the Reformation did away with the principle that there was a sharp distinction between the sacred and the profane, between the holy and the ‘world’, which formerly had been seen as the locus of temptation and evil. It questioned the belief that only in rejecting the world was God’s gift of redemption achieved. It denied that redemption was only mediated in certain places (Churches) and rituals (Taylor, 1999). Kings and priests were no longer seen as essential mediators between the sacred and the profane. In contrast, a key teaching of the Reformists was that redemption could be achieved by faith alone, and they rejected the notion of a mediating class between people and God.

The Reformation led to the key ideas of modernity (approximately dated from the 1500s to the middle or late twentieth century). The ideas around which modernity settled were the metanarratives of reason, optimism, universality and objectivism. In particular, reason and science were the narratives through which modernity claimed the world could be understood. Reason was considered the greatest of the human faculties and it was argued that by reason alone life could be understood and superstition eradicated. While in the ‘age of belief’ (de Leon and van Leeuwen, 2003, 79) God and God’s divine law were considered to be the sources of morality, scientism and its methodological relation – positivism – gradually developed, reaching prominence in the early nineteenth century. Under the influence of this rational narrative, people became less willing to believe ideas for which there was no empirical evidence. Science was deemed to have unique access to the truth and it rejected metaphysical and religious ways of thinking. Logical and mathematical ways of gaining knowledge were considered to be the only worthwhile ones and intuitive, introspective ways of seeking knowledge were rejected (Taylor, 1999).

The search for the authentic self

Therefore during modernity a new emphasis on the self as the agent of reason and action arose. The purpose of life became self-understanding, personal fulfilment, happiness and the search to be true to oneself. Taylor has referred to this as ‘ethics of authenticity’ (1991). The search for authenticity introduced a new kind of individualism that had deep implications for the individual’s relationship with organized religion, indeed with any external agency th...

Table of contents

• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Church Cannot Last Without Its People
• 2 The Catholic High School and Religious Socialization
• 3 Mapping the Catholic Identity and Mission of Catholic High Schools
• 4 Reviving the Chain of Memory
• 5 Principles and Practice of a Methodology for Religious Education in Catholic High Schools
• 6 Christian Service Programmes in Catholic High Schools
• 7 Teaching Complex Topics in Religious Education Richard Rymarz
• 8 Teachers in Catholic High Schools
• 9 The Faith Leadership Role of the Principal: What the Research Suggests Helga Neidhart
• 10 Catholic Schools are Distinctive and Inclusive
• 11 Voices from Catholic Parishes
• Index
• Copyright