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January 29, 2007
The Alexandra Pelosi Memorial Catholic Schools Thread
And just to be contrary, you can add your two cents to this thread, inspired by what Alexandra Pelosi is quoted as saying about her own Catholic education:
Learning about that divide was a shock to the woman who spent her childhood in progressive Catholic schools. "We were taught just to accept people, that was just a given," Pelosi says. "I don't ever remember being told at Convent of the Sacred Heart that gay was wrong. They never even told us there was anything wrong with abortion. They were just choices.
"That's why it was weird when I'd go to these places and ... people would say, 'It's in the Bible.' And they fall back on the Bible for everything."
During Nancy Pelosi's speaker celebrations this month, as the Pelosi clan drove through the streets of Washington and Baltimore together, some protesters held up signs that read, "Pelosi Preys on Children" -- a reference to the speaker's pro-choice stand, which contradicts church doctrine.
"My mother, throughout her entire life, has been faithful to the church, even though the church has not been that faithful to her because of her politics. And I think that takes a lot of perseverance," she says. "And still, people protest her right to go to her own church."
Now, I remember reading somewhere last week someone - I have no idea who or where this was - disputing Pelosi's account of her own Catholic education. Said they knew the school, and it couldn't have happened that way, etc. Who knows.
Anyway, this is a thread, designed to be instructive of negative experiences you have had with Catholic schools. Not picky disputes with a teacher that could have happened in any school system, but serious questions have been raised in your mind by either your own or your children's (or grandchildren's) experience of Catholic schools - questions like, "And I'm paying for them to not learn about their faith? Huh."
Not a place for generalized reflections, either. It's only Monday!
Update/Clarification: The weight of the comments is falling on the inadequacies of post-V2 Catholic education, probably because my leading question pushed it there. But there might be readers who have something to say something in this post about pre-V2 Catholic education, as well.
Update again:
Do remember that there's a Thank you, Catholic schools! thread down below...
Posted by Amy Welborn | Permalink
Comments
At the same high school mentioned in the Catholic Schools Week thread (Rochester's Aquinas Institute), Church teaching on core social doctrines was never mentioned during my time there in the mid-eighties. We learned war was bad of course, and to drive that point home, a man who traveled with Central American communists spoke to us about the evils of the Reagan administration. I recall abortion being mentioned once during a political science class. There was virtually no catechesis of any kind, as RE classes were devoted to things like Q source and reductionism. I remember finding a copy of the Baltimore Catechism about ten years after graduation and almost wondering what people did with it; it was an utterly foreign concept.
Posted by: Rich Leonardi at Jan 29, 2007 9:15:24 AM
I was a Catholic school drop out in first grade. The reason was that in our little town, the school made sure that the folks with money were told that their children were the smartest and brightest to keep the money coming in. I was a charity case. My parents were told I had below average intelligence.
By December, I was totally frustrated. The sister would never call on me. Worse, I found out that my friends in public school were already reading while we were still looking at picture books. I begged to go to public school. My parents switched me. By the end of 1st grade, I was on grade level. By 3rd grade I was on a 6th grade level and by 4th had been recognized by the county as having one of the highest scores on the achievement tests. Hardly below average.
One of the problems with Catholic institutions is that those with the money often get all the attention and that the instutitions are crafted to suit those with the money. Who gets all the recognition awards at the big-dollar bishop's dinners and such? It is often those who have given lots of money. Where is the affirimation of the average Joe and Mary in the pews? Does the priest even know them? Does anyone in the Church know them and affirm their faith?
There is such an emphasis on seeking out the "big donors." Making them happy. How often have folks been scandalized by big dollar donors having undue influence? I know of one religous order that had a big fund raising campaign and alienated hundreds of "little fish" donors by their focus on "big" donors only. One wonders how the big donors morals (or lack thereof) might change the fabric of this order. One can almost imagine such a donor requesting the head of the order to "please tell brother so-and-so not to preach against embryonic stem cell research as I invest heavily in the technology and as you know I am one of your biggest investors."
Posted by: Therese at Jan 29, 2007 9:16:49 AM
Innocent fifth grade child comes home with Benzinger Family Life materials with a glossary of fairly explicit sexual terms defined, along with a spelling assignment to use the word "ejaculation" in a sentence. Pursuant to the bishop's directive, the principal insists that no one could opt out of this sex ed program, which would be taught by teachers with demonstrated lack of judgment and discretion. Now this was in pre-scandal days. It was always odd that the pastor at one of the local parishes would never come to any school events and would only communicate with the school by FAX. Offers for the school children to come to the church and perform service projects were rejected. It turns out that the pastor was known by the bishop to have sexually abused a minor in the past. So the very same bishop who insisted that our children's innocence be violated in order to "prepare them for the world", did not think it necessary to warn parishioners that their pastor was a sex offender. After the scandal broke, the pastor was a removed. His replacement was removed as well for indiscretions in his past. With shepherds like this, who needs wolves.
Posted by: marie at Jan 29, 2007 9:21:22 AM
Therese is right. My mother remembers the people with money always getting a break, their kids being fawned over, being told they were smarter than others, etc. And discipline worked in inverse order: the fewer dollars you had, the more discipline you got, including expulsion for relatively minor infractions.
Posted by: Gina at Jan 29, 2007 9:26:03 AM
Does having your palm read by a Loreto nun after she teaches you Latin count? When I think of what my parents were paying for that "education"!
Posted by: G at Jan 29, 2007 9:29:26 AM
I attended a Catholic high School, Schulte HS in Terre haute IN. The school was staffed in part by the Sisters of Providence. We were taught that it was undesirable and supersticious to pray before the Blessed Sacrament. We were discouraged from saying the Rosary. In religion Class the Priest, Fr. Godecker, told us that healing from the Anointing of the Sick was "too magical" and that sacraments sybolized community concern. We voted on the Real Presence and Transubstanciation, and they lost. The school was closed for financial reasons, people weren't sending their kids there. That's also where I learned to smoke pot, drink alcohol and commit several sins of the flesh. It too, was a classist institution.
My Kids went to Holy Family in New Albany. They are now Adults, in their early twenties. They didn't know why we would venerate relics. They didn't know to invoke the intercession of saints. They had no concept of the Eucharist as more than a community memorial feast. They were there on tuition assistance, and were treated a second class by teachers and other students, who somehow found out that they required assistance. More classism.
I dis-recommend Catholic Schools now. There are some good ones, but very few.
Posted by: Mitch S. at Jan 29, 2007 9:29:52 AM
Attended Catholic elementary, high school, and college. Learned in elementary school (1968) that 1) the Vietnam war was bad, 2) the United Nations was very good, 3) the U.S. Marines were bad.
Learned in high school that the School for the Americas was very bad. The U.S. Marines were very bad, too.
Learned in college that . . . the U.S. Marines were bad.
I retire soon with 23+ years in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Posted by: Cornelius at Jan 29, 2007 9:30:32 AM
I attended a Catholic grade school in Pittsburgh, graduating in 1988, and my experience was like Rich's -- nobody said boo about homosexuality or abortion. It's not that the school was "progressive" -- this is Pittsburgh, after all, and back then half the teachers were aging Felician nuns in full habit. It's more that pre-AIDS, homosexuality was not on anyone's radar screen, and I guess abortion was not something they felt a need to teach grade-school kids about.
Looking back, I don't have a problem with the education I received. I don't think that a Catholic education needs to focus on hot-button issues like homosexuality and abortion. I think it should focus on building the kind of life habits that cause a person, when hearing that the Church says "X" about issue "Y," realizes that he owes assent to X.
Obviously, this begs the question of what to do about people like Ms. Pelosi. I heard nothing about homosexuality or abortion in Catholic school, but when I learned that the Church opposed those acts, I knew that I had to oppose them, too. Did Ms. Pelosi think she could stay Catholic while disagreeing with the Church on those issues? If so, someone at hear grade school or in her home dropped the ball when teaching her that being Catholic means doing what the Church does. Or is it that Ms. Pelosi decided to reject Catholicism and its positions on certain pelvic issues? If that's the case, I disagree with her decision but can't call her a bad Catholic, because she has at least acknowledged that she isn't one.
Posted by: Joe Magarac at Jan 29, 2007 9:37:03 AM
Ss. Peter and Paul High School - 1981-1984, followed by Nouvel Catholic Central 1984-1985 when our high school closed and merged with two others. Religion class tended to be a joke - freshman year we learned how scripture was primarily a Jewish take on Babylonian myths (first semester) and a series of made up stories by people long after Jesus died (second semester), using the works of Mark Link, SJ; sophomore year was Church history by way of overhead projector, chock full of inaccuracies apparent to any 15 year old; junior year was sacraments and morality...I shudder when I think what we were taught; senior year was peace and justice and more morality - some truly heretical stuff there.
We seldom had Mass, when we did it was in the gym (despite the fact that the chancery was just upstairs and, at the beginning, there were plenty of priests there who could have offered Mass more regularly). The "chapel" was used as a storage closet. There was little by way of moral guidance, except from a few teachers. I am eternally grateful to my parents who truly sacrificed to send me there, but more because of their example of sacrifice and dedication, and the education and formation they gave me, despite what I was getting in high school...
Posted by: Tim Ferguson at Jan 29, 2007 9:46:04 AM
I graduated in 1994 from a Catholic high school run by the Sisters of Mercy. Close to 1/3 of the student body was not Catholic. At our (infrequent) school Masses we were led to believe that it was OK to receive communion even if not Catholic. I had my non-Catholic boyfriend going to communion for awhile in college before one of the priests there straightened us out. I also recall some Masses at the high school where the readings were not from scripture but were poems, etc.
Our freshman year religion class, "God Questions," involved a capstone project in which we wrote our own creed and presented it to the class using some creative means such as interpretive dance or music. Another elective religion class, "Values in the Media," had us examining advertisements for phallic symbols, listening to Led Zeppelin songs backwards, and making collages (of course!) of alcohol advertisements.
Chastity was never addressed, although we did have some speaker come to talk about AIDS. Abortion? Well, we had to do a position paper in Morality class where we could argue either position.
Why on earth did my parents spend $5k per year to send me there?
Posted by: Sarah L. at Jan 29, 2007 9:57:42 AM
Cornelius--
Oohrah!
I served two years as the nominal chaplain for an all-girls Catholic high school while assigned as an associate at the neighboring parish. I was completely marginalized and contradicted by the nuns and the Campus Ministry team (laywomen). I got out of that thankless job when I transferred parishes. My successor is doing no better over there.
My experiences with parochial elementary schools have been much better.
Parents ought to carefully examine curriculae prior to sending their children to Catholic schools.
Posted by: FrMichael at Jan 29, 2007 10:00:52 AM
Just as with any Church group or experience, there is good and bad. At this point in my spiritual life, I will not point out the bad without a mention of the good. Otherwise, I become a crabby old woman who cannot serve Jesus each and every day, so here goes with my thoughts on "negative experiences with Catholic schools":
Bad: priest @ high school who taught religion from "I'm ok, you're ok." My mother complained that more books should be used but to no avail.
Good: same priest listened to my confession and taught me to get over my childish fear of the sacrament.
Yes. There it is if you want to find it in life: the bad with the good.
Is this not life, St. Blog's?
Posted by: Brigid at Jan 29, 2007 10:02:47 AM
I attended Marymount School in Rome in the 1970s. We had quite a few non-Catholic students, so "Religion" classes were very generic -- I don't remember learing anything about the church at all, much less anything about abortion. I do remember, however, the nuns and seminarians socializing, and all the drinking and drugs that most of my classmates indulged in. I also remember my roomate trying to help another classmate miscarry her pregnancy. We were later told that a local seminarian helped her to procure an abortion...
Posted by: ME at Jan 29, 2007 10:05:30 AM
My junior year religion class was a world religion class. The teacher was loopy, and drove me nuts, but she was wildly popular.
There were two things about that class which were something like milestones for me. First, we had a Hindu girl in our class (which I'm not disputing, more power to her) and I just remember the teacher explaining how we would go to heaven, hell, or purgatory, while our Hindu friend would be reincarnated. I didn't know the word 'relativism' or anything like that, but my reaction was, "oh come on!" There were a lot of these sort of moments in the class, and this one was just the most ludicrous that has stuck itself in my mind.
Also, our final project was to perform the ritual of another religion in the classroom as a group project. This I found pretty offensive. I don't want any dopey high school students acting out baptisms or confessions or, God forbid, the Eucharist in their classrooms. I forget how she justified this, but she did have some kind of "it's not real" blather going on. But the Hindu girl led us in a Hindu ritual so...
This would have been 2002-2003. The next year we were reading the Catechism, Gaudium et Spes, and Sheed, so it worked out providentially for me: I was intellectually insulted enough by World Religions that I was primed for a good solid Catholic shakedown. But I think my experience was opposite of everyone else's. The senior year class was a battlefield, and so far as I know, no one else thought there was anything whack about the world religions class. Like I said, she was a very popular teacher, and it was a popular class.
Posted by: Jules at Jan 29, 2007 10:07:52 AM
I attended St. Joseph Grammar and Monsignor Donovan High School in Toms River, NJ during the 70s and 80s. Early on in grammar school I was taught the faith, but as the years went on the religion classes became increasingly vapid and devoid of true catechesis. Indeed, in my senior year theology class we were taught by a priest (by then the only one in the school) that Saint Thomas' Five Ways did not prove God's existence.
Of course, I was also subjected to the evil "Becoming a Person" series, though I believe my folks pulled me out of the classes eventually.
I count it a miracle that my six siblings and I are all practicing, none of us ever having left the Church. My parents must never have ceased praying for us. To their minds, they had no other recourse; They would never have allowed us to go to public schools, having too much faith in "Catholic schools."
My siblings and I are practicing despite our Catholic school education, not because of it. I don't want that to be the case with my children, so I'm on the board of our parish's Montesorri school (in Great Falls, VA).
Posted by: Suibhne at Jan 29, 2007 10:08:14 AM
Our daughters attended Immaculate Heart Middle and High School in Los Angeles. We never had a lot of money and weren't big donors. We and our daughters were never treated with anything but respect and affection. Our oldest was the speaker at her graduation; our youngest had the highest 4-year GPA in her class.
The school's primary fundraising focus was the scholarship fund. Many girls who excelled academically, but otherwise would not have been able to attend IHHS, were give scholarships. Our girls received a first class education which prepared them well for their college careers and as citizens. I can't say enough about the IH nuns and faculty at that school. We were very fortunate to have found the school and to have our daughters educated there.
Their religious education was fundamental. A significant part of it was accomplished at home. If you send your kids out of the house to be educated in the faith and are disappointed with what they come back with and want to blame someone, look in the mirror first.
Posted by: Ferde Rombola at Jan 29, 2007 10:17:09 AM
Fenwick H.S., Oak Park, IL. Still in recovery from the Dominicans.
Posted by: ken at Jan 29, 2007 10:22:33 AM
Fifth grade sex ed--it may be difficult to do anywhere, but it could (and must!) be done better than this at a Catholic school.
Our Lady of Mercy, Dayton, OH (since consolidated...) circa '90. I had no idea what either a condom or a lubricant were, and while there were no demonstrations we were hit over the head with the admonitions that these were absolutely necessary. The lady presenting gave us horror stories, i.e. a boy who used motor oil as a lubricant because he didn't have anything else.
Innocence lost and horrific images ingrained... I'm sure that this could have been done with more tact and decency at a public school. I made it through unscathed, but thanks to loving and responsible parents. Lots of 7th and 8th graders were messing around sexually--and that was during the school day.
There were good elements of the school, and it's sad that schools are being consolidated/closed... but some of the negatives put subsequent problems in context.
Posted by: dhess at Jan 29, 2007 10:38:14 AM
Indulge what may seem like a "general" comment:
So despite 12 years of Catholic education in San Francisco and four more at a Jesuit university...
I have to say that on its face this doesn't necessarily seem inconsistent with what Alexandra claims was *her* experience with Catholci education.
Posted by: Richard at Jan 29, 2007 10:39:02 AM
"Church teaching on core social doctrines was never mentioned during my time there in the mid-eighties"
And why would one want to questin Catholic social doctrine???
Posted by: Morning's Minion at Jan 29, 2007 10:41:35 AM
When my son hit his junior year at Boston College High School the religion class was an ethics/morals class (the first two years had been good classes). When the teacher started using various questionable books, my son referred him to the clause in Canon Law that states that books without an imprimatur are not to be used in Catholic education. The teacher's excuse for using these was to get other perspectives. My son spent most of the year either ignoring the teacher's "fresh" perspectives, or sabotaging his idiocies with quotes from the Catechism or Denziger.
Posted by: Steve Cavanaugh at Jan 29, 2007 10:41:55 AM
Ferde
Amen to this: "...If you send your kids out of the house to be educated in the faith and are disappointed with what they come back with and want to blame someone, look in the mirror first."
Who knows whether Alexandra Pelosi is accurately recalling what those nuns did or did not say to her way back when? We DO know whom she had for a role model at home: Nancy Pelosi, champion of the powerless (as long as they have already been born).
Sorry for the "generalized" comment, Amy, but I couldn't help but mention Alexandra Pelosi (since this is her memorial thread ;-). At our Catholic school they are always telling us that parents are the first and best teachers of their children. Alexandra Pelosi's experience has one big mitigating factor (not to mention the fact that the tide of the culture is pretty strong, too).
Posted by: CV at Jan 29, 2007 10:45:34 AM
Sorry, I pulled an incomplete quote from Rich Leonardi's post above...
My own experience: religious education never matured. The stuff they thought you at 8 years old they repeated at 16, complemented of course by feel-good blather and the obligatory Friday movie!
When I went to college, I was an angry anti-Catholic, because of what I saw as its anti-intellectualism. Later, of course, I realized that nothing could be further from the truth. When I finally began to explore the depth of the Church's teaching, I felt cheated. Badly cheated.
Posted by: Morning's Minion at Jan 29, 2007 10:46:41 AM
Quoting Therese:
I found out that my friends in public school were already reading while we were still looking at picture books. I begged to go to public school. My parents switched me. By the end of 1st grade, I was on grade level. By 3rd grade I was on a 6th grade level and by 4th had been recognized by the county as having one of the highest scores on the achievement tests. Hardly below average.
On the basis of scholarship, my experience as a child in grade school and as a parent has been exactly the opposite. Public education is abysmal and many non-Catholic parents seek out Catholic schools in order for their kids to get an adequate education. Class never reared its ugly head because most parents struggled to be able to afford Catholic education in the first place and receiving some assistance was not uncommon. The parish underwrote the cost of every student anyway to keep tuition affordable at around $4000/year per kid.
I have three, currently in Catholic grade school, high school and college. Paying tuition is my life! I do not always get what I pay for. I have seen and experienced good solid catechesis along side the goofy. But I transfered from Catholic grade school to public high school growing up and I would not wish a "public education" on mine nor anyone else's kids.
It's fun to tell horror stories and I've got lots of my own, but our real job is renewal, which means serving on parent-teacher boards, going to the meetings, reviewing textbooks, writing letters and asking tough questions of administrators face to face.
Even with it's problems, Catholic education is a non-negotiable budget item in our household.
Posted by: lar at Jan 29, 2007 10:53:05 AM
I attended Ss. Peter and Paul grade school (Norwood) and St. Xavier HS in Cincinnati. If religious ed consists of teaching in faith and morals, the Jesuits did pretty well by us in the latter--importance of chastity, plenty of proper teaching on abortion, and perhaps an over-emphasis on social work and the dangers of wealth. Even one recruiting pitch every year. But it was all clear and aimed at age-appropriate levels.
But the faith part! Nothing in grade school about doctrine, prayers, what happened at the Mass, and really nothing more in high school about scripture or tradition. Not the slightest bit of church history. And the usual weirdnesses at Mass--mimes were the worst part. The grief I caught for complaining about mimes hopping around during the Gospel!
Posted by: John Murray at Jan 29, 2007 10:56:17 AM
