WHY 'CATHOLIC' SCHOOLS AREN'T CATHOLIC

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Once upon a time, in a certain Catholic 'convent' school here in NZ, it was fairly routine on a Monday morning for Sister to tell one of your classmates to stand up and explain why they weren't at Mass the day before.

How things have changed.  Now there are hardly any children at Mass, and even fewer front up for Holy Communion, even at 'School' Masses.

On Sunday we were told why. Don't ask me for detailed analysis or official jargon, but in his 'homily' for Good Shepherd Sunday, Father recounted the successive, regressive steps taken by our bishops in setting entry requirements for Catholic schools. He said 'retired' priests tell him the best thing about retirement is no longer having to negotiate what he called a minefield, deciding which child can get in and which can't.

I naively used to think that all children in Catholic schools were baptized. And at first, after integration with the state system in 1975, that was generally the case.

Then began the descent down a slippery slope. The only reason I can think of is, prospective parents baulked at the requirement of baptism, so their children were lost to state schools, leaving not enough little bums on seats in Catholic classrooms.

So then (I think the story goes) to admit a child it was enough if the parents were baptized - or more likely, just one parent. Time went on and the effects of our state-funded schools' 'teaching' of Catholic doctrine became apparent: there were no longer enough prospective baptized parents around.

Er, well, what about baptized grandparents? They'd been baptized before state-funding was introduced, when baptism was automatic in Catholic families, so it worked for a while, but inevitably that supply dried up too. So now it's sufficient to have someone - anyone - in the whanau put their hand up to 'sponsor' a prospective entrant and say yes, we might get them baptized, some day.

The result is, 'Catholic' schools aren't Catholic any more. It's a while now since Bill English as Prime Minister commented that "the staff are less Catholic and the kids are less Catholic. The staff are no more religiously inclined than in state school staffrooms. In the long run that can't work."

Have we reached the end of 'the long run'? Soon, if the doom and gloom preached by our bishops about vocations ('there aren't any!') is proved right, there won't be a priest left in the presbytery to instill as best he can the 'values' Catholic schools pride themselves on, and non-Catholic teachers will be reduced to asking the children to be nice to one another. There'll be no more weekday Masses for the children to learn how to genuflect before the tabernacle, and why they must.

Even as things stand now, teenage girls, maybe non-Catholic, at 'Catholic' secondary schools can be heard in the playground f...ing this and f...ing that. At home when teenage rebellion gets an airing, mothers are appalled at the language issuing from their sweet little daughters' mouths.

What should be exercising bishops and priests is not the trouble they experience in setting and negotiating the 'minefield' of  preference requirements. Instead they should be agonizing over the trouble ahead for children who've not been given the inestimable grace of baptism, "the cause and beginning of our eternal glory". (And the trouble ahead for themselves, when God calls them to account as shepherds of their flocks, ravaged by wolves.)

The bishops must exercise themselves in clearing that minefield. Faced with the glaringly obvious decline in society's standards, parents are now falling over themselves to get their children into Catholic schools, so having gradually lowered the requirements for entry, the bishops can surely gradually raise them again.

It's utterly wrong that by effectively denying children baptism, the Catholic Church in New Zealand has insidiously become trapped by secularism.

It seems the Church who is wedded to Jesus Christ is being wooed and won by that whore, the world.


"The cause and beginning of our eternal glory" - Divine Intimacy, Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen, OCD.