Once Ottawa's St. Charles School. Today, after an "adaptive re-use", loft apartments.
Gorgeous old properties built by the pennies of poor Catholic families and today sold because our families are now much smaller. Sad.
I always did like the pressed tin ceilings in these old schools.
We just lost 46 parish schools in our Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and 5 highschools as of Friday, January 6th, thanks to a "Blue Ribbon" panel of priests and our new Archbishop (thankfully not on the hew Cardinals list, Charles Chaput). Also, Chaput is selling the 78 yr. old mansion/residence of the Cardinal Archbishops of Philadelphia. In favor of what....2 rooms at the 95% empty Seminary of St. Charles Borromeo on City Avenue?
ReplyDeleteThe closing of parish schools and higschools due to declining enrollments and/or demographic change of a neighborhood is inseperably linked also to the massive departures from religious life among Orders of priests,nuns, aand brothers immediatly after Vatican II and continuing year after year until today.
Some of our large parishes, built on the donations, blood, sweat, and tears of generations of Irish, Italian, Polish and German Catholic immigrants in the USA from 1830-1960 had usually also (especially after the 1850's) convents of nuns close to or attached to the parish school to teach the children of the parish.
Catholic parochial schools in the USA were originally set up by our own Saint John N. Neumann of Philadelphia as a way to instruct our children in the CAtholic Faith, and to keep they away from the undesirable influence of Protestant ideology which was habitual in the USA public school system from about the 1780's, until the very early 20th century. It had all but died out by 1960except in the South, when the Supreme Court banned prayer in public schools. But in the 1840's, it was very pronounced.Seeing the danger of this undesirable influence to Catholic children, St. John N. Neumann developed the Catholic parochial school system, soon immitated by hundreds of Catholic parishes across the country.
The good sisters of 60-70 years ago required no expenses for clothes...they wore their holy habit at all times. Everything was provided by their Motherhouses...and there was always a full Motherhouse of sisters and novices and postulants in training. They required no real salary. They recieved a stipend to meet their needs collectively.
When Orders of nuns began the dsasterous liberalizing agenda, discarding the habit in favor of lay clothes and de-ephasizing teaching in favor of social work, tens of thousands quit the Order, and vocations disappeared as if overnight. In order for the school to stay open, it was necessary to hire an army of lay teachers to staff the schools. They demamded real salaries....which often bankrupted the parish an put a tremendous strain on the Archdiocese, which saw the army of lay teachers clim from less than 1% of the teaching staff in the schools in the late 1950's, to 98% today.
The whole Catholic school system has collapsed since then. Some Archdioceses, luckier than others, were able to hold on longer. But the collapse has finally come to Philadelphia....and faithful Catholics are much the poorer for it.
But there is blame to be laid. The blame lies with the "deforms" of Vatican II themselves, and with the now supremely aged, dissident radical femminist Orders of nuns who chose to commit collective suicide by renouncing their holy tradition and apostolates of teaching or nursing in favor of secular social work, justice and peace initiatives, or aggitation for women priests and homosexual rights.
The saddest thing of all, is that which took 150 years in the USA or more (as in Canada and other parts of the world) to build, has been destroyed in less than 30 years by the Vatican II generation. The collapse began immediately after and even during Vatican II.
Surely with regards to the collapse of Catholic schools, not to mention seminaries, parishes, and tens of thousands of convents and monasteries, one has to wonder (and some are now doing it openly out loud), whether Vatican II and what came from it was indeed inspired by God.
The massive wasteland of closures surely makes one wonder.