c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ At the big volunteer festival in Philadelphia at the end of April, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., made one of his usually insightful comments: The biggest volunteer movement in the United States, he said, is the Roman Catholic school system in the inner cities.

Subsidized by the church _ to the tune of $100 million a year in some cities and staffed by priests, nuns, brothers, and laity who work for salaries well below those they could command at public schools _ the parochial schools serve millions of needy people each year.

Yet they get little credit for what they do and are often ignored. Among all the celebrity hoopla _ including presidents’ past and perhaps future _ at the Presidents’ Summit on America’s Future, the Catholic school movement was barely visible. No one, except Senator Pat, mentioned them.

Funny, but that’s the way things work when the subject has anything to do with the Roman Catholic Church. It seem to me that if it’s Catholic, it simply doesn’t count with the media.

Not only is the Catholic school movement one of the largest volunteer movement, but students at Catholic high schools are more likely to volunteer than students at other high schools, even after compulsory volunteering required by some schools is filtered out.

But that doesn’t seem to matter, either. Catholic schools get credit for sending forth more volunteers? Forget about it!

As someone who has done a lot of research on volunteering, I was disgusted by the goofiness of the volunteer summit and some of the overlooked facts about American volunteering.

The extraordinarily high number of volunteers in this country _ about 50 percent of the population serve on average four hours a week and make a contribution to the national economy worth some $200 billion _ is a precious resource that has survived from the idealism of the early Kennedy years.

The spirit of that resource, however, was exploited at the summit for ulterior political ends. That is a shame and a disgrace.

President Clinton is quite right when he says big business should do all it can to help volunteers work more effectively. And the Catholic Church’s support of inner-city schools is a worthy model.

Partnerships between government and private agencies is also an excellent idea. Recognition of volunteer generosity is highly desirable.

But the notion _ voiced by all too many at the summit _ that volunteer service can make up for the decline of”big government”is absolute nonsense. In an era when America is persecuting immigrants and the poor with welfare reform, it’s foolish to think private organizations and volunteers can make up the difference.

Yet this paradigm _ private vs. public _ is the one the media used when reporting on the summit because too many of them fail to understand the current situation.

Only a fool would think, for example, that private efforts are going to solve the problems of poverty and inequality in America. Those issues have nothing to do with volunteering.

But the volunteer movement does prove one thing: Americans are far more generous than the bunch of mean-spirited Neanderthals now running Congress.

Americans continue to have the highest volunteering rates in the world. These rates have increased since 1980 and represent an almost incredible amount of generosity.

Another aspect of American volunteering overlooked at the summit is that religion plays an important part in the decisions of the men and women who give their time to the service of others.

Indeed if the rates of church attendance and membership in church-related organizations were the same in the United States as they are in Germany, American volunteer rates would fall from 50 percent to 30 percent. The advantage of the United States over other countries in generating volunteers is attributable almost entirely to religion.

For those wanting to understand volunteering in America, they can do no better than to look at religion, and the Catholic schools.

MJP END GREELEY