c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) Criticizing Roman Catholic schools has been very popular among certain strongly conservative observers in recent years. They certainly will dread the news that Catholic schools may not only be better schools, but more Catholic than they have ever been.

In a recent special Education Life section of The New York Times (Aug. 6, 2000), national correspondent Timothy Egan examines Catholic schools and draws some persuasive conclusions about the professional and religious improvements in Catholic schools.

Egan traces the changes from the great “brick and mortar” era when the ubiquitous schools were staffed by seemingly inexhaustible cohorts of priests, nuns and brothers. Those dedicated religious deserve the credit for building the Catholic church in the United States.

Even though their allegedly harsh discipline has been commemorated in the routines of comedians and in series of slapdash stage revues and films, they still live in the sweet memories of such leaders as Thomas Monaghan and Jack Welch in business, Christine Amanpour in journalism, and Chicago’s Daley family in politics, who credit them for teaching and living examples that gave them knowledge, character and faith.

It is safe to say that the Catholic school system that still stands, despite a generation and more of difficult transition, still owes its life to the American church’s own “greatest generation” of teachers. It has become fashionable, even among prelates and people who should know better, to wail at the same wall that the educational enterprise has come to nothing, that it is barely Catholic, and is in need of tighter supervision by the bishops.

At the center of this critics’ circle, sits the Rev. James Burtchaell, once at Notre Dame, whose 1999 book title summarizes his thesis, “The Dying of The Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches.” This volume has become the bible for critics, such as the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus who featured the book in his First Things as about “colleges and universities betraying their founding purposes.” Papal biographer George Weigel recommended it in The Washington Post as one of 1999’s best religious books.

More amazing still, the new rector of the Catholic University of America laid this book down as the cornerstone of his inaugural address, appalling many Catholic educators while pleasing the bishops, then involved in trying to get greater control over Catholic higher education on the grounds that its Catholic character was slipping.

Now Egan offers a viewpoint that will give pause to all those ready to believe that Catholic education has lost its Catholic heart and mind.

The Times correspondent studies the Catholic schools’ move toward what the late Harvard psychologist, Gordon Allport, described as intrinsic religion as contrasted with extrinsic religion. Intrinsic religion describes faith that, instead of emphasizing practices and acts of exterior piety, is a master motive in people’s lives, through which they bring every action and decision into focus according to its principles.

Al Falkner, principal of Gonzaga, the high school Egan attended in Spokane,Wash., explains: “We are more Jesuit now than we were 40 years ago.” Now, the Jesuit mission to examine life from a Catholic point of view is built into the manual that every teacher follows in order to achieve reflection in faith on what students learn and how, for one example, it applies to the papal concern for social justice throughout the world.

Teaching standards have also improved from those supposedly glory days when professed religious might be assigned by accident or whim to subjects for which they we were not trained and did not, except under obedience, want to teach. Catholic schools are more professional and they now offer a religion-based education to non-Catholics, especially in urban areas neglected by other school systems.

A more concentrated effort is needed to make religion and its life expectations and demands central in schools in which lay teachers now predominate. Catholic schools, such as Milwaukee’s Messmer High School, which is distinctively Catholic in serving its 80 percent non-Catholic students, have revived because of alternate funding, such as vouchers, that enable them to accommodate the poor.

Egan concludes that, although Catholic schools are greatly changed, this has been marked with more gain than loss. Small but telling at Messmer is the fact that non-Catholics may opt out of participating in religious activities. This tolerance is profoundly Catholic and the outcome reveals the attractive and vital Catholicity in such schools. Not one student has yet exercised this option.

KRE END KENNEDY