A report released by the Vatican today indicates some of the dramatic changes that America’s Catholic schools have undergone in the decades since World War II.
Published by the Congregation for Catholic Education, the report deals with church-affiliated schools around the world, but breaks down statistics by country.
In 1950, the report reveals, 86% of the teachers in American Catholic schools were clergy or religious-almost all of them nuns. Today, 95.6% percent of the teachers are laypeople. (The proportion of women teachers remains basically unchanged at around 75%.)
According to the Rev. Angelo Zani, undersecretary of the Congregation, Catholic schools in the United States increasingly serve the underprivileged.
Dioceses and religious orders whose schools long catered to the upper-middle class have been shifting their mission to “smaller yet high-quality schools, particularly for the poorest and neediest classes in marginal urban areas or for minority students,” Zani said at a press conference at the Vatican this morning.
Today, 43.2% of American Catholic schools are located in the poorest neighborhoods, Zani said, and 27% of their students come from minority groups. Almost 14% of the schools’ students are non-Catholics.
The Vatican report claims a drop-out rate of only 3.4% for Catholic schools, compared to 14.9% for public institutions in the U.S.