We Don't Need No Catholic Education

Throughout my whole life, I have always been told not to talk about politics or religion in public. And now I’m writing blogs about both topics. Great.

Now that I’ve gotten over that dilemma, it’s time to take a deeper look at the importance of Roman Catholicism in the United States and how it affects the American Dream.

Like all of us, Roman Catholics have also chased their great American Dreams in their time here in the United States. Many Catholics have found huge success in this nation and still continue to benefit from their riches. However, Catholics have not always had a clear path to success. Much like other religions before them, the Catholics were persecuted like the Jews and Quakers and found it difficult to worship. On top of the inability to worship completely freely, Catholics were concerned about the growth of their religion during the introduction of public schools. Public schools at their core were influenced by Protestant beliefs. Many church leaders found this disheartening and worrisome. William V. D’Antonio, author of this chapter of the book, states, “Church leaders were determined that education should not include Protestanizing the growing waves of Catholic immigrants.” (D’Antonio, 121) This concern led to many meetings between Church leaders with the topic of education at hand. Finally, leaders decided that each parish should hold its own school.

Thus, the birth of Catholic education. Personally, I am the product of a Catholic grade school and high school education. While I do not hold the same believes as those of my peers at these schools, I still find my early education to be extremely crucial in my upbringing. The implementation of Catholic schools in America is still important today in order to strengthen beliefs among Catholics. According to D’Antonio, the peak of Catholic school enrollment in America peaked around the 1960s when roughly 5.5 million children were enrolled in either a Catholic grade school or high school. Since then, the number of students in each school had diminished greatly. In my time in Catholic school, I experienced first hand the effects of less children being placed in Catholic schools. During my 7^th grade year, I was informed that my school would be closing, not because of a lack of students in my school, but because a neighboring school was suffering low numbers. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia decided that my school, along with a large portion of other schools in the area, would merge together to form a bigger school that encompasses more than one parish. As a result of this, student enrollment went up for a short while, but numbers are beginning to fall quickly again.

My question for you is: does religion have any importance being in our education system, even if it is not a public school?