Catholic schooling

Fascinating, red-hot thread over at Amy's, about Catholic schooling, kicked off by Alexandra Pelosi's comments in this SF Chronicle story:

Learning about that divide was a shock to the woman who spent her childhood in progressive Catholic schools. "We were taught just to accept people, that was just a given," Pelosi says. "I don't ever remember being told at Convent of the Sacred Heart that gay was wrong. They never even told us there was anything wrong with abortion. They were just choices.

"That's why it was weird when I'd go to these places and ... people would say, 'It's in the Bible.' And they fall back on the Bible for everything."

During Nancy Pelosi's speaker celebrations this month, as the Pelosi clan drove through the streets of Washington and Baltimore together, some protesters held up signs that read, "Pelosi Preys on Children" -- a reference to the speaker's pro-choice stand, which contradicts church doctrine.

"My mother, throughout her entire life, has been faithful to the church, even though the church has not been that faithful to her because of her politics. And I think that takes a lot of perseverance," she says. "And still, people protest her right to go to her own church."

Go read the long string of comments left by Amy's readers, all of them Catholics, and as far as I can tell all faithful to the Church -- and all of them very bitter about how their Catholic school experience destroyed (for a time) or threatened to destroy their Catholic faith. Note well: these aren't Catholics who are angry at the Church for being too strict; they are angry at the Church for not being the Church. It is an astonishing thread, really astonishing, because in it you can see pain and destruction caused by the Gramscian march through the institutions that the postconciliar Catholic left undertook. There is a whole world captured in those heartrending posts -- but also hope, too, because these people managed to endure and even triumph over their Catholic educations seemingly designed to turn them into ex-Catholics.

Here's something posted by Dad29, who sometimes posts on this blog:

We migrated to "alternative Catholic school" education for our children when the local parish school decided that education in sexual practices was appropriate for the 5, 6, 7 grades. That was a mandate from the Archbishop, who later resigned for some...ah....personal problems.

Interesting that the "alternative Catholic" school also provided a MUCH stronger Catholic atmosphere, as well as a MUCH stronger literature and math curriculum, AND actually taught 2 years of Latin (7th/8th.)

There are now three "alternative Catholic" K-8 schools in the area, all doing very well in terms of student-count, academic success, and spiritual success.

And the traditional parochial schools? Closing.

There's something important here: those Catholics who really wanted a serious Catholic education had to get outside the institutional parochial school framework and do it on their own. You'll find in this thread lots of evidence that people who kept their faith or found their way back to it had to do so not with the help of the institutional Catholic Church, but in spite of it.

If you want to go visit that thread to gloat at the suffering of Catholic laymen at the hands of unbelieving churchocrats, don't. It's cruel and pointless, and don't be deceived: the institutional decay within American Catholicism hurts the entire Christian community. The reason I post it here, though, is because what Amy's comboxes reveal is a hidden history (well, hidden from the mainstream, but certainly not hidden within orthodox Catholic circles) of how and why the Catholic Church has gotten itself into such a ditch. It wasn't an accident. It was systematically engineered by the treason of the clerks, so to speak. One of the most mysteries and consequential tragedies of the last half of the 20th century was the suicide attempt of the Catholic Church. Thanks be to God, it did not succeed, and signs of rebirth are there (you can see them in Amy's comboxes). But there's a long way to go back, and I'm afraid my Catholic friends are right: a lot more to be endured, and fought for, until that destructive generation and their spiritual children die out.

Still, what fascinated me as a Catholic, and still fascinates me now that I'm outside the Catholic faith, is this question: If these priests, nuns and others ceased to believe in the Catholic faith, why didn't they leave? Why did they stay, and try to take the substance of that faith away from people, especially Catholic children in the parochial schools?