So what would a national campaign for Catholic education look like? How would you envision it being established? What kind of projects would it fund?
Well, that would be something about which we’d have to get a good group of people to sit down and think out.
My initial thoughts in that regard would be that it could be in some ways similar to the way that money is raised and distributed for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. You’d take up a national collection, some portion of it stays in local dioceses, and then you’d have a local committee to determine how to distribute those funds.
There would be some criteria for schools and within the diocese, for example, with regard to the financial threshold need for particular parishes or schools.
Obviously we wouldn’t be giving money to wealthy parishes that can support the schools on their own, but perhaps some inner city parishes where they don’t have an affluent parish that can support them, there would be grants given to them.
And then on a national basis, I think we could assess grants in a way that would be comparable to the way CCHD does it, and national organizations that help Catholic education that could be supported.
Go here to read the rest. If the same people are in change of disbursing the money, they would find someway to use the funds to fund the Left, no matter the purported goal. The bureaucracy of the USCCB is not redeemable.
Bureaucrat thinks how to save the bureaucracy. Dog bites man.
My biggest beef with the structure of Catholic education here in America is that they attempt to ape the top down nature of government schools. No, my school is not a “regional branch” of the big company – it is a ground-up local community operation that has its own needs and should not be beholden to the whims of (pant)suits in an office 90 miles away.
Bishop Paprocki wants to put that on steroids. No thank you.
When one bureaucracy dies, the bureaucrats will desperately try to build another. It’s a total grift. Stop building empires that enslave and practice subsidiarity, keeping local money local without the national overhead.
Josh:
That depends on the diocese. In the Archdiocese of San Francisco, local principals (hired by the pastor) do all the hiring & firing, textbook and curricular selection. The DCS has a dozen employees, mostly clerks who manage pensions and healthcare, issue paychecks, and do credentials analysis. Religious ed (including CCD) has to use approved materials, but the Supers usually leave other issues to the school. We use a common standardized testing system and report results, but what we do with them is up to the principal.
Tom,
This is true – I think some of it is a size element. I spent 18 years at an independent Catholic school in the Archdiocese of Washington, so the oversight was minimal, but since my wife taught at archdiocesan schools, there was more attempted top-down oversight coming from the, ahem, “Pastoral Center” on Eastern Avenue – harder with lots of elementary schools.
Currently we are both in the Diocese of Wilmington. Not as many schools in it so our places get sniffed around. A lot. And they put a huge stress on standardized testing. All administrative hires here are filtered and approved by the diocese.
Here’s a suggestion: dissolve the Conference of Catholic Bishops and dismiss the entire staff.
Art:
Agreed. The bishops should be forbidden by Rome to act as a body, unless summoned by the Pope, under the presidency of his representative, to address specific issues. Each bishop answers directly to the Pope, as in the old days.