Across North Jersey, Catholic schools are serving a smaller flockSunday, April 21, 2013 Last updated: Monday April 22, 2013, 6:01 PM
BY TATIANA SCHLOSSBERG
STAFF WRITER
The Record
Padre Pio Academy in Hackensack will close its doors this year, following Assumption Academy in Emerson, which was shuttered in 2012. The Archdiocese of New York plans to close 24 schools in June.
And nationwide, nearly 150 Catholic schools will close this year, a troubling trend for the church in America. The effects ripple through communities as schools and the parishes that support them lose members.
For example, Paterson Catholic High School closed three years ago, buckling under the pressures of declining enrollment and a weak economy. Its closure was one of many in the Paterson Diocese, which since 1999 has shuttered schools across Passaic, Morris and Sussex counties.
“Paterson Catholic had become part of the community, and had a major impact on this city,” said Assemblyman and former Paterson Councilman Benjie Wimberly, who used to coach football at Paterson Catholic, once one of the region’s largest Catholic high schools. “You can’t replace that.”
In the Archdiocese of Newark, which oversees Bergen, Hudson, Essex and Union counties, there are now 104 Catholic schools, compared with 176 in 2000.
Several challenges facing the church, in addition to a faltering economy, help to explain why so many schools are closing. Society is more secularized and there is a decline in the churchgoing population. The priest sex abuse scandal has kept the church in the news — and in court — for many years. And there have been demographic shifts in America’s Catholic landscape, including immigrants who are Catholic but who do not put a priority on a Catholic education.
“Fewer and fewer people are going to church now,” said Jim Goodness, spokesman for the Newark Archdiocese, “and fewer and fewer parents are sending their children to Catholic schools.”
That means less tuition. And despite the Catholic Church’s legendary wealth, on a local level it doesn’t have the cash to close the gap in individual parishes. And if regular operating costs, such as maintenance and teacher salaries, are being covered by deficit spending, then the parish starts talking about closing a school, Goodness said.
Leased buildingsIf a school’s finances are in trouble, the discussions about closure begin at the parish level, Goodness said. If the parish administration can’t see a way to keep a school open, it will make a formal request to the archbishop to close it. Once that decision is made, the diocese will often look to lease the building to a non-profit or a public school, Goodness said.
For instance, Paterson Catholic High School now houses Grades 7-12 of the Paterson Charter School for Science and Technology.
“Our hope is that schools return and that people will come back to schools that might have closed,” Goodness said. “Or we can get multiple uses for buildings. Even though the Catholic school might not be there, we can use the building for religious education.”
If a Catholic school is used by the municipality, the building can help preserve a sense of community and have a lasting purpose beyond parochial education. School officials in Hackensack are in negotiations with the Archdiocese of Newark to lease Padre Pio to the city for use as an early childhood education center, starting in September. Here are other examples:
•In 1996, New Concepts for Living Inc., a non-profit that provides housing and services for disabled adults, acquired the Immaculate Conception High School in Hackensack in a lease-purchase agreement for $1.375 million with the Archdiocese of Newark. The building is now home to the George Washington School, a branch of the non-profit Youth Consultation Services. The building is currently undergoing renovation following extensive damage during superstorm Sandy.
•In 2012, St. Cecilia’s Catholic school in Englewood was leased to the city for five years from the archdiocese, at a total of $1.8 million.
•St. Mary’s in Dumont has been shared by Dumont, Bergenfield and New Milford since 2007 as the Bergenfield Alternative High School/Middle School for students with autism and special needs, at a cost of $7,000 per month.
•Sacred Heart School in Clifton was leased to the city of Garfield for three years, at $350,000 per year, starting in 2011.
•Cliffside Park began leasing Epiphany Elementary in 2005 for $150,000, in the first year of the lease. It is currently home to the Head Start/Early Head Start Administrative Offices.
•Saints Cyril and Methodius in Clifton was leased to the school district in 2001, for $100,000 a year, as a home for the first grade and bilingual kindergarten for School 12.
The closure of a big Catholic high school, or several Catholic schools in an area, can hurt public school districts.
“When schools close, whether they’re charter schools or Catholic schools, we get kids going into already-overcrowded schools,” said Irene Sterling, president of the Paterson Education Fund, a not-for-profit that works with the community to help improve education in Paterson.
“Historically, the Paterson school district has tried to lease those school buildings, which often works out so that kids still get schools, we get to use the buildings and the church gets the income to support other ministries,” she said.
Sterling said she sees a sense of loss in her community.
“Schools are very unique places — when a school closes, even if somebody takes over that building and the kids stay or the families stay, the community is different afterwards,” she said.
Lure of free educationWith fewer parents choosing Catholic education for their children, because of financial reasons or growing disillusionment with the church over the sex abuse scandal, times remain challenging for the church. Goodness and his counterpart in the Paterson Diocese, Richard Sokerka, say they recognize that fact.
One of the main problems is the economy, which has many parents forgoing a Catholic education when they can choose a public school. “Nothing beats free,” Goodness said.
Goodness, Sokerka, and Catholic school teachers and superintendents said that they don’t believe the cases of priest sex abuse have had a significant effect on parents’ decisions on what schools to choose. Goodness also said that settlements in the abuse cases did not divert resources from Catholic schools or other ministry services, such as tending to the poor.
Aside from the economy, demographic shifts in North Jersey and in the American Catholic landscape have posed some problems for Catholic schools.
In place of the Catholic immigrants who came to this country, and to New Jersey, at the turn of the 20th century from countries such as Ireland, Poland and Italy, Goodness said, “now in some places, like Hudson County, an area that may have been traditionally one ethnic group that was Catholic has changed to two or three ethnic groups that are not even Christian.”
Or, some immigrants who are Catholic — coming from Latin America or Asia — are often used to state-sponsored education, religious or not, and might be unable to afford a Catholic education, Goodness said.
Another challenge is that many new immigrants are sending a lot of their money back to the old country to support family, Goodness said.
In an earlier America, anti-Catholic sentiment was a powerful social force and drove many Catholics to take their children out of public schools and put them into Catholic schools where they would be among their own kind, and likely to succeed, without voices of discrimination around them, Goodness said.
However, some parishes and schools have long been making a concerted effort to include Spanish-speaking Catholic immigrants in their communities. For instance, the Newark Archdiocese sometimes uses madrinas, or “godmothers” — members of a particular congregation who speak Spanish — to seek out families who they think might be interested in a Catholic school, but are disconnected from the community by language and unfamiliarity.
Goodness said that in Newark and Jersey City, “outreach to people in the mother tongue is very strong,” and often effective. That speaks to the church’s willingness to adapt to its changing population, which is welcomed by members of the Hispanic community, and may prove to be even more fruitful, given the election of Pope Francis, the first pontiff from Latin America.
Email: schlossberg@northjersey.com