Conformed to the World?
More and more Catholic parents are home-schooling their children or sending them to independent Catholic schools. Why? We do have officially-sponsored Catholic schools, don’t we?
Maybe these parents don’t have confidence in the official Catholic schools in their area. In the Diocese of Oakland we have many Catholic schools — some good, some middling, some worthless (which could probably be said about the Catholic schools in most dioceses). But for some Catholic parents, even “good” is apparently not good enough.
We were struck by a special feature in Oakland’s diocesan paper (June 18) paying tribute to the high-school graduating classes of 2001 in the Diocese. The feature showcased two “outstanding graduates” from each of the nine Catholic high schools in the Diocese. These 18 graduates were asked: (1) Whom would you like to meet? and (2) What is the greatest challenge facing the world today?
Given that these students are graduates of Catholic high schools and that they are among the brightest, most attentive, most learned graduates in the Diocese, we expected that there would be a distinctly Catholic flavor to many, or at least some, of the responses. But no.
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Catholic schools embrace a mission that is illegal in public schools: the embodiment of Jesus Christ in the faculty, staff, students, and their parents.