About a month into my freshman year of high school, the student body gathered in the chapel for an announcement: the school would be closing at the end of that academic year. Although the school was supposedly part of the archdiocesan seminary system, only one alumnus in the previous 15 years had gone on to be ordained. The school, furthermore, was projected to incur a $1 million deficit that year. It was not financially sustainable, nor was it serving its intended mission. Such were the arguments for closing the school.
A day or two later, we were invited to assemble in the auditorium in the presence of a counselor. A number of students took the opportunity to voice their anger and grief. Some wanted to fight to keep the school from closing. One or two claimed that, because of this decision, they would never again consider pursuing a priestly vocation. As for me, I struggled to understand why the school’s failure to produce enough priests was sufficient reason to close it in light of all of the other good things it accomplished. If the young men who attended the school didn’t also happen to be the same ones God was calling to ordination, was that really the fault of the school?
None of us wanted to believe that the diocese was right to close our school, but in the end we accepted the decision and went about our classes. The seniors applied for colleges, the other students applied to other high schools to finish their diplomas. The curricula at other schools were comparable to, if not better than, what the high school seminary had, and those who wanted to maintain the community we’d built gravitated toward the same schools. Those of us who were still interested in vocational discernment were invited to participate in a new monthly program at the diocesan college seminary.
The school’s educational mission could be fulfilled in any number of other schools; its unique role as a seminary could be fulfilled through other means. The old school building, meanwhile, was converted into the new headquarters for the archdiocese. Nothing was lost by closing the school... from a certain point of view, anyway.
Neither my new school nor the new discernment program gave me the same sense of community — the same experience of grace — that I had in my freshman year. Monthly meetings were no substitute for daily interactions with priests and peers in the midst of discernment, or for all-school Masses three times a week.
(But then again, the sense that we were discerning the same call probably had little or nothing to do with my freshman year community. No more than one or two of my classmates ever attended the replacement program. Perhaps the sense of community I felt among my freshman year classmates was in some ways caused or facilitated by the fact that we knew that our time together would be so limited.)
Even now, it’s hard to guess how many ways my unusual high school experience affected me, but I’m confident in saying it was my first real opportunity to think about the sometimes-strained relationships between the Church’s institutional ministries and their stated missions—if not the Gospel.
It’s probably a bit odd for a Domer to say this, but our loyalties shouldn’t ultimately be to institutions or even traditions within these institutions. We can find security and comfort in them, but their real value lies in whether and how they make God’s grace present in the world. Our institutions must not lose sight of their ministries.
A Catholic university, for example is above all an educational institution and a community dedicated to the search for truth. The creation of ever-more programs or buildings needs to be weighed against the needs and best interests of the students who may have to pay increased tuition or donors who might feel pressured to support this new project instead of other causes.
Athletic programs or new student centers or academic buildings may help foster community among students and other members of the university community (I honestly LOVE the idea of the social sciences being housed in the same new building to facilitate cooperation within and between disciplines), but these projects must be pursued for the right reasons — oriented toward meeting the needs of people, rather than just having more impressive numbers to show off.
Parishes, for their part, may have many traditions or programs to which parishioners are emotionally attached, but such things must not be preserved just out of sentimentality. Rather, they should continue out of an appreciation for their role in the parish's ministry to its members and the surrounding community. For example, preserving a set of parish traditions from European immigrants in what is now a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood can be justified as an attempt to bridge different elements of the Catholic tradition, but if it is just a cultural festival, something is wrong.
Institutions and programs ultimately need to justify themselves in light of the ministry they are trying to achieve. This is not to say that any program whose value in the Gospel is not immediately apparent ought to be shut down and its resources distributed elsewhere, but that, as happened to my high school, sooner or later, the opportunity costs will definitively outweigh the ministerial benefits.
Sometimes, beautiful and historic religious institutions outlive their usefulness. Sometimes, they manage to stay open precisely because they have left behind some aspect of their mission in favor of pursuing a more worldly measure of success. Sometimes, they might close even when they are in the midst of rediscovering and rededicating themselves to their mission- and that, in turn, prepares the members of that institution to carry on that mission even after the institution closes.
No comments:
Post a Comment