Priest: You've contracepted our parochial school out of existence

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I hope this is the right forum for this.

This is a terrific article written by a priest who has had to shut down his parish’s parochial school, due to lack of support. He decries that Catholics are not being taught about natural family planning, the immorality of contraception, and the importance of having children. He also admonishes his fellow clergy for not teaching.

**Priest: You’ve contracepted our parochial school out of existence
lifesitenews.com/news/priest-youve-contracepted-our-parochial-school-out-of-existence

NFP Outreach - Natural Family Planning
nfpoutreach.org/**
 
The article actually addresses two issues, and contraception isn’t the primary one, though the article attempts to make it the primary one.

The primary one is “And they aren’t even going to Mass anymore.” It doesn’t matter if you have one 1 or 15 children; if you don’t raise them Catholic they’re not going to Catholic School. If a couple only has two children, and they go to Catholic School, the school can support itself.

An issue also not mentioned in the article is that the cost of living has become extremely burdensome in many areas. For example, if you live in an area where your an average house cost $300,000, your real estate taxes are $12,000, you have to buy your own health insurance, and you have 12 children, you simply can’t afford to send your children to a private school. One of my neighbors relayed such a story to use; he was face with either pulling one of his children out of Catholic school or buying a car to get the work. Needless to say, he bought the car.
 
quiet52 said:
I hope this is the right forum for this.

This is a terrific article written by a priest who has had to shut down his parish’s parochial school, due to lack of support. He decries that Catholics are not being taught about natural family planning, the immorality of contraception, and the importance of having children. He also admonishes his fellow clergy for not teaching.

Priest: You’ve contracepted our parochial school out of existence
lifesitenews.com/news/priest-youve-contracepted-our-parochial-school-out-of-existence

NFP Outreach - Natural Family Planning
nfpoutreach.org/
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Poweful stuff. “God always forgives, man sometimes forgives, but nature….nature never forgives!” ( from the article).

Linus2nd
 
Simplistic, to say the least. Maybe the school wasn’t very good. Not all Catholic schools are. They don’t get a pass, just because there is a “Saint” in the name. If it were good, even non Catholics would use it. I can also say, if we had 8 kids instead of the 2 we do have, my husband and I would be even less likely to send them to Catholic school. We don’t get raises just because we have more kids, so, while we could find the money for 2 tuitions if we wanted (we don’t. The Catholic school here isn’t worth it.), where would money for 8 tuitions come from?
 
Z1Z2 said:
Simplistic, to say the least. Maybe the school wasn’t very good. Not all Catholic schools are. They don’t get a pass, just because there is a “Saint” in the name. If it were good, even non Catholics would use it. I can also say, if we had 8 kids instead of the 2 we do have, my husband and I would be even less likely to send them to Catholic school. We don’t get raises just because we have more kids, so, while we could find the money for 2 tuitions if we wanted we don’t. The Catholic school here isn’t worth it.), where would money for 8 tuitions come from?
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Z1Z2 said:
Mine too. Thanks to his treatment at the nuns’ hands in 5 years of Catholic school while a child, he still to this day has doubts about his intellect. 😦 Thanks to his experience, I had to fight tooth and nail to get him to allow our daughter to go to Catholic school. A few actions by authority figures in childhood can have longterm ramifications.
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And apparently he’s never heard of demographic change. The older generation grow up, die or move away. The number of children in the area change. Sorry, but since the American population has increased from 180 million circa 1960, to 315 million circa 2012, he’s going to have to look for other reasons to explain why the school has closed.

Our local Catholic Schools have no problems getting enrolled pupils, and I’m prettyt sure Australians use contraceptives just as much as US parents do. The reason is that we’re in an area with a lot of young families.

Give it another 30 years, and it might be quite a different story.
 
In our city there have been several schools as well as Churches closed or combined. The schools that remain are filled with some grades having waiting lists. I can see the point this priest is making, I even understand why he is making it. But, if we want to keep the schools filled it will take much more than what he is talking about to do that. We need to keep people fervent about the faith. We need to make people understand why it is important to form their children properly from birth on. We need to see to it that the school employs people to do this who agree and believe in what our faith is about. It is a commitment to the Church that I believe is part of the missing pieces.
 
Very few issues have single causes or magic bullet solutions. This doesn’t mean one shouldn’t look for the larger issues involved.

Contraception really is one of those 800 pound gorilla issues. In a large number of cases, it was the nose of the camel (secularism) that first poked into the catholic family tent. When the family didn’t repell the camel then, the rest came in too. People don’t just stop attending mass or believing the faith overnight. It’s a slow process by which people begin to disbelieve. You’re kidding yourself if you don’t believe it starts somewhere.

The biggest issue afflicting catholic schools is costs. Vocations rarely come from single children. Vocations are almost common in big families. The catholic school system was heavily reliant on the sacrifice of religious who taught for nothing more than room and board compensation. It’s been brutal since they evaporated.

It’s also true that more than a few schools were their OWN worst enemy. There is little point in making a massive financial sacrifice to send one’s children to an underfunded imitation of a public school with a religion class tacked on at the end like an afterthought. A catholic school has to really be a CATHOLIC school in every way for it to be worth it. They are out there if you look. We’ve found one that I’d move to a trailer park before pulling my kids out of it.
 
Linusthe2nd said:
…“God always forgives, man sometimes forgives, but nature….nature never forgives!” …
Click to expand...
Awesome!

It is also a reminder of the miracle of God’s mercy. He shows his power over nature, and invites us to share his power by forgiving also.

*** he displays his power at its height by freely forgiving sins.***
(CCC 270).
 
I only skimmed the article.

Seems like he starts out complaining that Catholics aren’t having enough babies, but then moves toward a larger criticism of many parishes’ inability to remain viable with the people they already have.

🤷
 
TheWarriorMonk said:
The article actually addresses two issues, and contraception isn’t the primary one, though the article attempts to make it the primary one.

The primary one is “And they aren’t even going to Mass anymore.” It doesn’t matter if you have one 1 or 15 children; if you don’t raise them Catholic they’re not going to Catholic School. If a couple only has two children, and they go to Catholic School, the school can support itself.

An issue also not mentioned in the article is that the cost of living has become extremely burdensome in many areas. For example, if you live in an area where your an average house cost $300,000, your real estate taxes are $12,000, you have to buy your own health insurance, and you have 12 children, you simply can’t afford to send your children to a private school. One of my neighbors relayed such a story to use; he was face with either pulling one of his children out of Catholic school or buying a car to get the work. Needless to say, he bought the car.
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Talk about burying the lead. If you have a neighbor with 12 children, you should have led with that. 👍
 
If his sermons are as uninspiring as this article, I seen why he’s had a dwindling parish. He didn’t include poor leadership from the pulpit in his rant.:rolleyes:
 
He is writing from Westville, IL, a town of 3,175 people in an agricultural part of the State. Contraception is not the problem. Economics is.
 
Corki said:
Talk about burying the lead. If you have a neighbor with 12 children, you should have led with that. 👍
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Betcha a tasty donut he doesn’t. That was hyperbole, unless I miss the guess. The neighbor was a separate topic from the 12 kid family.

Interestingly enough, I went to catholic school with a family that had 12 kids. I can’t say how they managed it, but there they were. My parish today waives tuition for any beyond 3 at a time. Still a brutally hard situation for those folks though.
 
manualman said:
Betcha a tasty donut he doesn’t. That was hyperbole, unless I miss the guess. The neighbor was a separate topic from the 12 kid family.

Interestingly enough, I went to catholic school with a family that had 12 kids. I can’t say how they managed it, but there they were. My parish today waives tuition for any beyond 3 at a time. Still a brutally hard situation for those folks though.
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I figured as much. Biut I get tired of some of the excuses people have for not sending thier kids to Catholic schools.

A comment like “not everyone can afford to send 12 kids to Catholic school”, after some investigation, turns out to be that someone with 2 kids, 3 new cars, and resort vacations every year can’t “afford” to send thier kids to Catholic schools.

My parents sent five kids to Catholic school. Sure, tuition was lower then. But we had one car most of my childhood, one TV (black and white until I was in high school), my sister wore my hand-me-downs (some of which I got as hand-me-downs from an older cousin), my brothers had a paper route and we grew a lot of our own vegetables. My mother did not work outside of the home except to occassionally sub at the school (less than a dozen days a year). Now, if someone is making changes to their lifestyle to live more frugally and still can’t afford Catholic school, that’s one thing. But that is not the usual scenario among my friends and relatives who have the “can’t afford Catholic school” whine.

Every once is a while, my husband complains about sending our kids to Catholic school and what it does to our budget. But we are able to do so with **minor **economies. With actual belt tightening, we could send twice as many kids to school.
 
Deus_tecum said:
He is writing from Westville, IL, a town of 3,175 people in an agricultural part of the State. Contraception is not the problem. Economics is.
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If you lived near me you could drive by both nearby Catholic churches, which are within 5 miles of each other, on a Sunday morning and see packed parking lots with people having to park on the street and walk a block or more. I don’t think faith is as big of a problem as finances.

I live in an urban area where the local Catholic school is closed and the building being leased to a Charter School. Why? Because the economy here is terrible and very few can afford private school tuition. Charter schools, however, are paid for the same way public schools are…with tax dollars. If Catholic schools were treated the same way Charter schools are I would send my children to Catholic school. But that is not the case and there is no way I could afford Catholic education.
 
I think it’s more important to save for college that pay for private schools.
 
“Let me ask you a question: How many kids did you have?” He said, “Two.” Then I said, “So did everyone else. When you only have two kids per family there is no growth.”
The parish’s problems are a microcosm of the problem afflicting all of the developed world: falling fertility rates equal low or no growth. That leads to economic stagnation. But Catholic schools can thrive if the whole parish supports them. They are producing the nation’s most important resource.
 
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