The parochial-school system, which for the past 80 years has been the wellspring of the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S., is changing its patterns. In Cincinnati, Archbishop Karl J. Alter announced that because of high costs and overcrowded classrooms the parochial schools in his archdiocese would close their first grades next September: 10,000 children in an area that includes Cincinnati, Dayton and Springfield will enroll, instead, in public schools.
In suburban Milwaukee, the Rev. Oscar Winninghoff of St. Aloysius' parish, said that his school would discontinue the first four grades in September 1965. Having failed to persuade the local public-school board to build a new 24-room school to educate children of his parish in secular subjects, Father Winninghoff said: "I'm going to quit talking. I'm saying, 'Here are 600 kids —you solve the problem. And I'm giving you a year and a half to solve it.' " Some parochial-school classes have been closed in Green Bay, Wis., Saginaw, Mich., and in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.; in Williamsport, Pa., the 50-year-old St. Mary's High School shut down last year, leaving 208 pupils to be absorbed in public schools.
Go Out of Business? Cincinnati's Archbishop Alter says that three-fourths of all Catholic children in the arch diocese already attend kindergarten in public schools, and "adding one more year to their presence in the public schools will not interfere too seriously with their religious training." And a new book, by a Catholic mother of five boys who have variously gone to public and Catholic schools, suggests that the church should go out of the school business altogether. Mary Perkins Ryan, author of Are Parochial Schools the Answer?, argues that providing a general education for all young Catholics has proved an impossible task for the church, that in trying to carry it out the church has neglected to provide "anything like adequate religious formation for all those not in Catholic schools."
According to Mrs. Ryan, the 5,900,000 pupils in Catholic elementary schools, high schools and colleges in 1963 constituted less than half of all Catholics of school age. The best evidence on how they fare, comparatively, comes from the Rev. Joseph H. Fichter, S.J., head of the sociology department at Loyola University. Testing social standards, social skills, family relations and school and community relations in typical parochial and public schools in South Bend, Ind., he found that pupils were nearly identical: both "accept and demonstrate honesty, obedience, gratitude, self-control and kindliness in about the same proportions."
"Supreme Bean." But by the logic of the Catholic school system, children trained in it should get notably better religious formation. Mrs. Ryan thinks they do not, partly because parochial schools are anachronistic. No longer, she argues, are the Roman Catholic Church and its schools in the "state of siege" that has existed since the Reformation. No longer must Catholics be equipped with weapons of defense against Protestant teachings. What is needed, she feels, is workable religious instruction to make all Catholics better Christians in the community.