By Dick Ryan
Newsday (NY)
December 16, 2004

Sister Dorothy was the best teacher I ever had and that includes all those who ever stood, statues with chalk, at high school or college blackboards.

She was my first-grade teacher back on Manhattan's West Side and she taught us things about ourselves and God and crayons that were as simple as they were stunning.

The Sister Dorothys have always been the jewels of Catholic education but unfortunately, when problems arise today, the focus always pounces on something else for a solution.

For instance, with today's 57 regional and parish Catholic schools on Long Island mired in a huge drop in enrollment, the church honchos are naturally lunging for solutions with the official language of the Catholic Church: money. With the announcement of plans for a new Diocesan Education Foundation that will fund scholarships and other "special programs," there is also the proposal for still another annual collection, as well as a slick marketing campaign that will not only help fill the seats with tuition-paying kids but also fill the coffers of the schools' budgets.

It also hopes to address the complaints of some parents who no longer see the Catholic parochial school as the citadel it once was or as something mildly competitive with the public schools in terms of technology, focus on special-needs children and wider curriculum choices.

With this in mind, Bishop William Murphy and his advisers might be better served by turning the problem over to their research department rather than their fund-raising pros. And the researchers might then attempt to come up with an answer to the one simple question that should have been raised from the very beginning before dusting off all the fund-raising artillery. And that is: Why is there a decline in school enrollment? And, while they're at it, they might also want to raise similar questions such as: Why is there a similar decline in church attendance? Why is there a shortage of priests?

But, so far, too many church leaders around the country don't really seem interested in finding answers to any of those questions, because there might be a few clues in there somewhere about their own flaws and failures.

To the surprise of nobody in the pews, the research people may discover that the answer to all those questions is exactly the same. There is a pervasive malaise in today's Catholic Church that feeds on the mistrust and sense of betrayal spawned by the sex-abuse scandal but that is also soured by church leadership's veneration of image, money and anti-abortion, their grand obsession and their version of the Holy Trinity. And some find it ironic, if not chilling, that children and money always seem to be at the center of many of the crises in today's church, with very differing focuses between parents and prelates.

The decline in parochial school enrollment is far from the worst of the Catholic Church's problems on Long Island, and many parents are more concerned that they are the ones being treated like little children. Some feel that they are being patted on the head condescendingly when they broach the idea about Pope John XXIII's insistence on more lay involvement in the planning and decision-making for both the schools and the parishes. Others feel that, whatever the crisis, a healthy bottom line is invariably the highest church priority, while children continue to be the faceless casualties of cost-conscious bean counters.

Somehow, if the parents are to envision what my parents saw in that small West Side school once upon a time, there has to be a restoration of trust in both the people in the boardrooms and the people charged with communicating the faith and its challenges. There have to be more choices for the students and, before anything else, there has to be the flat-out admission from the bishop and his advisers that it's more about formation than finances. More about direction than donations. More about children than anything else.

Parents can only hope they and the schools together find their way out of still another crisis for their children and that their children's future will be the single, obsessive priority of bishops and board members. And that somehow the classrooms will once again discover the innocence, genius and treasures of another Sister Dorothy.

Dick Ryan of West Islip is the author of "Holy Human: Stories of Extraordinary Catholics."