While parents throughout the country have been taking on school districts over politically motivated mask mandates, racist curriculum, and radical gender theory, many Catholic school parents are engaged in similar battles.
Like their secular counterparts, many Catholic schools are revealing themselves as politicized institutions administered by leftist bishops, priests, administrators, and board members that are betraying the families they’re meant to serve. Whether it’s forcing face coverings and injections on children and staff or allowing woke ideology to infiltrate school culture, these schools don’t deserve parents’ hard-earned money. Indeed, it may be time for Catholic families to start shopping around.
A disappointing number of Catholic dioceses are beginning the school year with tyrannical mask requirements. Bishop Anthony Taylor of the Archdiocese of Little Rock and Archbishop of Atlanta, Gregory Hartmayer have mandated masks for all diocesan elementary schools, including for children as young as four.
The Archdiocese of Chicago and the Diocese of Brooklyn have announced mandates for all of their schools, regardless of vaccination status. The Archdiocese of Hartford and the Diocese of El Paso are even requiring that all staff accept Covid-19 shots, a disturbing indicator of things to come once vaccines are made available for young children.
Father Bob Tabbert, pastor of John XXIII Church in Fort Myers, Florida concluded a recent Sunday Mass by berating parents for planning to protest Bishop Frank Dewane’s last-minute mask mandate for students of schools in the diocese of Venice. According to the new rules, students whose parents refuse to have their children muzzled will be shunned from campus. Tabbert told parishioners he would be “pissed off” with any demonstrators, even threatening to withhold tuition assistance from families who protested the mandate.
….In an op-ed for The National Catholic Register, Noelle Mering sounds the alarm about what she described as the “woke toxicity” corrupting Catholic schools. She cited examples from Loyola Academy, a Catholic Prep school outside of Chicago, where students were racially segregated for school assignments on privilege.
Mering correctly argues that Catholics don’t need woke diversity consultants to teach them about “social justice.” The sophisticated theological and philosophical tradition of the Catholic Church, built up over two millennia, emphasizes the universal dignity of all persons and condemns racism as an intrinsic evil. Christians follow St. Paul’s teaching that “all have sinned and need the glory of God.” We seek salvation in Christ alone, not by asking “structural questions.”
Unfortunately, many Catholic schools have been seduced by the gospel of woke. Last spring an open letter from a group of concerned alumni and parents of Regis High school, a prestigious private Jesuit school for boys in New York, lamented the board’s surrender to the “anti-rational, anti-liberal, anti-meritocratic, neo-racist ideology that is Critical Race Theory.” A Florida couple recently sued their daughters’ private Catholic school, the Academy of Holy Names in Tampa, Florida, for breach of contract, claiming that the school’s adoption of “woke” ideology is a betrayal of its commitment to providing a Catholic education.
I had to address similar concerns with the preK-6 Catholic independent school in Seattle where my daughter was enrolled for two years. Not surprisingly, the school’s response was essentially to shut up and pay up. The archbishop’s office similarly blew me off.
Yet no one has explained why a Catholic school, as part of its “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” program, is hosting staff development and parent education nights featuring “respected voices” like writer Ijeoma Oluo, a #shoutyourabortion activist, who expresses contempt for the Christian faith, and is anti-science and anti-Catholic enough to believe that abortion is “just the removal of a clump of cells”.
Nor has anyone shed light on why a Catholic school community is being lectured on racism and sexuality by an LGBTQ advocate who has tweeted that “most Latinos are just Spanish speaking white people who typically lean very conservative and hate black people,” that “black men married to white women are always the weakest link,” and that the “the drunker I get the cuter the Korean chicks get.” This bigotry is hardly the Catholic education and culture I signed up for….
The above comes from an Aug. 26 story by Carina Benton in The Federalist.
Many Catholic schools have devolved into incubators of liberalism and secularism. Good money is spent by well meaning parents only to have their children learn to be Catholic in name only. The answer is homeschooling, make the sacrifice for the sake of the souls of your children.
What is very disturbing about this, is that apparently newspaper journalists and contributors evidently do no or little individual research into these very important contemporary topics. Instead, they take the opinions of others which agree with their own personal opinions. One well known example of this is Climate Change. The majority of supposedly well educated journalists for papers like the NY Times, prefer to quote “experts” like Greta Thunberg. Scientists working in the field, realize climate is very complex, and not easy to predict. For example, the sun, the major contributor to climate and temperature, is going through a cooler period. This may lead to lower temperatures in the next decades. Yet, this is not mentioned in the Media. Also not mentioned is that Communist China is producing twice the amount of Carbon Dioxide as the US, and since they are planning even more coal fired power plants, they may soon triple our output.
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Demand they show you in the church teaching these woke policies. And you could say if I wanted liberals teachings my children I would go to a public school. Don’t stop. Keep fighting. They need your dollars.
Our parish has a secret weapon. I won’t tell you his name. He is the guy who asks a question that will make the abortion activist never come back. Having liberal speakers at your parish is a very short phase if you don’t back down. Seems long while it is going on, though.
Fr. Tabbert of Ft. Myers, Florida, has a filthy mouth in church. Shame on him! Terrible example, especially for the children attending Holy Mass! You must respect Our Lord, Padre. Use only good language, especially in church, at Holy Mass.
When the pro-abortion people say “it’s only a clump of cells (i.e., not a baby)”, I say then why not leave it? What harm is a clump of cells??
lifesitenews.com/opinion/fight-the-anti-life-agenda-share-this-amazing-rare-video-footage-of-the-unborn-child/
“The Biology of Prenatal Development, which Father Frank Pavone, the national director of Priests for Life, called “the most
vivid, powerful, and striking videography of the unborn child that exists,” is a prime example of this.”