The Battle for Blessed Sacrament

Clutching a homemade protest sign made of appliance-store cardboard, I wave cheerfully at the drivers crawling through the school zone.  Some of them smile or wave back, and I nod gravely to them, glad of their gestures of solidarity as we await the final showdown at the Vatican. 

The other moms and I been standing out here during school drop-off and pick-up for over two months now.  Today Mother Nature is entertaining herself with a post-Easter cold snap, but it’s much better than the bone-chilling weather that February night when stunned parents and children huddled, with hot cocoa and hand warmers, to raise an outcry against the unforeseen closure of Blessed Sacrament, our inner-city K-8 Catholic School here in Erie, Pennsylvania--(read the full story here: https://catholicstand.com/blindsided-when-catholic-parents-get-ousted/).

The announcement came without warning, via an Erie Catholic School Board email on Valentine's Day.  Only months ago, some of the Blessed Sacrament parents had sat through hearings to interview candidates for the post of system president, erroneously believing that their input would impact the future of their beloved school in a positive way.  Infuriatingly, it is quite possible that the decision to close the school had already been made. 

School board officials said that the closure was justified by data from Meitler Consulting, a firm that specializes in advance planning for Catholic schools and parishes.  Strangely, the board has not yet released the full Meitler Report to parents.  On March 8, they published a press release stipulating in no fewer than three places that an executive summary of the report would be forthcoming as part of their “next steps.”  However, even this document has not been released to parents, more than a month and a half later.

Over the ten days following the closure announcement, parents were catapulted into the fire, scrambling through the basics of Canon Law 101 in time to petition the Bishop to reverse the Board’s decision.  When this emergency measure proved fruitless, the concerned parents were forced to seek higher recourse, sending the case to the Dicastery for Culture and Education at the Vatican.  So now, we wait…and pray.

Sympathetic friends have commiserated with our plight, asking us where we are going to send our kids to school next year.  Some of us still don’t know.  I could go back to homeschooling, as I did for the first five years of my child’s education, but I hesitate to deny him the opportunities for interaction with other kids that are so relished by a boy of his happy temperament.  A pleasant-voiced lady from the school system has called me twice to offer a spot in one of the schools which is remaining open.  However, in all honesty, the intense violation of trust I have felt at the hands of the Erie Catholic School System has made me exceedingly loath to pitch even a penny of tuition money in their direction.  Meanwhile, I will continue to wait, here on the sidewalk, for the word from Rome, mutely requesting “The Full Truth, Erie Catholic.”