So who should pay for religious education tuition [CCD]?

I was browsing through Facebook earlier this week, specifically the “Catholic Directors of Faith Formation” page to which I subscribe, and I came across an interesting post, as I often do, on local problems in parishes. What caught my eye was this post by a Director of Religious Education:  I am looking for the Pros/Cons of charging for Faith Formation, at the Parish. We currently charge $60 per kid with a cap of $150 per family. I was informed today by our parish finance committee that beginning next year we will no longer charge. I have a lot of feelings. If it helps, so do I.

I would have liked to see the parish council’s minutes of the meeting that decided the new policy, to see how it addressed the pros and cons. In some parishes the parish council or finance board, if either exists, is a rubber stamp of the pastor which helps him to dilute hostile feedback. [Parish finance boards are mandated as consultative bodies to assist the pastor, per Canon 537 of the Code of Canon Law. Finance boards provide advice; they cannot override the pastor. Canon Law does not require Parish councils.]  The issue of “paying for services” in parishes can be a hot potato. And if it makes you feel better, Pope Francis himself is enmeshed in a current controversy about reducing and/or eliminating the cost of obtaining annulments. “The pope said that since 2015, when he tried to streamline the annulment process and make it less costly, he has received “much resistance” to his reforms. Almost all of them were lawyers who were losing clients. And therein lies the problem of money,” said Pope Francis. “In Spain, there is a saying, ‘Por la plata baila el mono’— ‘Monkeys will dance for money.’” [America, 2021]

I have had the interesting experience of pastoring churches with and without schools during my lifetime. And, until very recently, I taught theology to parish staffs, diocesan schoolteachers, and volunteer religious education teachers, and even treated several of the front liners in my mental health practice. One thing that quickly comes to the fore among religious education personnel who work in parishes with schools is a sense that the religious education program[s] are the ugly ducklings of the parish family. I could not help but notice that the religious education director who inspired today’s post was informed of the decision out of the blue, and never consulted. It may be a small consolation to her, but many non-ordained parish ministers/educators are left in the cold. Some parishes have a very weak or non-existent team camaraderie. There is not much that can be done about that, I am afraid. Our American bishops had no time for Synodality, and that was a priority of the pope himself.

It is true that comparing the Catholic religious education experience to the Catholic school experience is an apple vs. orange situation. An accredited Catholic school must meet federal, state, and diocesan standards. Its teachers must be degreed and maintain certification. Schools are enormously expensive to build; the new public school down the street from me [Kelly Park, for you locals] cost $28,521,195.78 to build two years ago. Even with all the population growth in Florida and a very generous tax credit system for students in private schools in this state, schools are enormously expensive to operate. In Florida there will always be applicants for seats, I think, but many of our facilities are getting long in the tooth, and the capital expenses of maintaining and updating aging facilities is a lurking issue, at least in the minds of our long-range planners. Building new Catholic schools seems incomprehensible, price wise.

The history of parochial religious education programs in the United States is complicated. In the 1800’s Catholic youth were primarily immigrants who attended public schools. The curriculum was strongly Protestant and anti-Catholic, and U.S. bishops grew concerned over the faith and safety of their youthful population in secular schools. In the Third Plenary Council in Baltimore in 1884, U.S. bishops voted “that every parish in America should try to build a parochial school within two years of the Plenary Council's closing.” How ambitious is that? And yet, this vote became the guiding template for America. It was common for the next generations of new parishes to build the school before building the church, with Sunday Mass offered in a school room of sufficient size. My school, the now long demolished St. Mary Magdalene on Buffalo’s Fillmore Avenue, was built in 1900; the church in 1904.

The 1884 mandate calling for Catholic schools in every parish was a formidable challenge from a hammer-and-nails vantage point, but the staffing of the schools with competent professionals would have been impossible without the thousands of adult religious who staffed the schools for bargain basement compensation. [I am a product of Christian Brothers elementary education which, curiously, was far superior to my seminary high school experience later.] Consider that for a young Catholic girl of modest means—and that would have been about every Catholic girl till after World War II—religious life, “taking the veil,” was the only affordable route to the educational and medical professions. Hence, U.S. Catholics were extremely fortunate to have the numbers of nurses and teachers that it did, and at exceptionally low cost. I have read documents and correspondence between the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and numerous religious orders in Ireland and elsewhere as Los Angeles was opening a new Catholic school every ninety days in the building boom of the late 1940’s. Irish religious superiors were offered the princely sum of a $90 stipend/monthly for each sister in negotiations with the Los Angeles chancery.
 
There was an expectation from the American clergy—as late as the 1950’s-- that every child should attend Catholic school, though no one was excommunicated for not registering. In some locales in rural regions, of course, it was a physical impossibility. My best friend as a youth was a Catholic who went to public school—he probably saved me from becoming a religious fanatic. [We still have lunch in Buffalo every couple of years.]

In 1914 the practice of “released time” began in the U.S., which allowed Christian children to miss several hours of public school weekly to attend doctrinal instruction at their local churches. I suspect the privilege applies to Islamic and other religious traditions as well, though Protestantism was the predominant religious identity of this country until after World War II. For Catholics in populated regions, we Catholic schoolers were sent home at noon on Mondays, and our teachers taught religion to the public-school Catholics in our classrooms in the afternoon. Several times we were advised to take our personal things home with us; the implication that public school students were likely to steal them. There was a tacit culture clash between Catholic school children and Catholic public-school children.

What would happen, though, if the thousands of college graduate religious sisters and brothers turned to other ministries or left the religious calling altogether? How would public school Catholics receive religious instruction? Or, for that matter, who would teach in the Catholic schools? This is exactly what happened in the 1960’s. The numbers of religious sisters who left teaching—or the convent altogether—is hard to fathom till you see the actual numbers, which CARA/Georgetown research has tracked for the past sixty years. How many sisters worked and served the American Church?
1965:        178,740
1970         160,931
1975:        135,225
2022:        36,321
The 1960’s was the decade where “religious education” became a freestanding thing. I recall giving a high school religious education retreat in Maryland in 1970; it stands out in my mind because the parish’s religious education coordinator [eventually DRE] was the first lay person in her diocese to hold that position.

Anyone in the ministry of religious education needs to know this history simply to appreciate the challenges he or she is facing. Today a new parish instructor/volunteer as a rule has little or no background in theology and/or pedagogy to start with and receives precious little on-the-job training. My diocese offers none now. Local “certifications” are as flimsy as Confederate dollars. The national conference of bishops has briefly considered a countrywide standard of training and certification for catechists, but little has come of it. We can put it this way: the parish classroom religious educator of 2024 is attempting to fill the shoes of a 1965 religious man or woman in vows, with perhaps twenty-five years of experience and professional schooling in theology.

IN CONCLUSION....
Let me sum up a response to the lady’s original question.

First, religious education/faith formation is in a state of flux, and it is not the fault of this generation of religious educators. After all the excitement of Vatican II, only 17% of American Catholics attend weekly Mass in 2024, which suggests to me that we ignored a lot of problems in the mist of our optimism and ideologies over sixty years. This is what Pope Francis was trying to address when he urged the Church to come together and talk candidly about personal and parochial life in the Synod on Synodality. Regrettably, this generally did not happen in the United States, but again the shepherds, and not the sheep, bear responsibility for this lost opportunity of grace and wisdom.

Second, I do agree with the parish board’s decision not to charge for religious education, nor for any sacramental or ministerial service. From the business side, the various ministries should be included in the general budget, which in turn should be available at any time on a parish’s website. Every financial consultant I ever worked with told me the same thing: your people must know what healthy ministry costs—including, for example, such things as actual cost per student in the parish school vis-à-vis the posted tuition. From the religious side, congregations do need to hear the true “cost of discipleship.” Canon Law is clear on the basic responsibilities of a parish. If a parish cannot afford these necessary services, a bishop cannot be criticized for merging such a parish with a healthier one, or to a cluster of parishes as is done in my hometown, Buffalo.

Third, religious education attracts many candidates [i.e., parents] who themselves need evangelization as much as their children. The sacraments of initiation are particularly rich opportunities to engage whole families to the Eucharistic table. I am seeing more “family-based formation programs.” That is an exceptionally good thing, but while the “retooling” is a lot of work, we should not be afraid to talk about it and even consider moves in that direction.

It is hard for those of us in ministry to admit that our own measures of success might be obsolete. For example, on Facebook one would get the impression that youthful religious education is approached like an SAT tutorial before Confirmation. What if instead we taught children to prayerfully meditate?

Consider this piece from a Catholic journal: Among parishes, the prevalent pastoral assumption is that individuals receive the grace which the sacrament confers, even though there might be the appearance of serious defects of intention, preparation, and understanding. The hope is that “the sacrament will take care of it” and that the sacrament alone will lead to the new life it signifies. This misconception must be addressed to awaken the capacity for an active, relational faith inherent in baptized parents.

Fourth, consider self-care. Pray and play. Read. Meet socially with your local colleagues. [Be sure to have a designated driver.] We belong to God’s Church after all; we alone will never solve all its problems.

Fifth: The most recent research indicates that the median age when Catholics begin to disengage from the Church is thirteen, and in some cases as early as ten. Religion teachers engaged with the young are on the scene when their students are making their lasting judgements about the Catholic enterprise, and organized religion in general. Their parents need to know that, too, and we can engage them as co-evangelists…without picking their wallets in the process.