Most Reverend Rembert G. Weakland, O.S.B.

Archbishop of Milwaukee Catholic Schools Dinner

Marquette University Alumni Memorial Union

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

February 15, 1999

I have to confess I didn't go to first grade in a Catholic school. My mother didn't like the first-grade teacher, and so she sent me to the public school for one year. It didn't seem to do me much harm.

The real story behind the beard is this. They wanted to save money at this banquet so that more money would go to Catholic schools. So the planners sent me away for a few weeks to grow a beard and to come back as if I were somebody from the outside that they had brought in to give the speech tonight, hoping you wouldn't recognize it was the same person as last year.

But when I was away on vacation, I read a book about the history of the Church in the last century in Europe and how the Church reacted to the French Revolution. And one of the things that struck me that I hadn't known before was that the Church constantly was fighting, even when it lost all its other rights and powers, it was fighting to keep its own school system. I thought that the idea of a school system for a Church was something that the immigrants coming to the United States invented; but I did not realize that they were really doing what was happening in Europe at the time, where the Church was fighting to keep its own school system. And it did so for three reasons. What struck me was that those reasons are still valid today as they were in the last century in Europe and to those immigrants who came to the United States from Germany, Ireland, Italy, whatever, in the last century.

The first was to preserve the rights of parents to be the primary educators of their children. You and I say that so often, but do we really believe it -- because it's an important philosophical way of approaching education to say that parents are those who have the right to educate their children. And they did this also - the Church maintaining its own school system - as a way, the only way they knew, of opposing a kind of new statism and totalitarian regimes. I was not surprised the first time I went to Russia to see how much effort was being put into children, where the State almost felt they had the right to raise the kids rather than the family. The Church already knew that right after the French Revolution and fought strongly to oppose that kind of statism by anti-totalitarianism and by maintaining their own school system.

I realized then why the Communists were so insistent in trying to take over immediately the schools. When I was in Rome for the ten years as head of the Benedictine Order in the '70s, I noticed that the Communists were much shrewder than we Catholics; the Communists were getting into the liceo, the high schools, their very best young people as teachers, attractive people as teachers, knowing that those were the minds that they wanted to influence and get them, as it were, into the Party. So they knew, as the Church knew, that if you want to control the future you have to influence the minds of the children of today. That is the way it is. And so the Church has been involved in education since that time of the French Revolution in ways never before known because they realized how important it is for the future of our society to have influence on the younger minds.

And the third reason that the Church wanted to keep that school system under their control was because they felt it was the only way in a secular society to transmit what the Catholic ethos was all about. And I would say that I have come to that conclusion myself in these twenty-two years as bishop, that to socialize someone truly into the Catholic thing, the Catholic tradition, there is no doubt that the Catholic school is the best way of doing it. And in a pluralistic, post-modern society like we live in that is so culturally diversified, the schools remain the way in which people can be socialized into what the Catholic tradition is all about.

I say all those things to let you know that we are not new at this and these are the reasons why the Church has been so involved in it.

And then I said to myself, that's fine, but why has the Church been successful in this educational endeavor through these centuries in Europe but also in the United States over the last two hundred years. And I have come to a remarkable conclusion, I am sure; you can quote me on this any time you want: it takes a parish to educate a child. The reason why the Church has been successful is because the school should never be isolated. It takes a parish - or today I would say a network of parishes - to educate a child. The first level has to be parental responsibility and maintaining always before our eyes that the parents are the primary teachers and our role is to assist them. If we do that right, that much, we certainly will make a difference in education. So parental involvement has been very important to us.

But that parental involvement - and here I say something very important for now and for the future - that parental involvement has to be not only in the school but also in the parish and the parish life. What the parents do is going to make as much impression on the kids as what teachers say. Because when parents become involved in the school, it says to the children school is important; and when the parents also try to make sure that they take their learning and get involved in the parish and in the whole of society, it says to the students that is also important, that religion is also important to them. So parental involvement in the school and the parish, I find, is one of our great challenges if the parish is to be so important in educating the child.

And the second level has to be the parish involvement in the school. That is the one great asset that we have. That is -- and it's not a school that is isolated -- but it is a school that belongs to a larger entity, the parish itself. And when you think about that, it is a tremendous advantage that we have. It's true that a public school has the area, the district, but that is not quite the same kind of commitment that a parish can have to educating its children. There is a deeper bonding there which is so important. And as we cluster schools now, we hope to do even better, where a group of parishes can support those schools; and we should be able, better than anyone else, to cross-fertilize between urban and suburban, because that's where we are and that's the kind of network that we are able to build. That involvement of the parish in the school, up till now it has been primarily financial; that will continue. But it has to be more than that. It has to go into all kinds of tutoring, all kinds of concern and care for the children, but also the parents as the educators. That to me is the great asset that we have at this point.

How would I like to see that evolve? Well, just as I think the parish should be very important to the school, I would like to see the school very important to the whole parish -- not just to those that have children in the school, but to the whole parish. It gives everybody a chance to be truly Christian and to work for and help others. It also is a way, it seems to me, in which all those children who aren't in the Catholic schools can, nevertheless, profit from that environment and that school system. So that it has to be bigger than and broader than just those in the Catholic schools.

This is our big asset and we have got to use it now into the future. And this is my last point. For us to do that and to do it adequately, we have to continue to plan. I say today that any parish that is not planning will not survive. And I will say that any school which is not planning with others, with the parish and other schools, will not survive. That has to be done on all levels. And if John Norris were here, I am sure he would say a word about the need for such planning at this point in history; and I want to say that in his stead. We have to continue to plan for our schools, on the parish level, on the cluster levels, districts, and for the whole diocese.

I count on you to help us into that future. I am very pleased with the turnout tonight and the interest that you have for Catholic schools. And as we continue now to plan to make those schools better, to make them more excellent, to make them solid, and to see how we can use the assets of the existence of our parishes to make them into better schools, I ask for your continued support and for your continued concern that we do it, that we plan well, and that we do it well into the future. In that way we prepare the future, because we prepare the youngsters, who are that future for us.

Peace.