Christ the King Parish

We shall celebrate Catholic Schools Week this Sunday. National Catholic Schools Week is the annual celebration of Catholic education in the United States. It starts the last Sunday in January and runs all week (January 25 - 31) Schools typically observe Catholic Schools Week with Masses, open house and other activities for students, families, parishioners and community members. Through these events, schools focus on the value Catholic education provides to young people and its contributions to our church, our communities and our nation. I would like to extend my love and gratitude to Chris Caban, our Principal and to his team of administrators and faculty who manage CTK school professionally. Catholic Education is one of the most important ministries in the parish. Blessings to all our teachers and students.
 
There were 7,000 Catholic schools in the U.S. in 2010, down from 13,000 in 1960, according to the National Catholic Education Association. The decline, rooted in the migration of parishioners to the suburbs and the secularization of Catholic culture, has been dubbed the “closure crisis” within the church. In the book, “ Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools’ Importance in Urban America,” by Margaret Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett, the authors ask and answer whether or not a Catholic school has an appreciable effect on the social capital of the neighborhoods they serve, not just the students. And, the answer is yes, they do, and the effect is not only appreciable, it is positive. There is plenty of documentation about the success of Catholic schools for those students who attend them. They have higher graduation rates. More of their students get into college and more of them graduate. Down the road, those students are likely to have more stable marriages, better jobs, be more involved in their community, in short, they will acquire higher levels of “social capital” than those students who attend often failing public schools in urban America.
 

Pope Francis underscored that educators must speak to be understood by the younger  generation. “Every educator – and the Church as a whole is an educating mother – is required to change, in the sense of knowing how to communicate with the young.” He laid the responsibility of expressing “the living presence of the Gospel in the field of education, science and culture” on Catholic education institutions, adding they must “know how to enter, with courage, into the Areopagus of contemporary cultures and to initiate dialogue, aware of the gift they are able to offer to all.”