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14 Catholic elementary schools in Brooklyn and Queens will close by this time next year due to plummeting enrollment, and other schools will merge in an attempt to adapt with changing trends nationwide. If the proposal announced yesterday by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn (which also includes Queens) is carried out, the diocese will have shut down nearly one-third of the elementary schools it had just half a decade ago, the Times reports.
The announcement left students and parents in tears; one third-grader at the doomed Flatbush Catholic Academy in Brooklyn told the Daily News, "I don't know how they could close my school." But the number of children attending Catholic elementary schools in Brooklyn and Queens has dropped about one-third since 1998, when 55,000 students were enrolled, compared with 37,000 children this year. To take one example, Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament School in Jackson Heights is down to 180 students from 2,500 in the early '90s.
The Diocese's proposal, which is currently under review, could be approved as early as next month by Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio. In a statement, Bishop DiMarzio said, "When we determined that our schools are operating at only 85% of capacity, it became clear that we had to consider why this was happening and how we might reverse the trend."
Photo of a closed Catholic School in Brooklyn courtesy occipital lobe.
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Oh No, where will all the pedophiles, oops i mean priests, get their variety of boys from now??
More fodder for the academic wasteland known as the public school system. At least the country will be well supplied with burger flippers and welfare queens for the next several decades.
Painting all Catholic priests as pedophiles is like saying all Jews are thieves because of Madoff or that all blacks are rapists because of Darryl Littlejohn. Shut your bigoted fucking traps.
No we won't shut up because church leadership KNEW children were being raped and didn't call the police. They transferred the same rapists to different parishes again and again. They attacked the victims with lawyers and threats of damnation. They set up failed rehab programs for the rapists, sent them back out and didn't warn anyone. AFTER they were exposed in court and the media the leadership decided perhaps mistakes were made.
That's true, but it's still unfair to put blame on the many innocent priests who were not involved with this horror.
Some of the innocent priests knew what was going on, but lacked the morale strength to dial 911.
That's true, but one of the problems here is the Diocese's lack of appropriate response to the issue. The fact that the priests who were exposed as pedophiles were not immediately excommunicated speaks volumes.
I was a cradle Catholic. As a parent, I would not want to send my child to a Catholic school simply because, given the church's past responses to problems, I would not feel confident that the school would report and address any issues or take a vested interest in protecting my child.
And there are a lot of reasons parents stay away from Catholic schools that have nothing to do with the priests. I would not want my child exposed to the church's homophobia and narrow views on various issues.
Jeez, it took just ONE post to squeeze in the buggery stuff. A new record.
www.forgotten-ny.com
Catholic Bashing - The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel