ABSTRACT
The faith-based identity of Catholic schools is increasingly problematic in a secularised society where the numbers of teachers belonging to religious orders are diminishing rapidly. Teachers’ views regarding the characteristics of Catholic schools are an important aspect of the identity of such schools. The authors locate Catholic schools in the United States, Queensland and Australia in their respective contexts and compare teachers’ ratings of the importance of 11 given characteristics of Catholic schools as seen by 3,389 teachers in US Catholic schools and 2,287 teachers in Queensland Catholic schools. When the mean ratings for each jurisdiction were statistically correlated, US teachers were much more likely to rate these given characteristics as essential, and the resulting χ² and associated Odds Ratio values indicated very statistically significant jurisdictional differences. Some tentative explanations are suggested including the differing political contexts, the conditions of teachers’ employment and the support structures for the spiritual and faith formation of teachers in the respective jurisdictions.
