ABSTRACT
Historically the primary purpose for the American Catholic schools has been the protection of the Roman Catholic religion of the Church’s children and youth. Colonial schools were Protestant in orientation and the Protestant religion was taught as part of the daily curriculum. After the public schools shed their overt Protestant influences, they often retained anti-Catholic sentiments which Catholic parents understandably felt were injurious to the development of their children. Moreover, throughout the nineteenth century Catholic schools were often associated with specific ethnic groups which helped preserved both the languages and the customs of the dominant group by instructing the children in both. The historian Philip Gleason claimed that the part Catholic schools founded by ethnic groups played in the gradual assimilation of the young into the mainstream American culture cannot be overestimated. “The [Catholic] schools,” he wrote, established by ethnic groups, “performed the functions, in addition to intellectual and religious training, of transmitting the ancestral language, orienting the young to the national symbols of the group through successive generations.” t
Over the past 200 years the purpose of Catholic schools, the protection of the faith, has not altered even though both its expression and the principal threat to the life of faith have changed. Today the goal of the Catholic schools is still the formation of the whole child - religious and moral as well as intellectual and emotional - and the chief determent of faith development is surely the godless secular culture of American society which is preserved and passed on to future generations by the country’s public school system. While Catholic schools today are rarely related to a particular ethnic group, a case can be made for the fact that they are counter-cultural; they socialize children into a spiritual community. They foster religious motivation and communication, orient the young to gospel values and virtues, and facilitate an outreach of service to others.
