January 30, 2009
The Bishop's Forum
Catholic Schools Week 2009
by Bishop Gerald A. Gettelfinger
Catholic Schools Week is celebrated the last week of January every year. This year however is singular. It offers both challenges and opportunities never experienced by parents, students, teachers, administrators and pastors.
The immediate challenge is the current economic depression facing all families and parishes. Children will need to assist the family during these financially trying times by participating in paying the costs of their own Catholic schooling.
Opportunities for babysitting, snow shoveling, and lawn mowing for the younger students could provide additional money to purchase clothes, books, school accessories. In addition, parents should assist their children in understanding the gravity of the situation. Some parents have lost or might lose their jobs in the months to come. The use of credit cards will have to be eliminated or at least curtailed.
Part time jobs are opportunities for high school students. I have always urged parents to require their high school sons and daughters to pay a portion of their tuition or other attendant high school costs. Such a personal investment in their schooling will help them to appreciate its value.
All children, along with their parents, need to participate in the ordinary Sunday collection in the parish. It is not the amount you are able to give but the recognition that the parish community is underwriting the costs of both the elementary and high school costs. Without the ongoing support of parish communities, our elementary and high schools could not exist.
Another urgent challenge is the respect for all life. The annual March for Life in Washington is history but the threat to human life both for the unborn and the elderly continues.
Parents are the first teachers of their children. Respect for life begins in the home. It must evidence itself in simple ways such as respect for each other in the family. Parents must be intolerant of violence in the home — starting with themselves. A seemingly innocent test of one’s spirit of non-violence is the question: “How do you feel about the coach or general manager of a sport’s team ‘getting into the face’ of a legitimately appointed referee or umpire?
Reverence for each person in the home generates in the children a spirit of reverence for others outside the home. Such reverence breeds an intolerance of violence of any sort.
Daily, parents have the opportunity to remind their children of the sacredness of every human life.
Parents must teach their children that abortion is the taking the life of another person forbidden by God, the Creator of all life. It is the killing of an innocent life.
Looming in the future is a grave concern for governmental legalization of abortion beyond the Supreme Court Decision of Roe vs. Wade in 1972.
Next week: Catholic Schools Week continued