Guest Commentary
By Father Joseph J. Kerrigan
Special to The Catholic Spirit
School closing belies a deeper urban drama
For all of the outcry over the announced closing of St. Peter’s High School, some of us who live or minister in New Brunswick quietly uttered a relieved “Finally” or “Thank God.”
We have something worth shouting about ourselves when it comes to the Catholic presence in Hub City, namely its growing vitality. But what we’re excited about is at odds with those who cling to fossilized notions of the church as museum.
The Catholic community in New Brunswick is on the cusp of resurgence — in numbers and in mission — promising an invigorating and unified presence not seen in recent years.
This upswing has been fueled by an influx of new migrants, mostly from Mexico, and by those who have mobilized to serve them. Participation in church and religious education is up markedly across the city. Try finding a seat at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish on the weekend. My parish, Sacred Heart, has more than doubled its congregation in the last year.
But beyond the numbers, equally significant is that veteran parishioners and institutions are proving generous in the new challenge of welcoming the new arrivals and have dropped the go-it-alone pretense that has kept many Catholic institutions in their own private orbits.
Physicians at Saint Peter’s University Hospital, Catholic Charities’ staff and parish leaders are meeting regularly now to solve common problems, and they are using their personal time for immersion experiences, Spanish language classes or acts of direct service. New Catholic-inspired entities, especially community-based organizations, are emerging and contributing.
Many are experiencing first-hand the words of Jesus, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35) or the more recent words of the Jesuit Father John McGarry, “By responding with compassion and solidarity to the immigrants of today, we embrace an opportunity to know and appreciate the many ways that God is present in our world.”
In the past five years, more diocesan and national Catholic funding and resources have been directed to root-cause solutions of poverty in New Brunswick than in the previous 20 years combined. The rise of the 1,200-member workers’ organization New Labor and the neighborhood revitalization Unity Square Partnership are the best examples of that investment in the lives of New Brunswick’s voiceless and unrepresented.
The church in New Brunswick is poised to become a servant church, a church of the poor, a city-wide arena for the application of Gospel-based principles of relief, development and solidarity. This could prove to be a tonic for the church in Middlesex County as a whole, which has been tepid since the rise of the behemoth suburban parishes in the 1950s and 60s.
So why couldn’t there be a place for St. Peter’s High School in the new environment?
The typical new Catholic family
• lives from month-to-month in a rented room, not an apartment
• has reason to fear deportation or other consequences of anti-immigrant backlash
• works in low-wage, uncertain jobs
• has no health care benefits
• may not be literate in their native language, much less English
For these families, where secure access to food, shelter and clothing are the immediate daily variables, education in a Catholic high school is a moon shot, not a reachable dream. For them, St. Peter’s might as well have been an exclusive New England boarding school. Only one of my New Brunswick resident parishioners attends the high school, and only one in five St. Peter’s students actually live in New Brunswick.
Saint Peter’s was driving a 1950s model of Catholicis — Church as institution — into 2007. Like most vehicles of such vintage, failure was inevitable, especially when the engine of that model — feeder Catholic elementary schools in the city — began to close or struggle a generation ago. Several years back, the school had the opportunity become a Jesuit Cristo Rey school. The Cristo Rey model, successful for more than a decade and now in more than a dozen high schools, features student participation in a work-study program with local corporations that finance the majority of the tuition cost. The school’s rejection of the Cristo Rey proposal was its last, best opportunity to remain relevant to the city as it is currently populated.
The social mission of the church functions best as a living, breathing community responsive to current human needs, rather than remaining insistent that the buildings and structures that may have been helpful at one time must be so forever. Storied memories and nostalgia don’t add up to “Let’s keep it open forever.”
With nearly 20 Catholic or Catholic-inspired institutions in place, the church in New Brunswick is ready to bring a combination of social, spiritual, health care and economic development gifts to bear in breaking the cycle of poverty. Some new educational opportunities will undoubtedly be part of the ongoing transformation. But, at this point, the reckoning question that will take us to this future is “Who’s really there for the poorest of the poor?”
Father Kerrigan is pastor of Sacred Heart Parish, New Brunswick. He is director of Catholic Relief Services Metuchen, the diocese’s Catholic Campaign for Human Development and its Justice for Immigrants Campaign.
*The attached/referenced article was originally published in The Catholic Spirit, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Metuchen, and is protected under U.S. and international copyright law