The Gradual Instant

It is fourth period and our Catholic school is hosting our annual boys basketball tournament.  There is a stoppage in play, just as the afternoon announcements and prayer begin.  As one of our students reads a prayer over the PA both public school teams in the gym stop, bow their heads and wait.  Our Catholic school students wander out of the gym, yelling and making plans for the weekend.  The public school teams are respectful, tolerant of the Catholic school. The Catholic students are not.

The incident reminds me of Anne Michaels' book Fugitive Pieces and how she develops the motif of the "gradual instant."  She asks the question, when does something change from one form to another.  What is the exact moment when a skeleton becomes a fossil? When does lava turn to stone?  When is a Catholic school no longer Catholic?

My education in Catholic schools, from kindergarten to postsecondary and my work in them spands all but six years of my life.  A member of my family has been working in or going to, a Catholic school for nearly seventy years.  I think it would be safe to say, I know something about them.   They are good places. that are tended to by a large and dedicated group of professionals, teachers, administrators, support workers, trustees, directors and parents who want to see the Catholic system thrive because they are honest people of faith. They've inherited and protected the system at great sacrifice.

The publicly funded Catholic school population in Ontario is comprised of three groups.  The first, and perhaps the smallest group, is Catholic students in religious and faithful Catholic families that attend Church weekly and believe in the tenants of the religion.  The second group is the non-Catholic, fundamentalist Christian and now, lately, Muslim families who hope to benefit from an education system that is trying to "instill" some sort of religious values.  The third group, and by far the largest, is lapsed Catholics who have a tradition of attending Catholic schools but are no longer believers in any faith and enrol their children out of some vague sense of duty or faith. They have some superstitious notion that God should be part of something.  This group likes the convenience of the system but would never fight to defend it because they don't really believe in Catholicism.  Their children were the ones walking out of the prayer during that basketball game.

All of these groups cling to the tattered idea that Catholic schools are more disciplined and better.

This composition poses problems for Catholic school systems across Ontario.  The first problem is despite all sorts of initiatives, including discriminatory hiring, Catholic graduate expectations, integration of religion in all subjects, permanent full time chaplains, prayer centers and the demanding of compliance in faith celebrations, they can't make their students and their families, Catholic. Secondly, the growing segment of their population, fundamentalist or Muslim, has no intention of ever becoming Catholic.  Both of these problems, slowly, gradually and in an instant, transmutes the school, changing it into something else.

The current Catholic system will be at a crossroads shortly.  Governments and courts are starting to understand that the system, while governed by dedicated Catholics, does not have a constituency that is Catholic and that there just are not enough students to go around to keep two school systems running in most communities.  Pressure will build to move to one school system and some political party is going to take advantage of this pressure.  An astute provincial political leader will learn that the system simply doesn't have the numbers to defend itself.

In Ontario, if the current leaders of the Catholic system, Directors of Education, OECTA and Chairs of the Board and trustees and dioceses were proactive, they'd recognize this gradual instant and manage it.  They'd open discussions with the government around the integration of the separate school system into the public, guaranteeing Catholic education would continue in some form in the new, unified system.

If they don't recognize that the system they are governing has changed, then, in a gradual instant, it will become a fossil.