Please let me take this opportunity to share with you some reflections that have occupied me as our parish school concluded this year in which we offered our students pre-K through eighth grade in-person classes, five days a week, since Labor Day, and weekly Mass too. At the graduation Mass for our eighth graders, I was deeply moved to acknowledge what our school leaders, teachers, and staff have done, what was given to these kids in the year since our last class graduated without proper ceremony.
What we gave these kids this year was not the result of a financial transaction, but rather of a prior and persistent commitment of this parish to provide to children the school, the structure, the safety, and the society that they require to rise up as fully formed human beings in the image and likeness of God. Many people worked long hours every week this year, assisted by others far away or even long dead, to fulfil this commitment.
Yes, we have to charge tuition to do this, but this is a parochial school, not a private one. We operate at a deficit, not a profit, as every participant contributes to the possibility of the enterprise. Our teachers give up the 20% more income they could be paid almost anywhere else; the parish gives the same percentage of her offertory income. It would be time consuming (not to mention unwelcome publicity for the ones who offer them) to list even half of the services that people offer freely, without charge. There was no Covid tuition surcharge, no hazard pay. This whole fiscal year, which ends with this month, we operated at the tuition rate we set and published back in January 2020, two months before the pandemic changed everything.
Children need school. Families need school. The community needs school. Our civic leadership failed everyone when they failed to stand and say, The children need school, who will give them school? But it was not too much to ask of our people to sacrifice for the sake of the kids and their families. I know, because when we planted our flag and said, The children need school, who will join us in giving them school? they stood and said, Here I am.
It has so little to do with money. These children need school and so we provided them with school, out of our resources -- personal, professional, and emotional, as well as material. We are all keenly aware of the limits of our resources; we also have learned a hundred times over how precious and powerful everything we have to give is, when we offer it for the good of another. Everyone involved could ponder the past year and provide examples, detailing how it was really, truly difficult. But the funny thing is that now that we have done it, and see the kids who received everything we had to give, nobody seems to be inclined to count the cost.
More than simply having something that almost none of their peers did, these kids have received what they needed to be themselves, to be fully human. They received it from what we had to give, and thus also gained some understanding of the potency and the fragility of the project that is their life. Like many a kid who grew up the Great Depression and didn’t know that their family was poor, these kids know who they are because they know that they were loved.
The prevailing criteria of power and money can neither see nor explain what our school leaders, teachers, and staff did; it is intelligible only in the economy of love. It was marked at every stage by sacrifice, personal and communal; and it bore fruit in abundant life, personal and communal. No political, social, or philosophical system can love; but people can, souls can, where there is freedom. Where there is also grace in Christ, love bears great fruit that will endure.
