There are over 800,000 children enrolled in Catholic schools in Canada. Most of those are in just three provinces: Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan. That's because they are the only provinces that fully fund Catholic education as an alternative public education system. In the remaining provinces, Catholic schools are either fully private or receive partial operating funds on a per pupil basis.
Seven years ago in Catholic Education: The Future is Now, Fr. James Mulligan took a hard look at the health of Canada's Catholic education systems, particularly those in the three fully funded provinces. At the time Newfoundland and Labrador had just lost its denominationally funded system. Over-night Catholic schools in that province disappeared while in Quebec, the denominational school system had been replaced with a language-based system in which the Catholic religion could still be taught.
In his new edition Catholic Education: Ensuring a Future, Fr. Mulligan revisits and updates the issues identified in that earlier study. Although the organization of the material is similar, his new edition is longer. There is now a chapter on the impact of globalization on education, and the issue of "vision" has been broken into separate chapters on "words and action" and "privileging the bias." In those chapters, Fr. Mulligan has taken the time to update the earlier examples he used such as the Regina Catholic School District's vision statement, and has added material on Msgr. Dennis Murphy's series of reflections from The Catholic Register. There is also an extended component on materials from the Institute for Catholic Education (ICE).
The greater portion of new material concerns Fr. Mulligan's attempt to explain and encourage readers to not forget our bias. In particular, his calls for "sacrifice" as the "engine" of the vision are both timely, and crucially important if Catholic education in fully funded provinces is to survive.
Fr. Mulligan's own bias in Catholic education is a vision of the faith based on social justice, grounded in the knowledge of its tenets and foundational writings. But it's something he believes should be taught through a critical perspective rather than dogmatic pedagogy. In that regard, his greatest concern is for the faith formation of the teachers who teach in Catholic classrooms and the administrators who lead them.
Mulligan deals with this issue at length in the chapters on "leadership" and "formation." After providing examples to illustrate poorly formed Catholicity in teachers and principals, he describes the components of a well-formed teacher with a brief description of current efforts in each of the three provinces to address this need. But that is as far as he goes. I would have been very interested in his ideas about what more we should be doing and in what format. For example: In Ontario should our Catholic Colleges be establishing Faculties of Education to graduate students with a Bachelor of Education in Catholic education?
In his forward to Ensuring a Future, Dr. Mark McGowan of the University of St. Michael's College in Toronto remarks that: "Mulligan has issued an urgent wake-up call to Catholic partners in education: either address the salient problems now --complacency, betrayal of Catholic values from within, the failure of the parish/home/school triad, and poorly formed or un-informed leadership-- or face the demise of the 'enduring gift of publicly funded Catholic schools in Canada." Dr. McGowan's comments are all too true. But if my own recent experience as a Catholic school trustee is any example, Fr. Mulligan has been far too lenient on the trustees, parents, priests, and especially the bishops.
Ensuring a Future's emphasis is philosophical and theological in its approach. This is its great strength. But it's also its area of weakness. As the second chapter points out, words must be turned into actions. But Fr. Mulligan fails to provide specific examples of complacency, betrayal, or poor leadership on the part of trustees, parents, or our ecclesial leaders. For example: Is the failure to establish English language Catholic high schools in small Northern Ontario towns (in comparison to their Alberta or Ontario Francophone Catholic counterparts) a result of complacency, historical inertia, failure of nerve, acceptance of neo-liberal economics, or a lack of commitment to the Catholic faith? Surely all "partners" must share in this failure of leadership, but how and in what proportion?
Similarly, I would like to have seen a deeper analysis of what we might be doing to ensure our future through programs in Early Childhood Education, adult parish-based Catholic education, the establishment of post-graduate degrees and research in Canadian Catholic education, and the production of a professional journal or a general magazine to promote and disseminate what is the "enduring gift" of Catholic education.
But perhaps Fr. Mulligan's greatest omission may be one of philosophy. If we really want to ensure our future as a Catholic education community, we are going to have to admit to and become engaged in the current debate which is occurring between the progressives and traditionalists within the Church. There are sporadic places throughout his story where he does dip his toe ever so gently into that pool of hot water. Like Fr. Mulligan, I believe this is the issue none of the partners want to confront. And in many ways it is at the heart of the distrust that exists within each (and between each) of the major players.
In her forward to the first edition of Fr. Mulligan's book, Sr. Clare Fitzgerald asks: "Is the crisis in Catholic education being exacerbated more by people within the system rather than without?" She then goes on to say that Catholic Education calls them to the "conversation that must take place" among themselves.
In my view, the answer to Sr. Fitzgerald's question is "the people within the system." The need for that "conversation" is greater than ever. Fr. Mulligan's books are still the best expression of that need. If we continue to avoid the challenge he still calls us to consider, a decade from now we may have a lot less than 800, 000 students in our schools.
John Borst, a retired educator, is a Catholic school board trustee and writer.
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