Catholic trustees: little passion for the common good

Catholic New Times, June 29, 2003

The unparalleled attacks on public institutions during the Harris years have exposed the Achilles heel in Catholic education. The breathtaking attacks, so distasteful to Bill Davis, have resulted in 25 million lost school days in the province in the last seven years, compared to 11 million under NDP and Liberal governments. While this massive disruption proceeded apace, Catholic trustees proved unable or unwilling to meet the challenge. When education staggered under the body blows of government vindictiveness, when it lay hemorrhaging, those entrusted with its care had barred their doors and turned off the lights. Few dynamic leaders appeared but there was always a small core of religious zealots whose sole raison d'etre seemed to be the restoration of religious education to rote obedience. They fought the experiential approach of the Come to the Father series. This battle lost, they seemed more bewitched and entranced by the neocon revolution than by Catholicism's strong social teaching of the common good.

Ceding the right to tax, trustees, in a stunning act of naivete, apparently believed the government: that they would now get equal funding. In fact, "equal funding" brought public schools down to a new level of poverty, shared equally with the Catholic board. There was no great resistance to draconian cuts. On the contrary, the present chair of the Catholic board crowed that "the TCDSB supported the objectives and principles introduced by the government," and then proceeded to knock the public board for not doing as well! Unlike the public school board who refused on principle to balance their budget at the expense of students and programs, Catholic trustees took no such courageous stand. In a mirror image of Tory contempt for social programs and the poor, they refused to eliminate their development tax, even on social housing. Talk about your preferential option for the poor!

Catholic trustees are overdue to catch the Davis rage. They must aspire beyond a miasmic political ideology--or sink into irrelevancy. The time has come for trustees, individually and collectively, to reject the fruitless politics of manipulation that distorts the true mission of Catholic education. Sometimes, its custodians need the moral courage, when simple justice dictates, to rise up and bite the hand that feeds them.