Head of school Fr. Leon Olszamowski discusses the future of Catholic education and his beloved Notre Dame.
In a summary of trend data cited in a report by the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) titled United States Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools 2014-2015: The Annual Statistical Report on Schools, Enrollment, and Staffing, in the 10 years since the 2005 school year, 1,648 Catholic schools were reported closed or consolidated, while 336 school openings were reported. NCEA also said that the number of students in Catholic schools declined by 481,016, or 19.9%.
Total U.S. Catholic school student enrollment for the current academic year is estimated to be at 1,939,574, according to the NCEA, with 1,359,969 in elementary and middle schools and 579,605 in secondary schools.
But what perhaps is least surprising from the report is the breakdown of religious vs. laity in Catholic school staffing. Full-time equivalent professional staff in Catholic schools in the U.S. numbered 150,709, with 97.2% laity (lay women: 75.2%; lay men: 22.0%); and 2.8% religious/clergy (sisters: 1.9%; brothers: 0.4%; priests: 0.5%)
At Notre Dame Preparatory School and Marist Academy, students are blessed to have three Marist priests and one brother on staff, plus a Benedictine brother in the upper division and a Franciscan sister teaching in the school’s middle division, all of which might make NDPMA an outlier when compared with other Catholic schools in southeast Michigan.
Since 1606, when Franciscan missionaries opened the first Catholic school in America in St. Augustine, Florida, and 1810, when St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, with the support of Archbishop John Carroll, opened the first parochial school in Emmitsburg, Maryland, Catholic schools in the U.S. have served as bulwarks of high academics, moral development and faith. So what was true through the 20th century is still true today even though those “bulwarks” number far fewer.
No one knows this better than NDPMA head of school Fr. Leon Olszamowski, a Marist priest with a PhD, who was educated nearly exclusively in Catholic schools and is now helming one of Michigan’s highest performing private, independent schools.
Olszamowski remembers a time in the Catholic Church when Mass was in Latin, women’s heads were always covered in church, priests were called by their last names, and parochial school classrooms usually included more than 35 kids.
He says that in an increasingly secularized world with great change in the church happening at a far greater pace than ever before, a school like Notre Dame can still make faith—particularly the Catholic faith—as relevant to students as it was for his generation.
“The world in which we live is far different than the one I grew up in and even more different than the world my parents grew up in,” said Olszamowski. “Yes, secularization is a process that glorifies the good that humans are, but we know full well that man cannot always be the measure of all things.”
Olszamowski said humans need a relationship with the One that called them into being to fulfill their destiny.
“One of our most important roles as Catholic educators is to ensure that students come to understand that humans, though created in God’s image, can fall astray by the exercise of an inadequately or badly formed free will,” he said. “We try to teach them a very old Catholic doctrine: humanity without God’s helping grace tends to self-destruct. We as individuals are not the center of our own universe—the creator is, and the creator knows best.”
He says this thinking is at the base of [Marist founder] Fr. Colin’s desire that all in our school and others like it become Christian people, upright citizens and academic scholars. “In that order,” Olszamowski says, with emphasis.
The Notre Dame school mission is based on a commitment from its faculty and staff to work with God to form Christian people, upright citizens and academic scholars.
Integrating faith with schooling
The Catholic Catechism and the National Catechetical Directory for Catechesis state that each catechetical program, such as those found in Catholic schools, must include three things: the teaching of Catholic doctrine, the celebration of sacraments, and Christian service. These are based on the ancient practice of the church, which creates community, right praise or prayer, and right moral practice and service.
“All three of those programs are solidly established in our own Catholic school context at Notre Dame,” Olszamowski said. “We have an outstanding program aimed at understanding the faith as presented by our American bishops, and we have a very fine liturgical practice in place.
“I would hazard a guess that anyone who attends an NDPMA all-school liturgy gets an immediate and strong sense of a school at prayer. Plus, we have a very robust campus ministry program, with four employees offering retreats, service-project opportunities, reflections on apostolic works practices and much, much more.”
He said the Marist Fathers oversee all of this as part of a covenant with Detroit’s Archbishop and Notre Dame’s own Board of Trustees.
“As priests and brothers, we were sent here to be light bearers for the Christian Catholic project that NDPMA truly is,” he adds.
Is the Church changing?
Growing up in the Corpus Christi and St. Joan of Arc parish grade schools and then at Harper Woods Notre Dame for high school, followed by teaching and administration stints at both HWND and NDPMA, Olszamowski has been witness to much change over many years in the Catholic Church.
“I have watched the Catholic Church during my lifetime try to keep balancing three central things: community, prayer, and moral practice,” he said. “Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI stressed community and doctrine, and Francis stresses moral practice when he says, ’The church is not a fortress for the strong but a field hospital for the weak.’ I think that sounds a lot like Jesus, who said, ‘I have come not to those who are well, but to those who are sick.’”
Optimistic about the future
Going forward, Olszamowski said the church has a bright future, and that it also is becoming “more user-friendly.”
He said Pope Francis has started a good trend by trying to be less judgmental and working with people where they are in their personal journey. “That, by the way, was a favorite theme of Fr. Colin and the early Marists,” Olszamowski added. “Give people hope and joy for life with or without the law.”
The next 50 years?
So what will Catholic education in the U.S. look like in 50 years or beyond? Will Catholic schools in the U.S. have to adapt to this changing world to even survive? While acknowledging that the questions are good ones, Olszamowski says we must look to history first.
“Right out of the gate, the Catholic faith has had to live in a somewhat hostile world,” he said. “Secularism feeds on relativism, but Christianity does not. Everyone wants it his or her way, and that is not the way to build humanity.”
Olszamowski said the recent response to the Supreme Court’s decision on single-sex marriage is a good point to reflect on.
“The Supreme Court interprets the constitution through its own moral lens,” he said. “So does the church. But the church, given all of its past problems dealing with the real world, has nonetheless kept true to its understanding of what God wants for humanity.”
He said that Catholic schools, too, will surely have to adapt to a changing world.
“Being Catholic does not mean breathing different air. It’s how you breathe the air that makes all the difference in the world. God created the world to be good—he could do no other thing—the problems in our world are of our own making.”
And, he stresses, Notre Dame will continue to preach Jesus: “who He was and what He wants from the faithful.
“We proclaim Jesus as God’s manifestation in our world,” Olszamowski said. “I am personally of good cheer when I teach my International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge class. Our kids are genuinely good people trying to make their way through life as best as they can. I also believe that they have a powerful spiritual dimension to them. I see that very often by the questions they ask in class. They are genuine seekers. Our job here, and it certainly is not easy, is to help them see that the word of God as spoken through Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.”
Not fearful
Olszamowski thinks Notre Dame is well-positioned and well-prepared for whatever the future holds for Catholic education.
“I am not fearful of the future because I am a solid believer in Christianity,” he said. “I am often frustrated with Christian exercise of the good news but never frustrated with God’s plan in Jesus. We have some very, very hearty believers among the Marists!” He says the Marist’s primary role is to share the joy of the Gospel for a world that needs it more than ever.
“And Notre Dame Preparatory School and Marist Academy is a great place to share that joy,” Olszamowski added. “Ours is truly a miracle school, as Cardinal Maida often said. Mary, the Mother of God, is hard at work to make us thrive in a sometimes hostile world.”
Olszamowski also said that the International Baccalaureate provides a perfect framework to build Christian persons, upright citizens and academic scholars.
“I would expect no less from our great combination of IB with a traditional Jesuit-oriented set of programs that includes the old quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy—and its educational preliminaries.”
Comments or questions? mkelly@ndpma.org.
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About Notre Dame Preparatory School and Marist Academy
Notre Dame Preparatory School and Marist Academy is a private, Catholic, independent, coeducational day school located in Oakland County. The school's upper division enrolls students in grades nine through twelve and has been named one of the nation's best 50 Catholic high schools (Acton Institute) four times since 2005. Notre Dame's middle and lower divisions enroll students in jr. kindergarten through grade eight. All three divisions are International Baccalaureate "World Schools." NDPMA is conducted by the Marist Fathers and Brothers and is accredited by the Independent Schools Association of the Central States and the North Central Association Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement. For more on Notre Dame Preparatory School and Marist Academy, visit the school's home page at www.ndpma.org.