Disintegrating Worldviews and the Future of Catholic Education: Addressing the Deep Roots of Catholic Disaffiliation

Abstract

Catholic schools in the United States continue to struggle with declining enrollment just as the wider American Church continues to struggle with rampant disaffiliation. While some Catholic educators have generated creative solutions to keep their schools afloat, the long-term viability of U.S. Catholic education will require understanding the deep roots of current disaffiliation trends in the gradual fading of the Christian worldview from Westerners' imaginations. This article addresses this issue by interpreting sociological data about the faith lives of Catholics and Americans in general through the lens of contemporary research on secularization. Working from these interpretive insights, the author suggests concrete implications for how an understanding of the subtle forces precipitating this momentous historical change might guide the work of Catholic educators.

Moving Beyond Enrollment: A Framework for Encouraging Critical Perspectives and Embracing Diversity in Catholic Education

“…As mentioned, this conceptual paper contains two distinct sections: a critical review of trends within the field of Catholic education and the creation of a framework that could align the field more closely with the Church's social teachings. For the first section of this paper, we intentionally sought out and reviewed two main areas of literature: 1) texts that represented the dominant narrative in Catholic education, emphasizing issues of enrollment, school choice, and the Catholic school effect/advantage (e.g., Berends & Zottola, 2009;Brinig & Garnett, 2014;Bryk et al, 1993;Corbonaro & Covay, 2010;O'Keefe, 2004), and 2) texts that represented and argued for a more expansive view of Catholic education, calling for diverse and critical perspectives to engage the Catholic education research community beyond issues of enrollment, choice, and traditional assumptions of Catholic schools (e.g., Burke, 2012;Garcia-Huidobro, 2017;Manning, 2018). Examining literature in these two areas allowed us to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying assumptions of each strain, and to see them both as independent arguments and in dialogue with one another.…”

“…This paper and the proposed framework serve to highlight existing work that expands the field of Catholic education research (Burke, 2012, Garcia-Huidobro, 2017Manning, 2018) and establishes a means to call for more research welcoming diverse voices into the field. Following the AERA 2019 annual meeting theme, increasing the number and kind of voices in Catholic education research will expand the current narrative to create new ways of utilizing evidence and conceptual thinking and breathe new life into our field.…”

“…these debates (e.g., Burke, 2012), working from the principles of critical theory, have looked to find and articulate the problem-framings, ideologies, and power relationships that have come to dominance in the field and the tendency of Catholic education researchers to reflect the interests of universities and philanthropies supporting their research. Others of these debates, represented by recent calls in the Journal of Catholic Education to create more space for conversations around curriculum (Garcia-Huidobro, 2017) or theological foundations (Manning, 2018) in Catholic education research, suggest that the field must be willing to interrogate what it means to live out Catholic social teaching. For this reason, the actual Catholic social teachings of the Church, referencing Vatican pronouncements (e.g., Leo XIII, 1891;Second Vatican Council, 1965;Francis, 2015), were used to ground the theological aspects of the framework proposed in this paper (e.g., justice and Catholic identity).…”

Mental Health and Schooling

“…It can take the form of expanding the subjects from within. In teaching science for instance, it can mean going to the limits of scientific discovery and then coming to human concern by pointing to the origin of it all [8]. It means providing a larger horizon, where human issues can be addressed.…”