Fundamentals of the Faith

Off the 8:27 train at White Plains, N.Y. one morning last week tumbled 60 teen-aged boys of all shapes and sizes. In little knots, shouting to each other, they raced through the crowd of commuters on the platform and loped down the stairway at the north end, two steps at a time. Nearly 40 of them squeezed into the first bus with the other passengers for Mamaroneck Avenue; those in back jammed open the rear door so that three more could slip in. The bus driver slid from his seat, ran back and plucked out the culprits like so many ripe peaches.

"Behave, or you'll walk," he warned. "It'll be a long way to walk when there's snow."

While the bus slowly jolted through White Plains, the boys sang and roughhoused like any schoolbound boys that morning all over the U.S. But when the driver stopped before a gleaming, modernistic school building, they got off and went in as quietly as though they were entering church. In a sense, they were. It was the new $4,200,000 Archbishop Stepinac High School, the nation's best equipped Roman Catholic diocesan school.

Avoiding Graveyards. U.S. Catholics spend $182,250,000 a year to run their church schools. This is America's largest single religious expenditure--and more than any U.S. Protestant denomination spends for all purposes. The total 1947 expenditure of the Methodist Church was only $165,000,000; the second highest in Protestantism, $132,000,000, was raised by the Southern Baptist. Over 9% of the total U.S. scholastic enrollment is in Catholic schools; the figure for elementary schools is nearly 11%.

About half the 2,947,000 Catholic schoolchildren in the country go to parochial schools. In the last 20 years there has been a large and significant increase at the high-school level. In 1930 the Catholics taught 241,869 boys & girls between ninth and twelfth grade. The figure is now nearly 490,000--more than double. Last week the principal of Stepinac High, short, amiable Father Joseph C. Krug, explained why Catholics have striven so hard for this increase. Said he:

"High schools are a graveyard for the Catholic religion. These are the years when adolescents take their first critical look at life, at themselves and at the world around them. The philosophy of this school, like every Catholic school, is to give a thorough academic training but always to emphasize the overall religious significance of life."

Making Americans. When he dedicated Stepinac High last fortnight, Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, who is U.S. Catholicism's most influential leader, wove into his speech every overtone of the Catholic parochial system. In his first sentence he called the school "the full embodiment of the great and generous spirit that is America." Then he praised the prelate for whom he had named it, Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac* of Yugoslavia, railroaded to jail by Tito in 1946, as "the victim of godless Communism and a martyr to the ideals that Americans revere and cherish. He is the symbol of Peter and Paul and all the apostles and martyrs ... He also reincarnates the symbol of the fathers and mothers of America--whose thoughts, powers, sacrifices and achievements in the building of this mighty nation were motivated and inspired by the twin virtues of love of God and of country.

"The school's most precious endowment," the Cardinal concluded, is "the combination of the American and Catholic spirit fused and sanctified in ... the lives of the 50 priests who have dedicated themselves to the education of your sons that they may be sincere, active Catholics, and thus, inevitably, sincere patriotic Americans ..."

Clashing Concepts.The ardent identification of Roman Catholicism with Americanism has roused non-Catholics to be equally ardent in recalling the traditional American doctrine of separation of church & state.

All over the U.S., the Catholic and non-Catholic concepts of this doctrine have clashed repeatedly over such issues as the transportation of parochial pupils in public-school buses, and Government aid to parochial schools. The 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision of 1947 on the Ewing

Township bus case upheld the legality of parochial schools receiving public aid in such fields as transportation, textbooks and health services.

The Catholics argue that: 1) they are taxed to support public education; 2) they also support their own schools; 3) these schools save other U.S. taxpayers some $400,000,000 a year in additional taxes. (Catholic schools save the taxpayers much more than their actual $182,250,000 cost per year, because their operating expenses are less than half the public-school average.)

The parochial schools are staffed by nuns, lay brothers and priests who get board and lodging but very little cash.* Even so, the largest single item in most parish budgets is the support of the parochial elementary school.

Competing Loyalties. The diocese or archdiocese often has financial responsibility for high schools, which usually charge tuition. The boys at Stepinac pay $15 a month, though Father Krug explained: "No boy is sent away because he can't pay. His parish shoulders the difference." Since Stepinac is the first archdiocesan high school in Westchester County, the boys commute from many towns--some of them 20 miles.

"We have to compete with local loyalties," said Father Krug. "Almost none of the boys here would have been in a parochial school now if this one had not been built. A boy knows his own town and has his buddies there. Often he can look right down his block and see a first-rate high school--and he can go there free. We must offer the very best to meet that competition."

Stepinac, with a capacity of 1,360 students, does offer everything, from manual training to a radio studio. When fully staffed, it will have 54 priests--more than the total number of ordained clergymen in many a U.S. Episcopal diocese. Each priest has a comfortable parlor-bedroom-&-bath of his own on the penthouse level of the school. On Sundays the priests will help out in Westchester parishes and get to know the parents of their pupils. The parents will also be invited to school functions, including the evening dances and roller-skating parties in the gym. "Westchester is a strong coeducational county," said Father Krug. "Our boys see no girls in school hours, but the parties will meet the coed situation."

Either ... Or. The real difference between Stepinac and its rival public high schools, and the real reason Westchester boys commute to it (whether the impetus comes from themselves, their families or their parish priests), is religion. Because of the separation of church & state in the U.S., no pupil can now have any religious instruction, even a Bible reading, on public-school premises.* At Stepinac every boy, whatever his course, has a 45-minute class in religion every day of his four high-school years. He attends regular services in the school chapel and auditorium. Just before Easter each year, the entire school will hold a three-day religious retreat.

Until he became principal at Stepinac, Father Krug was assistant principal at Cardinal Hayes High School in The Bronx. "We had a very satisfactory number of vocations to the priesthood there," he said. "We should have them here too."

The overwhelming majority of Stepinac alumni will, of course, remain laymen. But through their adolescent years they will have had the most thorough religious instruction their thoroughgoing church can provide. In a ninth-grade religion class last week, Father Joseph Sum reminded his young hearers: "At the end of the world our bodies will be reunited with our souls and either enjoy the beatific vision of Heaven or suffer the tortures of Hell." He led a careful discussion on the moral issues of the purpose of life.

Toward the end of the class, Father Sum inquired: "What would you say if somebody asked you, 'What do you, as a Catholic, believe?'"

After a short silence, one boy volunteered: "I believe in God."

"That is not enough," said Father Sum. "A Methodist believes in God, too."

After a longer silence, a second boy spoke up: "I would recite the Apostles' Creed."

"That would be better," said Father Sum. "It contains the fundamental articles of the Catholic faith."

The bell rang. The boys rose, recited a prayer to Our Lady of Fatima, and quietly filed out. Every day, for nearly four years, they would be drilled in the fundamentals of the Roman Catholic faith.

*"Ste-pee-nats" in Yugoslavia; "Step-i-nak" in White Plains. Said Cardinal Spellman during the building campaign: "I don't care how you pronounce it, so long as we have the school." *The annual pay of New York public schoolteachers ranges from $2,500 to $5,400. *Despite the Supreme Court ruling in the Vashti McCollum case (TIME, March 22), some public schools still allow their students to attend once-a-week "released time" classes in religious education at nearby churches.

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