If that’s the politics Bishop, then close the school.
Smaller and purer may be the way to go.
Maybe the bidhop had a talk with a lawyer.
Bring back the Oath Against Modernism.
I can’t believe that Vasa folded on this.
There has to be more to the story that we see here.
I started reading the comments posted on the Press Democrat website and was staggered by the level of vitriol directed towards the Bishop, a lot of it from self-identified Catholics. If this is indicative of the state of the faith in his diocese, then he has an uphill battle to be sure. He may have misjudged the amount of resistance he was facing. If teachers were threatening to quit en masse and effectively shut down the schools, then I don’t see how he had much choice but to back down for now.
Believe me, I understand the sentiments to “fix it now or shut it down,” but I don’t see that as exercising responsible stewardship over the Church’s goods. Closing a school is not like closing an Arby’s. Schools are complex institutions with deep ties to the community, and risking shutting one down even for the best reasons without sufficient preparation would cause immense bad will that might never be healed, and actually harm efforts to spread the Faith.
I’m glad to see the Bishop is sticking to his guns on the long term goals. Hopefully the more disgruntled teachers can find new jobs in the interim. I haven’t been following this until now, so anyone who is more aware please forgive my ignorance. But it seems to me that he made a tactical, but not necessarily fatal, miscalculation in trying to roll this out so fast.
Hopefully any long-suffering faithful teachers are communicating with him in private so he knows who his friends are inside the institutions so he can focus on turning around at least one of the schools, and from there begin to form a solid structure of authentic Catholic education in his diocese.
In humility, though, I think we have to recognize that these problems have been festering over many decades and they aren’t going to be solved overnight.