It was announced yesterday that the plan proposed by the Philadelphia Roman Catholic Archdiocese’s Blue Ribbon Panel for Education is not resonating with the peons in the pew—at least not in East Falls.
Several months ago, the esteemed committee reviewed its parochial school system and announced dozens of school closures and mergers. The Committee has already reversed a good number of its Blue Ribbon decisions, but not in East Falls. That property in East Falls is just too valuable to be wasted on the young.
And so, the Archdiocese announced with Blue Ribbon wisdom that the children of East Falls would travel several neighborhoods away to be part of a parochial school in Manayunk that would bear a new name, St. Blase. (St. Blase is the patron saint of people with fish bones caught in their throats.)
The Blue Ribbon committee made the mistake so common among hierarchies, real or imagined. They assumed the families of East Falls would thank them for their wisdom and, at their first opportunity, wind their way through the crowded back streets of Manayunk, checkbooks in hand, to enroll their little ones in St. Blase. But they didn’t.
It doesn’t work like that any more. Neighborhood matters. Neighborhood is a choice people make—not hierarchies or Blue Ribbon committees. There may have been a time when Church was such a powerful force in society that people would follow edicts that were clearly designed to benefit hierarchy at the people’s expense. Those days are over.
And so, St. Blase is not to be. The Archdiocese has declared it. If it’s any solace to our Catholic neighbors, the Church is saving spots for their children in parochial schools even farther away. (They just aren’t getting the message.)
The Catholics aren’t alone in their mismanagement of the people of East Falls. Up the hill, the Lutherans thought they could just close the church on the white members of Redeemer and create a relocation plan for the black members. A simple hostile property takeover, thinly veiled in pompous rhetoric. Should have been quick and easy.
That plan isn’t working very well either.
Neither hierarchical plan makes any sense to people who actually know and care about the people involved. But those valuable properties just blind the Church from common sense—along with any sense of mission.