The story of a convent school

This brief series of facts plot how, over the course of 10 years, a Catholic Convent School went from being fairly orthodox in its approach to education and the faith to being over the top modernist.

 By that I mean that it travelled from the margins of being a reasonably good school teaching the faith well and achieving good academic results to being a dung heap of secular, politically correct and religiously effete garbage.

For the sake of brevity I have placed this information as bullet points....

• 1986 - The school has a population of 80% Catholic pupils and 20% non Catholics. It enjoys a good academic reputation and the children, when they progress to secondary school, are regarded as exceptionally well behaved by their new teachers. The headteacher is a nun who wears a wimple and habit and she has two other teaching nuns as well as Catholic laypeople on the staff.

• 1989 - by now all four of our children are at this school and doing reasonably well. We have concerns about the teaching of RE as it seems to comprise solely of learning the parables (and doing paintings of scenes from the parables). Each Christmas the school produces a nativity play which involves all of the pupils. School Sports Day in the summer period is popular with parents and there is a standard prize structure for those coming first, second and third.

• 1990 - School Masses have become so crass and banal that we withdraw our children from receiving the sacraments at them. School Sports Day now comprises of races where all participants receive a prize; there is no first, second and third prize structure. At Christmas the nativity play has been replaced by a semi comical musical about Herod and the nativity.

• 1992 - A group of Baptist ministers are given access to the children and catechise them in the course of one day. The first we know about it is when the children bring leaflets home with them describing how Jesus had brothers and sisters and that he was 'just a prophet'. Complaining just means that our children receive even greater discrimination from the teaching staff. By now the nativity play and the semi religious musical have gone and in their place is a panto type production, no mention of the Christmas story whatsoever.

• 1994 - The nuns have discarded their habits and wear the mandatory M&S outfits, their hair is permed. The RE element has not changed; the classroom walls are still plastered with pictures of Zacchaeus up a tree. The only element of change is that the older classes have more realistic pictures. Several of the teachers are now non Catholics and have no appreciation of our concerns. It is hard to spot a crucifix in the school now.

• 1996 - The only nun on the staff is the headteacher. 80% of the pupils are non Catholic and only 20% Catholic. School Masses are a debacle with pottery chalices and many interuptions with wisecracks from the priest. When asked if he would go into the non Catholic secondary school to catechise the children the priest replied: "What's the point they are only going to lose the faith anyway."

Zacchaeus seemed to spend at least
ten academic years up that tree!

So when people say to me "But we are all the same, we are all Catholics" I beg to differ. The modernist Catholic element is not deserving of any respect whatsoever, it has done enormous harm to the Church and probably lost many souls in the process. And the souls that it has lost are, in the main, those of children, too young to rationalise their faith but old enough to see that what they were being offered in the guise of RE was pure pap.
That is an awful holocaust of young souls; we grieve for the three thousand physical losses of 9/11 but modernism has many, many millions of spiritual losses to its eternal shame.

Just as a footnote to the above bullet points. The Parish Priest of such laxity had to leave the country overnight after being apprehended for soliciting in a public lavatory. His Curate, who had denounced my family as being 'heretics' and had turned many of his parish against us, ran off with a divorcee with four children.
I mention these points to illustrate that invariably there is a link between a decline in teaching the faith and the morals of those charged with the teaching.