By all accounts, Saint Ignatius is one of the finest Catholic grade schools on the north side–its enrollment economically and ethnically diverse, its principal dynamic, its teachers dedicated, and its parents committed.
Such disputes are becoming common as the church struggles with how to allocate its resources as middle-class Catholics continue to leave the city. The archdiocese, which faces a $15 million deficit, has closed 53 inner-city churches since 1990. As reporter Andrew Herrmann recently wrote in the Sun-Times, the archdiocese is targeting its limited resources toward a handful of far-off suburbs and upscale neighborhoods like Dearborn Park while cutting back on “overserved” communities in Chicago. “‘We must dream,’ [Joseph Cardinal Bernardin] told Catholics earlier this year,” Herrmann wrote. “But those dreams must be ‘practical.’”
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One such “overserved” neighborhood is Rogers Park, which in the 1920s was a heavily Catholic working-class community. Over the years the area has seen an influx of Jews, and then of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians; there’s still a stable, integrated, middle-class base in Rogers Park, but its schools are economically segregated. By and large, the lower-income children attend public schools, while most middle-class parents send their kids to private schools or ship them out to magnet schools in other communities. All of which means the local Catholic schools have struggled to maintain enrollment. “The demographics changed,” says Rich McMenamin, a parent at Saint Ignatius. “The original parishioners moved to the suburbs, and the church didn’t keep up.”
A few months later, SUCCESS unveiled the first draft of a proposal to consolidate the area’s schools. Saint Gregory and Saint Henry would become middle schools (that is, for sixth- through eighth-graders); Saint Jerome, Saint Ita, and Saint Gertrude would offer kindergarten through fifth grade only; and Saint Timothy and Saint Ignatius would close.
During the summer, parish leaders pored over the books to see if they had enough money to operate the school independently. They discovered that the parish owed the archdiocese about $700,000, but that most of those loans had gone toward the church, not the school. “We needed an additional $65,000 to operate on our own,” says McMenamin. “It was doable, if we ran some aggressive fund-raisers and tapped our alumni.”
Other parents felt Bernardin was using soft language to disguise hard tactics. “This parish used to generate a surplus of cash that I’m sure helped the archdiocese develop suburban parishes,” says McMenamin. “Now we go through tough times and they pull out the rug. It’s not fair.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Alexander Newberry.
