Father Burns' The Catholic school system in the United States and The growth and development of the Catholic school system in the United States have been freely used in the present work. cf. p. v.

Walch presents the dramatic story of a social institution that has adapted itself to constant change without abandoning its goals of preserving the faith of its children and preparing them for productive roles in American society.

Winner of the 2005 New Scholar Book Award given by Division F: History and Historiography of the American Educational Research Association In 1893 Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, the father of the modern university, helped implement a policy that, in effect, barred graduates of Jesuit colleges from regular admission to Harvard Law School. The resulting controversy—bitterly contentious and widely publicized—was a defining moment in the history of American Catholic education, illuminating on whose terms and on what basis Catholics and Catholic colleges would participate in higher education in the twentieth century. In Catholic Higher Education in Protestant America, Kathleen Mahoney considers the challenges faced by Catholics as the age of the university opened. She describes how liberal Protestant educators such as Eliot linked the modern university with the cause of a Protestant America and how Catholic students and educators variously resisted, accommodated, or embraced Protestant-inspired educational reforms. Drawing on social theories of cultural hegemony and insider-outsider roles, Mahoney traces the rise of the Law School controversy to the interplay of three powerful forces: the emergence of the liberal, nonsectarian research university; the development of a Catholic middle class whose aspirations included attendance at such institutions; and the Catholic church's increasingly strident campaign against modernism and, by extension, the intellectual foundations of modern academic life.

Using the evidence of Magisterial, European and American history, this book analyzes the historical standards the Catholic Church established for education and demonstrates exactly where and when the concept went off the rails in America. But most important, it demonstrates why it went off the rails. You will discover surprising facts concerning the American episcopal hierarchy, and even more surprising facts concerning their enemies. You will learn why school reform never succeeds, how and when the schools began to break down (it's not when you think), how the Catholic parochial schools inadvertently fueled the culture of death and you will thereby discover the reason we are where we are today. But best of all, you will see the way out of the morass. Because the analysis of the breakdown is thorough, the solution is much easier to envision. Designed to Fail describes three centuries of knock-down drag-out combat between the Catholic Faith and American culture, but it also shows how Catholics can triumph.

"Offers the spiritual foundations that should define/suffuse Catholic education, at every level, to ensure that Catholic schools are providing the education that they promise"--

St John Neumann established the parochial school system in the United States of America! The Roman Catholic school system has been the pioneer of the national organized educational system in our country, as well as the standard of success in pedagogy! In AD 1950, there were more than eleven thousand Catholic elementary schools in America; sadly, there are only around twelve hundred still functioning. The title of this work serves as a hallmark and a means of exaltation for the contributions made by the Roman Catholic Church in the field of education!

1968 witnessed perhaps the greatest revolution in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. It was led by Fr. Charles Curran, professor of Theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, with more than 500 theologians who signed a "Statement of Dissent" that declared Catholics were not bound in conscience to follow the Church's teaching in the encyclical of Pope Paul VI,Humanae Vitae, that artificial contraception is morally wrong because it is destructive of the good of Christian marriage. The battle at Catholic University centered on the major question in Catholic higher education during the turbulent years after the Second Vatican Council, "What is the meaning of academic freedom at a Catholic university?" Curran and the dissenting theologians maintained they needed to be free to teach without constraint by any outside authority, including the bishops. The bishops maintained that the American tradition of religious freedom guaranteed the right of religiously-affiliated schools to require their professors to teach in accord with the authority of their church. This clash over the authority of the Magisterium of the Church within its own academic institutions was at the heart of the dramatic clash which unfolded at CUA. This book uses never-before published material from the personal papers of the key players at CUA to tell the inside story of the dramatic events that unfolded there in the late 1960's. Beginning with the 1967 faculty-led strike in support of Curran, this book reveals the content of the internal discussions between the key bishops on the CUA Board of Trustees. Incorporating personal interviews with Curran, the author presents a balanced account of the deep frustration and anger against the institutional authority of the Church which played into the hands of the dissenting theologians. This work attempts to disprove both the standard "liberal" and "conservative" interpretation of the events of 1968, suggesting that the culture of dissent was a direct fruit of the excessive legalism and authoritarianism which marked the Church in the United States during the years preceding Vatican II. Because the polarization in 1968 has continued to define the experience of many American Catholics and has had an ongoing effect on Catholic education, this work should be extremely interesting to those who wish to understand the recent past so as to move forward into the 21st century with a greater awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of Catholic education in the United States.

The authors examine a broad range of Catholic high schools to determine whether or not students are better educated in these schools than they are in public schools. They find that the Catholic schools do have an independent effect on achievement, especially in reducing disparities between disadvantaged and privileged students. The Catholic school of today, they show, is informed by a vision, similar to that of John Dewey, of the school as a community committed to democratic education and the common good of all students.