Blindsided: When Catholic Parents Get Ousted

Clad in soft purple scrubs, ready to begin her sixteen-hour night shift, Christine gazes into the cell phone camera held by her young son at their Erie, Pennsylvania home.  Her face radiates the dignity of her deep faith and motherly heart, as she speaks with great feeling in the English language she has worked for a long time to master.  “Blessed Sacrament is the best choice ever that my husband and I made for our children,” she says, “One day me and my husband was just passing by Greengarden, and then we saw a sign about enrollment at Blessed Sacrament School, so we went in.  We pick up the application, we fill it up, and the next day they called…that they accept our application.”

Christine’s instinctive act of trust in the Holy Spirit has surely borne fruit in the experience of her children at Blessed Sacrament.  These high-achieving students routinely win prizes for their academics, particularly in math, and give their time as altar servers during school and weekend Masses.  One of her sons recently participated in the “Spirit of Wisdom” trivia contest, during which teams from the six schools of the Erie Catholic School System battled for top honors in knowledge of their Catholic faith.  Blessed Sacrament kids won the trophy.  It was a rare moment of light for the beleaguered school community, which now stands under threat of dissolution.

On February 14, 2025, parents checking their emails opened a most unwelcome Valentine.  Citing declining enrollment, the school board had recommended that the beloved school be closed at the end of the academic year.  More than one parent never received the fateful email at all.  One mom, Whitney, got the bad news via a screenshot on her middle-school son’s phone.  “I was standing in the shoe store, and he’s like, ‘Mom, mom, read this,” and I was like, ‘What,’ you know, fussing at him, and he said, ‘No, look!’ and he looked like he was gonna cry.  Then I read it and I just, like, sat down.  I had to slow down for a second just to gather myself.” That afternoon, as parents were still reeling from the unexpected blow, the story popped up on local TV news programs.

In a press release issued that same day, the Most Rev. Lawrence Persico, Bishop of Erie, commended school board officials for “thinking strategically for the future,” a position he has continued to maintain despite widespread criticism of the decision that has circulated among the Erie community.  Compare this response to the actions of Bishop Michael Fisher, just across the state line in the Diocese of Buffalo, New York, when a similar catastrophe rocked the families of St. John Vianney School in Orchard Park.

In September 2024, parents there also received an abrupt email announcing that their school would not reopen the next fall.  School supporters responded with a peaceful protest; on the following day, Bishop Michael Fisher met with concerned parents and decided to give them a reprieve for 2025-2026.  Parents pledged to work with diocesan officials to keep the school open.  While the ultimate outcome of this compromise is obviously unknown, the negotiation was a shining example of how church leadership can meet the lay faithful halfway to stimulate greater parent investment in Catholic school life.

Similarly, the families of Blessed Sacrament mustered with signs to rally for their school.  Cheerleading coaches led the group in a rousing chant: “Bulldogs strong, bulldogs proud!  Save our school, shout it loud!” while students and parents rubbed their icy fingers in the 17-degree cold.  Four days after the announcement, parents gathered in the school cafeteria with Erie Catholic leaders, ready to discuss options to keep Blessed Sacrament open.  But the meeting unfolded very differently than parents expected.

One school board official began her remarks by quoting from the Erie Catholic mission statement:

Anchored in the Gospel values of Jesus Christ, the Erie Catholic School System, under the guidance of the Diocese of Erie, provides academically distinguished schools that cultivate every child’s potential.

She invited her audience to “read along, if you know it,” but, unsurprisingly, none of the parents complied. Then she noted that perhaps not all the people present understood the workings of the Board: “Sometimes it feels like they’re nameless, faceless people who make these decisions from on high and then, you know, bring them down to you all.

It is unlikely that school families felt any better about the Board by the end of the meeting. A parent asked for a year of continued operation for families to come to terms with the shattering decision, but this grace was not extended.  Others offered to raise funds to restore the school to parish control. “What’s the dollars and cents for us to make it happen with our church, if we get out of Erie Catholic?” one mom asked.  The Erie Catholic School System leadership had not come to answer questions about saving the school.  They were much more interested in handing out “transfer preference” forms, intended to streamline the process of slotting students into the remaining five schools as quickly as possible.

In justifying the decision to close Blessed Sacrament, the Board of Directors referred to a growth and vitality study conducted that fall by Meitler Consulting, a firm which uses data to help Catholic parishes and schools to strategize for the future.  While Erie Catholic leaders cited a 52 percent enrollment decline at Blessed Sacrament since the inception of the school system in 2017, they did not make the full report available to parents.  This reticence seems odd, as the Erie Diocese has posted parish Meitler reports openly on their website.  Community members cannot help wondering what the school system has to conceal.

Blessed Sacrament School has the distinction of having the highest percentage of minority students of the six schools in the system.  Historically, this demographic often faces considerable economic challenges. Families who live in public housing make many sacrifices to afford the tuition, though some do receive scholarship aid through that housing.  The faculty and staff know their students well—some teachers even buy extra food and clothes for the kids who need them, sharing these gifts with discretion and sensitivity.

Transportation also taxes the ingenuity of parents, some of whom have developed an intricate system of ridesharing to shuttle their kids to school and get themselves to work on time.  Some students must take city buses across town each day, waiting twenty minutes to transfer in a neighborhood whose safety record is not the greatest.  Sr. Katherine Horan, the Benedictine principal of Blessed Sacrament, rode the bus with her students for the first week of school—so they have learned how to do it.   However, these children must still face the unpredictability of the frigid Erie winter and the inevitable bus system delays.

When Erie Catholic officials were asked, months ago, to investigate the possibility of busing for these students, the answer had been disheartening.  No bus was available.  However, at the meeting on February 18th, parents learned that Erie Catholic would be busing their children to the other five schools for shadow visits.  Transportation had magically appeared!

In the weeks that followed, the Erie Catholic school bus became a not-infrequent sight in the Blessed Sacrament parking lot, ready to bear students off for a day of wandering through unfamiliar classrooms and hallways where they could not help feeling like second-class citizens.  A closer look at the current Erie Catholic transportation system revealed that each of the other five schools had access to either the Erie Catholic bus, city school buses, or in some cases, both transportation options.

It is reasonable to ask how many more students could have been able to enroll at Blessed Sacrament, if Erie Catholic had considered some of the challenges common to lower-income, inner-city families.  Moreover, while enrollment numbers are very important, there is an inherent danger in making Catholic education too much of a numbers game.  Perhaps there are cases when closing a school is the sad necessity of an institution devoted to Gospel values.  In the case of Blessed Sacrament’s closure, however, the method employed smacks of a disregard for the poor which is strictly antithetical to the Gospel:

My brothers, show no partiality as you adhere to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ. For if a man with gold rings on his fingers and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and a poor person in shabby clothes also comes in, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Sit here, please,” while you say to the poor one, “Stand there,” or “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil designs? (James 2:1-4)

Telling economically disadvantaged, hardworking families that they should be content “sitting at the feet” of more affluent school communities demonstrates a blatant disregard for the social and emotional networks forged by the poor.  Moreover, shutting down an inner-city Catholic school does not merely uproot the families involved.  It compromises the vitality of the parish and the entire neighborhood.

In his 2020 apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia, Pope Francis tells us that pragmatic and economic motives must never disregard the individual dignity of the person:

Dialogue must not only favour the preferential option on behalf of the poor, the marginalized and the excluded, but also respect them as having a leading role to play. Others must be acknowledged and esteemed precisely as others, each with his or her own feelings, choices and ways of living and working. Otherwise, the result would be, once again, “a plan drawn up by the few for the few,” if not “a consensus on paper or a transient peace for a contented minority”. Should this be the case, “a prophetic voice must be raised”, and we as Christians are called to make it heard.

In the days since the disastrous meeting with Erie Catholic leaders, stunned Blessed Sacrament parents, who had expected their springtime to be consumed with things like soccer sign-ups, Easter candy sales and fumbling through their children’s latest math homework, have staggered into the fray as the voice of prophecy.  Wielding a black-and-yellow Bulldogs flag that is bigger than she is, a mom in a maroon coat waits for her kids at dismissal time, while nearby signs proclaim “Justice for BSS” and “Don’t Uproot BSS Kids.”  Passing motorists, including the occasional school bus driver and local firemen, applaud these messages with honks, waves, and pumping fists.

Meanwhile, Blessed Sacrament kids, whose educational stability has come crashing down around them, attempt to cope.  The bewildered ones wonder wistfully, “Will anyone at my new school like me?”  The angry ones erupt in a series of minor emotional explosions.  Up to five days of instructional time per student have been sacrificed to shadow visits at the other Erie schools.  Is this the “academically distinguished” and Gospel-based Catholic education for which parents have paid their hard-earned money?

Believing the answer to this question to be a resounding “no,” a group of concerned parents formally petitioned the Bishop to reverse his decision and then tracked him down for a meeting, a request to which he reluctantly agreed.  Unfortunately, they were unable to convince him that preserving this mission territory in the heart of the city was a remarkable investment in the future of the Church.  At the end of March, in collaboration with their canon lawyer, the parents submitted a formal recourse to the Dicastery for Culture and Education at the Vatican.  Though they were not invited to help determine Blessed Sacrament’s future course, they can still exercise the choice to fight for this key institution in the Erie community.

In this Jubilee Year of Hope, school advocates continue to draw inspiration from the haunting testimonial of one of Blessed Sacrament’s hardest-working moms.  On camera, Christine joins her hands as she pleads for the preservation of her children’s Blessed Sacrament family.  “Please, please, please, keep our school open…Save our Bulldogs,” she murmurs. “Please, please, you out there…save our school.”

To follow Blessed Sacrament’s canon law case at the Vatican, call (814) 314-9292, or email [email protected].

Disclosure:  Dorothy Osanna is a proud parent and member of Friends of Blessed Sacrament School.