January 20, 2012

From start, schools key initiative for diocese

Cathedral High School was established by Bishop Thomas Byrne soon after the construction of the Cathedral of the Incarnation in the early 1900s. The school had students in grades one through 12; the high school was one of three all-girl Catholic high schools in Nashville, along with St. Cecilia Academy and St. Bernard Academy. Cathedral High School closed in 1970.

Andy Telli, Tennessee Register

From the earliest days of the Diocese of Nashville, the Church has invested in Catholic schools as an important tool to pass the faith from one generation to the next.

Some were housed in grand old mansions, others in sturdy brick buildings that still stand more than 100 years later, others in log cabins built on what was still a frontier. They’ve been filled with the rich and the poor, the sons of farmers and the daughters of factory workers, new arrivals to the country and those with deep roots in the Catholic community.

But in every year since the diocese was established in 1837, and in every location, and in every circumstance, the aim of Catholic schools remained the same.

In his 1985 book “The American Catholic Experience,” University of Notre Dame Professor Emeritus Jay P. Dolan quotes from a letter from Ignatius F. Horstmann, the bishop of Cleveland at the turn of the 20th century, to one of his priests:

“The parochial school is a rock foundation, the soul of the future. Their divine faith understood fully is the most precious inheritance parents can leave their children. With it practically lived up to they will gain heaven. Without it all else is valueless – a priest’s work without a parochial school can only be half done and is very discouraging.”

The American bishops’ interest in supporting and promoting Catholic schools has a long history. The bishops of Nashville shared that interest with their colleagues around the country.

Determined to develop a native born clergy to serve his far-flung flock, Nashville’s first bishop, Richard Pius Miles, opened a seminary in the Cathedral in his first few years. However, the seminary did not survive long.

St. Michael Male and Female Academy near Cedar Hill in Robertson County, which opened in 1842, was one of the first Catholic schools established in the Diocese of Nashville. The school closed in 1855 because of a lack of funds. St. Michael Church is still in use.

In 1842, Bishop Miles dedicated St. Michael Church in Robertson County. And soon after, the church, which is still in use today, opened a boarding school, St. Michael’s Male and Female Academy, with the mission of improving students  in “Religion, Morals, Good Breeding, and Health,” according to a handbill of the time.

The academy closed in 1855 for lack of funds, and all that remains is a historical marker a few miles from St. Michael Church.

Bishop Miles continued his efforts in providing Catholic education in the diocese when he invited the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, Ky., to establish St. Mary’s Female Academy in Nashville in 1851. But a dispute with the bishop prompted the sisters to leave Nashville and the school was closed before the decade was out.

Bishop Miles, whose diocese covered the entire state of Tennessee, had more success in Memphis where he invited Dominican sisters from Ohio and Kentucky to establish St. Agnes School for girls in 1855.

His successor, Bishop James Whelan, convinced the congregation of Dominican sisters in Somerset, Ohio, to come to Nashville to open a school for girls. They arrived in August 1860 to open St. Cecilia Academy and establish a new congregation of sisters. Both are thriving today, more than 150 years later.

The third bishop of Nashville, Patrick Feehan, continued the growth of the diocese with new parishes and new schools. It was Bishop Feehan who in 1866 invited the Sisters of Mercy to Nashville to open St. Mary’s School associated with the Cathedral. Two years later, they opened St. Bernard Academy, which still operates today as an independent school.

From Nashville, the Sisters of Mercy carried their varied ministries – including schools and hospitals, among others – to nearly every corner of the diocese.

Bishop Feehan also oversaw the establishment of the forerunner to Christian Brothers University and Christian Brothers High School in Memphis in 1871; the establishment of parishes and schools for German immigrants settling in the Lawrence County towns of Lawrenceburg, Loretto and St. Joseph; the opening of a school at the Church of the Assumption in Nashville; the establishment of Notre Dame de Lourdes School for girls by the Nashville Dominicans in Chattanooga, which was the forerunner to the current Notre Dame High School there; and numerous parishes and schools in small towns along the rail lines that crisscrossed the state, including Pegram, Sneedville, Newsome Station, McEwen, Brentwood, Franklin, Thompson’s Station, Columbia, Antioch, Smyrna, Murfreesboro, Tracy City and Winchester.

The band at Assumption School, where the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia taught from 1899 to 1961 when the school closed, poses with their teacher and Assumption pastor Father Henry Japes. The parish opened the school in 1874. Cardinal Samuel Stritch of Chicago and Archbishop John Floersh of Louisville, both attended Assumption School as children.

Bishop Feehan continued his energetic efforts to establish parishes and Catholic schools after he was named the first Archbishop of Chicago in 1880. Meanwhile, in the Nashville Diocese, bishops continued to grow the network of Catholic schools in the state.

Bishop Thomas Byrne convinced the order of religious sisters founded by St. Katherine Drexel to open Immaculate Mother Academy in Nashville to serve African-American children. When Bishop Byrne built the Cathedral of the Incarnation, he opened a school on the site.

But the bishop, who had an impressive record of establishing all sorts of Catholic institutions in Tennessee, failed in one effort: the establishment of a Catholic high school for boys in Nashville.

That was left to his successor, Bishop Alphonse J. Smith, who opened the Nashville School for Boys at the Cathedral in 1925. Three years later he moved the school to Elliston Place and renamed it Father Ryan High School. More than 80 years later, Father Ryan, with more than 950 students, is the largest school in the diocese.

Bishop William Adrian, who followed Bishop Smith, also oversaw tremendous growth in the diocese, particularly in the post-World War II boom years of the 1950s. Among the parishes and schools established during that decade were St. Edward, Holy Rosary, St. Joseph and St. Henry in Nashville and St. Paul the Apostle in Tullahoma.

“The 1950s are really remarkable,” said Father Stephen Klasek, pastor of St. Paul and the director of pastoral planning for the diocese. Holy Rosary, where he used to be pastor, opened its school in 1954 “and doubled in size every year for five years,” he said.

That growth was driven by the Baby Boom as well as more Catholics moving into the area from out of state for jobs, Father Klasek said. “It was a new community,” he said.

‘Center of our lives’

Dr. Therese Williams, superintendent of schools for the diocese, saw a similar experience growing up in St. Edward Parish. Her parents were among the first parishioners, and her mother was a patrol mother and her father coached the school football team.

“It was a brand new neighborhood,” said Williams, who grew up across the street from the school. “As people moved in, the Catholic families got to know each other very quickly.”

The church and school soon became “the center of our life,” she said. “Almost everything we did involved the church or the school.”

The Mercy Sisters staffed the school, Williams said. “They really taught us to be a part of the community we lived in, and they taught us to serve others.”

Today’s students might not recognize the school then. “The classes were very big,” Williams said. “We had probably 45 students in a classroom. We would have to move the desks to line up to go to lunch. And we didn’t know any different,” she said.

Alice Valiquette and Sister Judith Coode, R.S.M., tell similar stories of their days growing up the Cathedral parish and attending the Cathedral High School, also staffed by the Mercy sisters.

“Cathedral School was a great school,” said Valiquette, a former teacher and principal at Christ the King School and now director of curriculum for the diocesan schools office. “When I think of it, I’m just filled with gratitude. There was a real community there.”

“The parish sort of revolved around the school because all the children went to the school,” said Sister Judith, who entered the Sisters of Mercy after graduating from Cathedral High School. “It was like we were a family. We all knew one another. The sisters knew us all. They cared about us. They didn’t only teach us, they encouraged us.”

The sisters “were very dedicated in making sure they were passing on the religious faith to the students,” Valiquette said. “That is a real inspiration to me even today.”

That sense of community that surrounded the schools wasn’t prevalent only in Nashville. In the small town of Loretto, Sacred Heart School has been a gathering point for the parish and community since they were established by German Catholic homesteaders in 1872, said Catherine Bradley, who grew up in the parish and has worked at the school since 1969, the last 17 years as principal.

“In the parish community, the school was essential,” she said. “Everybody worked together and everybody supported it.”

Like today, Sacred Heart had more than one grade in each class, Bradley said. “The room was full of desks,” she said. “We didn’t have any kind of teaching aids” common in classrooms today, she added.

Most of the students lived close to the school and many went home for lunch every day, Bradley said. “Today, I shudder to think of all the papers that we would need signed for the safety of so many leaving school and returning in the middle of the day.”

Birth dearth

But as the 1950s and 1960s moved into the 1970s, enrollment at schools across the country, Catholic and public alike, began to fade, said Father Klasek.

In the 1970s “what happened nationally is the Baby Boomers didn’t get married or have children,” Father Klasek said, so there was a birth dearth. “Schools of all types were closing.”

While enrollment was falling, costs were increasing, Father Klasek said. For generations, the Catholic Church relied on an inexpensive and deep labor pool of religious sisters and priests to staff their schools. But as religious orders began to lose members in the years after the Second Vatican Council, schools were forced to replace them with lay teachers who received much higher salaries, he added.

“When I look back on it, that probably should not have been the case when it was happening,” Valiquette said of the lower salaries and limited benefits the religious received for teaching in Catholic schools. “The sisters should have been compensated more than they were.”

Father James Niedergeses, who later became Bishop of Nashville, teaches a class at Father Ryan High School, his alma mater. Most of the faculty members at Father Ryan, which was named for Father Abram Ryan, right, were diocesan priests through the 1950s. Over the years, nearly 75 Father Ryan graduates have become priests or have entered religious life.

In some parishes, the young families with school aged children were moving out of the neighborhoods, he said, pointing to Holy Name Church in East Nashville. The parish “was thriving place with lots of kids,” until families started moving into Madison and Hendersonville, Father Klasek said.

There were other problems facing schools, Father Klasek said. “The expectations of the schools changed significantly,” he said, and many of the buildings were no longer adequate.

“If you don’t have any kids and don’t have any money, you can’t really do that kind of capital investment,” he said.

“You went from totally free to pretty expensive and then you didn’t have enough kids,” Father Klasek said. “You really couldn’t successfully operate them.”

Schools at Immaculate Conception in Clarksville, St. John Vianney in Gallatin, St. Rose of Lima in Murfreesboro and Holy Name all eventually closed. 

Resurgence in enrollment

But in the 1990s, there was a resurgence in the population of Catholic school-aged children and a spike in the number of Catholics moving to Middle Tennessee. The demand for Catholic schools returned.

“All the Catholic schools were booming in the 1990s,” Father Klasek said, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, five schools opened in the diocese and many schools were expanded and renovated.

The five new schools were St. Rose in Murfreesboro, Immaculate Conception in Clarksville, Pope John Paul II High School in Hendersonville, St. John Vianney in Gallatin and St. Matthew in Franklin.

When Valiquette took over as principal of Christ the King in 1989, the enrollment had dropped to the point it threatened to force closure of the school, she said. By the time she retired in 2003, the school was at near capacity and has remained that way since.

Bishop James Niedergeses brought in consultants to help Catholic schools market themselves, Valiquette said. “The idea of marketing Catholic schools absolutely was new,” she said, but it was a valuable tool.

It also took some hard work. “I contacted every realtor in Nashville to tell them about the best school in Nashville, which was Christ the King,” she said.

Many of the families who were enrolling their children in Catholic schools were returning to their roots, Valiquette said. “I was struck and really touched by the fact that so many parents … said they went to Catholic school and ‘you know I left the Church for awhile but I want my children to have the Catholic education that I had.’”

In good times and bad, the mission of Catholic schools has remained the same: to pass the faith to the next generation.

“I feel deeply committed,” Valiquette said, “to prepare our young people to be involved in the church of the future.”