They consider me a valuable source of information. Ugh.
That’s a nice way of calling me a dinosaur.
The “Blessed Sacrament School –Old York Road in Baltimore, MD
21218” group on Facebook has 133 members.
I’d like to think it should be more, but then this is an elementary
school that closed its doors in the 1970’s due to declining enrollment. When I browsed the group’s page the other
day, it saddened me to see that the school building, rectory and convent are
all up for sale. I gazed at the
photographs. What they called the
parking lot had been our playground, but now it was as cracked and broken down
as some of its earliest graduates. Clicking
through to the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s Real Estate page (which I didn’t know
existed), I saw no less than seven Baltimore City Catholic schools and three
Baltimore County Catholic schools for sale.
Aside from its clergy’s well-publicized faults, it was hard
to top a Catholic education from the 1950’s through the 1980’s. The nuns and priests were my second family. Their watchful eyes saw and noted
everything. Missteps had consequences
and transgressions were swiftly reported to my parents who followed up when I
arrived home. If my mathematics
calculations or my grammar wasn’t correct, they made sure that I worked until
the concepts had been mastered.
In that flourishing era of Catholic schooling, there was no
such thing as tuition. Our parents were
just supposed to toss a dollar or two into the collection basket at Sunday Mass. Our religious educators didn’t receive
salaries, only small stipends to cover their bare necessities. My mother and other parents volunteered to
ferry the nuns to medical and dental appointments on a rotating basis. Mom volunteered me to struggle through my
modest piano repertoire to entertain the sisters on occasional Sunday afternoons. It was a shock when I graduated to Catholic
high school, where the tuition was a then-staggering $200 a year.
My modest urban alma mater is now approximately $12,000 per year
plus add-on fees.
Blessed Sacrament Parish recently celebrated its 100th
anniversary. In the beginning the
surrounding community was solidly blue collar.
Before it succumbed to the infection of drugs, crime and poverty, hard-working
families raised their children in the rowhouse-filled streets, attended church
and entrusted their children to the School Sisters of Notre Dame who lived in
the greystone convent attached to the school building.
It was the luck of the draw whether you got the fresh-faced
nun, straight from the novitiate, sweet and kind, or the prune-skinned relic,
counting the days until retirement from classroom duties. We did have a few lay teachers, but they were
the exception and exclusively female. The pupil-teacher ratio was large. It was not unusual to have 30+ kids in a
class. Yet the room was as silent as a
tomb. The nuns wielded a long, wooden
pointer whose use wasn’t restricted to the blackboard. After-school detention meant humiliation,
additional homework and manual labor around the school grounds. It just wasn’t worth it.
Conversely, the agony of self-control could be
legendary. Those unfortunate enough to
be selected for the church choir were led by Sister Mary Teresa. This poor woman’s sanity was borderline, due
to teaching the combined 6th/7th grades with a total of
49 pupils daily. We practiced in the
choir loft of the church, accompanied by the organist, Maizie. An object of very unchristian juvenile cruelty,
Maizie had been born with a cleft palate which had been poorly repaired. Back in the 50’s, the unsophisticated term
was “harelip”, based on the shape of a hare’s lip. This defect distorted her speech into nasal
garbling. “Nit nur buks uf muh urgun!”
she would yell. Translation: “Get your books off my organ!” We would raise our hymn books to cover our
red, contorted faces as we fought to stifle our laughter and keep our pants dry.
As I write, the television networks are covering the
Pope’s retirement….more convulsive change.
Yes, reflecting on and complaining of change is characteristic of an
aging personality, but I’m not convinced that’s the complete explanation. Change is accelerating on all fronts and I
don’t think I’m alone in struggling to stay abreast. The challenge is figuring out what changes
are worth keeping.
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