Q & A with John Staud

I sat down with John Staud to talk about the recently released report from the Notre Dame Task Force on Catholic Education: Making God, Known, Loved, and Served – The Future of Catholic Primary and Secondary Schools in the United States.  

John served as a core committee member of this Task Force and shared significant responsibilities in the creation of this document.  Within this report lies the future direction of ACE.  To read the report, go to: http://president.nd.edu/activities-and-initiatives/catholic-schools/

The ND Task Force was written in response to a letter from the US Catholic Bishops – what did the Bishop’s letter say and why did it prompt a response from ACE?

Since the Second Vatican Council, every decade, the US Bishops release a document affirming Catholic schools.  Probably the most famous was the 1972 document, “To Teach as Jesus Did.”  These documents have had a consistent message, that Catholic schools provide the best way to educate and form people in the faith.   

The key line in this most recent document (“Renewing Our Commitment to Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools in the Third Millennium”) that prompted a response from ACE was the Bishops calling upon the whole community to support Catholic schools, not just teachers, principals and parents, but the whole community.  They specifically ask Catholic higher education what they might do to support Catholic K-12 education. This was the invitation that Fr. John Jenkins responded to by calling together this Task Force.

So how many reports have been distributed so far?  What types of groups were they sent out to?
    
We’ve sent out over 6,000 now. The initial run was about 4,000 and we sent them to every American bishop, every superintendent, every ACEr, every ACE grad, all the parents of ACE grads, stakeholders in the Notre Dame community, other Catholic colleges and universities, presidents of ND alumni clubs around the country, and then benefactors and foundations that have been important to us in the past.  

What struck us was the number of requests since the first mailing.  We have requests for more copies now coming from these dioceses and colleges.  So, for instance, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia requested 400 additional copies.  Many dioceses are using them for diocesan wide in-services.

Can you tell us a little bit about how the Report is organized?

Essentially, we wanted to begin by striking a hopeful note.   I think Catholic schools are kind of like global warming, all you read is gloom and doom.  So we believe that there is a lot of reason for hope especially because of the number of talented people that have gone through ACE.  They are maybe the best sign.   

We really tried to tell the story of Catholic schools over the past few decades, but tell it in a new way.  And to really focus on how if you took any other business and you completely had to overhaul the labor pool, you have massive demographic shifts and escalating costs that in business probably wouldn’t even exist.  

So the fact that Catholic schools are still around and there’s still over 2 million American kids in the schools, one can look at that and say, "Oh, it shrunk to half it’s size in the last 40 years," or you can say, "My gosh there’s still a lot of vitality and we’ve transformed from a labor pool that was almost entirely religious to one that’s almost entirely lay." We really tried to see this as a hopeful moment and to tell the story that way.  

In the Report, there are twelve recommendations that Notre Dame will pursue.  These are the things that Notre Dame will do to try and address the issues.   There are five general recommendations to Church leaders and other leaders outlining what the Church might do more broadly.

The word “sacrifice” is mentioned a few times early in this report as something the Catholic school system was built on, how are we being called to this “sacrifice” and what’s the “cost”?    

If you think back to the April retreat when people are first oriented to ACE,  we talk about an “invitation to discipleship,” but considering as well, “what are the costs of discipleship.”  And everyone who’s done ACE knows that there really are sacrifices and costs, personally and financially.  

I think that the whole Church needs to look back and be inspired by the time when our ancestors built this Church in the United States.  When you look at so many of the schools and parishes in this country, they were built mainly by immigrants for whom the Church was so central to their life.

Now, we’re in a situation where American Catholics have entered the mainstream and become more affluent. American Catholics annually give about 1% of their income to church.  I think we really need to look at ourselves and challenge ourselves because if we could just double the 1% per year to 2%, imagine the difference.  

Have you been hearing any response to this report?  What’s the response been like and who’s it coming from?  

It’s been very favorable, especially from the Bishops in the USCCB.   Fr. Scully and I went out in early January for meeting with the Bishops.  We were given 45 minutes on the agenda and Fr. Scully presented and did a great job of conveying our enthusiasm for these projects.  There was a great sense of gratitude that Notre Dame is humbly trying to do this and also a real appreciation for the sense of hope.  

How is it that in just over a decade, ACE has gone from placing its first group of 40 teachers, to taking a position on a national scale through this Task Force Report?

Well, the short and most accurate answer is the Holy Spirit.  But I think that, ultimately, it’s probably the right time.  Many Catholics are waking up and realizing that this is such a treasure, they are a “national treasure” as Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings put it, and we can’t let them disappear.  And so I think there was a sort of providential timing.  

What are the next steps with this Task Force?

To do what we said we’d do.  We’ve set ourselves a pretty bold and ambitious agenda.  And I think one of the biggest challenges we have is to keep the core of what we’ve been doing in ACE growing stronger, even as we tackle new things as well.  So we are focusing right now on a lot of the new initiatives and trying to generate the financial resources to help us do that and also assemble the right human resources.  So the next six months will really be about how we implement these recommendations, raise the money, and find the people. 

Interview by Tony DeSapio