A great teacher and a welcome manifesto

Reluctant as I am to fiddle with the U.S. Constitution, I’m willing to consider an amendment banning any elementary school from opening before Labor Day.

That’s the way things were when I was a boy in Baltimore and could no more imagine being in school before Labor Day than I could imagine rooting for the New York Yankees. Labor Day marked the end of summer vacation: Ocean City, Maryland, emptied a few days earlier; my mother took my brother and me to Stewart’s in downtown Baltimore to get our new school uniforms (the pants of which usually had the knees knocked out by October); at McCrory’s five-and-dime we chose new lunch boxes (Roy Rogers? Superman?); and we waited with bated breath to see which School Sister of Notre Dame would reign supreme over our classroom until June.

In those innocent days, these things seemed as immutable as the law of gravity.

So at the beginning of another school year, however absurdly early its beginning, I’m remembering September 1959 and the first weeks of third grade in the Cathedral School, then lodged at 7 West Mulberry Street, a stone’s throw from America’s most historic Catholic building, the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

I don’t remember my second-grade class being particularly rowdy when we were being prepared for first confession and first Holy Communion by the firm, kind hand of Sister Mary Francis Borgia, SSND. We must have been a disciplinary challenge, however, because when the elderly sister slated to be our third-grade teacher took sick and was replaced by a novice, Sister Barbara, we evidently drove the poor young woman to distraction, as she lasted (if memory serves) only two weeks. Then the hammer came down in the person of an even more fledgling SSND, a postulant named Sister Florence. And I thank God for it.

The former Florence Sweeney (who was later professed as Sister Miriam Jude, SSND) had been a Philadelphia public school teacher for some years before entering the convent, and life among the young ruffians in the City of Brotherly Shove was sound preparation for whipping us into shape. Sister Florence brooked no nonsense, and if we found her a bit scarifying then, her tough love did me a lot of good. I don’t remember her being a screamer, but her tone of voice made it abundantly clear that she was in charge, whether it came to drilling us in the multiplication tables (by recitation ad infinitum et nauseam) or teaching us to say the Lord’s Prayer properly (accent strongly on the first syllable of “trespass,” a habit I retain to this day).

It was Sister Florence who caught me sneaking up the side aisle because I couldn’t read the homework assignments on the blackboard from the back row — and thus spotted the myopia that led to my first pair of glasses. It was Sister Florence who encouraged my fledgling interest in history and purloined a copy of the eighth grade’s test on World War II so that I could pit my knowledge against that of my elders and betters. (I can still recall the sweet smell of the wet ink from those old Ditto machines.) And it was Sister Florence, a former summertime encyclopedia seller, who convinced my parents to buy a 19-volume set of the World Book Encyclopedia, in which I roamed for years with the greatest pleasure and parted with most reluctantly after my parents’ deaths.

Long after she had become Sister Miriam Jude, my wife and I ran into her during an alumnae reunion at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, where, on a summer’s evening, we shared steamed crabs and memories. Sister has long since gone home to the Lord, but she came to mind when I read the recent Front Royal Statement, a reaffirmation of the seven classic principles of Catholic primary and secondary education and a reform manifesto of which I think Sister Miriam Jude would have approved. So would the bishops who, meeting in 1884 at Baltimore’s Old Cathedral, the basilica of which I have such fond memories, mandated a Catholic school in every U.S. parish.

That is not possible today. But the Catholic schools we have must be authentically and unapologetically Catholic, transmitting the faith and the great Western civilizational tradition in the arts and sciences, for the sake of young souls and the renewal of our national culture. You can read the Front Royal Statement here. Get the new school year off to a good start by sharing it with the pastors and principals of every Catholic school with which you’re in contact.