Catholic
Education S.C. Catholics found new high school
By TOM ROBERTS
NCR Staff Greenville, S.C.
Forgive the Catholics in this small city if they feel a bit like
the underdog.
This is territory dominated by Southern Baptists and by Bob Jones
University, a fundamentalist school where the official line, even today, is
that the pope is the anti-Christ.
Catholics here are also a four-hour drive from diocesan
headquarters in Charleston and think they are easy to ignore. So there is still
an air of jubilation among some Catholics over what they managed to pull off
four years ago with little more than determination, daring and a lot of
hands-on help -- the founding of St. Joseph's High School.
"Most of us really believe this is the job God gave us to do,"
said Mary Cotter, a co-chair of the board of directors of the school. "Too many
things worked out."
After four years of operation, the school has an enrollment of 60,
expected to reach 90 next year, and will graduate seven, six of whom started as
freshmen. This year, three students won gold medals in a music competition
involving 38 other schools in the South Carolina Independent Schools
Association. The math team also placed first in a state competition. Brett
Meyers, a forward on the basketball team, won player of the year honors in the
association league.
St. Joseph's appears to benefit from several intersecting
influences, including previous attempts to start a school; regional growth that
has brought in Catholics from other parts of the country; a weak public school
system; and lay people taking up a task that previously would have been done by
the diocese or a religious order.
The success in 1993 followed attempts by at least three other
groups during the past 40 years, according to Cotter and Margaret Ann Moon,
co-chairs of the school's board of trustees. And one of those attempts left a
bitter memory.
According to Cotter and Moon, people organized in the late 1950s
and early 1960s, collected a significant sum of money and purchased land with
the intent of starting a diocesan high school in the region. But in the late
1980s, the land was sold by the diocese and the project was scuttled.
Those who had strongly supported the earlier efforts were
reluctant this time. Nor was the diocese interested. Cotter, Moon and others
met for several years, petitioning the diocese for support, doing exhaustive
research on other Catholic high schools that had opened in recent years and
finally, against all odds, taking the plunge.
Only one priest in the local deanery spoke out in favor of the
idea. Organizers said that after meetings with diocesan officials, word came
down in 1992 that the project was not feasible.
Time was running out. Interested people like Moon had children
ready to start high school. Moon regularly puts her hunches to a divine test.
So she prayed for guidance in early 1993 and told God that if, somehow, they
were able get into a building by fall, they would go ahead.
The prayer was answered by a local Lutheran minister who initially
donated the use of his church's Sunday school facilities for classrooms during
the week. When that offer met with objections from his congregation, he offered
an old house on church property. A heavy turnout of volunteer laborers
refurbished the place, and it was ready to open by fall, 1993.
Everyone knew, however, that the gift house was a temporary fix.
More space would be needed the following year. So the newly incorporated board
began looking for a new location.
Before the year was out, the search zeroed in on a former United
Way building. Just before she signed her name to a $400,000 mortgage, Moon
stopped again to pray, this time asking for some kind of sign that she wasn't
doing something foolish. When she got home, Cotter called and told her that the
school had just received a donation of a St. Joseph statue, "just a little sign
that we're going in the right direction," she said.
The deal was done and now the group is looking to the time when
enrollment will swell over 130 and they'll need a new building, a development
that could occur within a few years, said Paul E. Reinhardt, school
administrator. By then, the story may not depend on sheer guts, faith and
generous donors. Already there is a marked change in the attitude of pastors in
the area, some of whom have begun donating money to the school.
And there is talk about an affiliation with the diocese. "We'd
really like to have good relations with the diocese," said Cotter. Without that
affiliation, St. Joseph's cannot be called a Catholic school, she said. The
closest the diocese will allow is "in the Catholic tradition."
She would like to have the diocese approve the religion
curriculum, for instance, but she would also like to do it in a way that does
not anger donors who are still bitter from previous attempts to start a school.
Some major donors have said if there were any affiliation with the diocese they
would stop giving.
On a recent warm spring day in the Upstate region, it was enough
to bask in the tales of what already had been done and to prepare for an
in-school fund-raiser -- a Lenten Friday night fish fry.
National Catholic Reporter, March 28,
1997
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