Educational excellence

Richard A. Sokerka

As Catholic Schools Week begins Sunday in the Paterson Diocese and around the nation, it’s an opportunity to reflect on the excellent education our schools offer to students.

Our Catholic schools have succeeded where others are failing because they produce students with a solid moral and spiritual foundation based on our Catholic faith and Christian values. With that foundation as its strength, Catholic schools emphasize shaping character as well as the mind because their teachers see their jobs as a ministry of the Church.

Our Catholic schools are distinctive because they generate a community climate that is permeated by the Gospel message. The schools relate all of human cultures to the good news of salvation so that the light of faith will illuminate everything that students will gradually come to learn about the world, about life and about the value of every single human person.

The values-rooted education which our Catholic schools offer has helped many of us through the years. Every one of us who has been graduated from a Catholic school can attest to the difference Catholic schools have made in our lives.

Our Catholic schools accomplish their very important mission with fewer funds and resources than their public school counterparts. They do more with less by virtue of their accountable structure to the parents who choose them and the Catholic community at large that supports them.

Our Catholic schools deserve our unwavering support. Today’s Catholic schools continue the tradition of graduating students who will be moral in the face of demeaned values; who will be messengers of the Gospel; who will speak out with compassion and seek justice for all people, and who will be faithful stewards of the planet.

Every child deserves the opportunity for this type of values-based education. It is up to every Catholic to see to it that it continues to be available.