I live in the neighborhood that lays claim to St. Catherine of Siena Catholic school, the one that’s been in the news lately because its future is in jeopardy. Even if you’re not part of the St. Catherine parish community — and I’m not — the school is a neighborhood anchor, sharing the same block of Federal Boulevard as the church with its blond brick walls and red tile roof and rotating banners announcing fish fries and pancake breakfasts.
I’ve attended Mass there a few times. Each time, Father Sebastian gave a sermon that demanded my attention for not only its content but his delivery. The pastor is not from around here.
“Where are you from?” Mark Randall, the former Nugget, asked Father Sebastian at the school’s annual fundraiser last weekend.
“Quebec,” the priest replied.
“Oh,” Randall said, ” ’cause I thought it might have been Pueblo.”
Given the bright mood in the room, you would not have thought the archdiocese was cutting funding to the school. Yes, a few tears were shed. But people were resolute.
“Closing is not an option.”
“These doors will stay open.”
Take heart, the gathering was urged, from the person living in France who sent $5,000 to save the school, from Dante Dino, a kindergartner who announced “he was contributing every cent he had, all $14, to make sure the doors don’t close.”
As Father Sebastian prepared to say grace, he said: “I would like this whole event to be a prayer.” The challenges ahead are real, he said. The mind might suggest they are too great, that little can be done. But sometimes, he told them, the heart has its own laws.
As I said, I’ve been watching this unfold from the neighborhood. It strikes me that at some point, a school — like a church or a library — becomes more than its intended purpose. These institutions are thresholds first, passageways to destinations not bound by gravity or geography. At their best, they prepare us for a life of the mind, of the spirit and soul. At their most mundane, they are bureaucracies, taking us from point A to point B, movement with little meaning.
In either case, somewhere along the line, a school also becomes a repository of community identity. This may be the inevitable result of longevity begetting nostalgia. Still, St. Catherine of Siena school, born in the church basement in 1921, has bound generation to generation. It is a means by which values and tradition are passed. The children of St. Catherine today walk below a photo of the children of St. Catherine in 1959. Posed on a wide expanse of a lawn, they are dressed in Holy Communion white, palms pressed together as if in prayer.
So the response to the archdiocese’s decision has been hurt and anger. The sense of abandonment was compounded by the timing: late in the school year, leaving little time for fundraising. It didn’t help that some parishioners heard the news the day they received the archbishop’s annual fundraising appeal.
“St. Catherine gets in your heart,” former PTA president Anna Vann told me. “It’s part of north Denver. To see that go away would really break my heart.” Vann graduated from the school’s eighth-grade class in 1974. Her son graduated from its eighth-grade class last year.
I mention my thoughts to Richard Thompson, the archdiocese’s school superintendent, and he tells me of an experience with a rural school closing. “It sucks the spirit out of a community,” he says.
But the numbers are what they are. Enrollment, at 147 students, has been on a long, slow decline; capital needs are enormous. The school is poised for a demographic bonanza, given the neighborhood’s gentrification, but the archdiocese can’t wait, Thomp son says: “Every school needs to be working on becoming self-sustaining. That’s the reality of this economy.”
The archdiocese will continue to support the neediest schools, but, he says, “right now, there are too many of them, and we need to be strategic. We have to consolidate.”
To which the St. Catherine community’s response is: Consolidate elsewhere. St. Catherine alums have gone on to become high school valedictorians, graduates of prestigious universities.
School fundraising has kicked into high gear. More than $60,000 toward an immediate goal of $250,000 has been raised. Most of that was donated during Saturday night’s fundraiser, though on Wednesday morning, a first-grader named Monica brought in a baggie filled with $3 in change.
At Saturday’s fundraiser, Mark Randall, who has become the Nuggets’ community liaison, was the keynote speaker. He surprised the room by auctioning off an opportunity for 15 people to go to a team practice, tour the locker room, get some goodies. Who’ll give me $500? he asked, and the bids poured in. One thousand, one thousand one hundred, two hundred, five hundred, eight hundred.
Two thousand dollars.
Sold! To Anna Vann, class of 1974.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-1416 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
