“Truth is such a rare thing
it is delightful to tell it.”
–Emily Dickinson
–Emily Dickinson
On the evening of January the 19th, 2010, Father John Balluff stood before the School Board and the many concerned parents in attendance to explain his reasons for submitting a secretive counterproposal to the Catholic Schools Review team that had, after well over a year of intensive study, recommended an exciting new focus and a bright future for St. Mary’s Parish School.
Many who were in attendance naturally wished to know why Father Balluff had not shared this alternate vision with the school board, despite many opportunities and invitations to do so.
He offered the following justifications for his failure to disclose his intention to close the school:
- His plan did not really crystallize until the last possible moment.
- He did not wish to panic parents unnecessarily in the event that the diocese did not find his last-minute entry favorable.
- He could not understand why the review team had recommended that St. Mary’s remain open, and indeed found the expert team’s recommendation somehow “mystifying.”
From "Q and A with Father John."
Here at St. Mary’s Matters, we quite agree that Father Balluff has to date suffered from an uncanny inability to grasp the special spirit that flows through St. Mary’s School, making it a central presence in the community since 1922. Teachers, parents, students, and visitors all routinely sense the St. Mary’s difference almost immediately upon setting foot on our campus, and joyfully make it their spiritual and educational home. A goodly collection of priests have noted and celebrated our extraordinary spirit, as well, and have gladly helped it thrive. Even the best team of expert consultants that the Diocese of Joliet could gather couldn’t disagree: St. Mary’s serves a crucial role in our evolving community, and must continue to do so.
At St. Mary’s, we take our faith seriously. The School Board collaborated intensely to ensure that the meeting held in the wake of the counterproposal’s discovery would proceed with all due calm and civility. Both in prayerful groups and as fair-minded individuals, we sought to find a way to grasp this significant and painful difference of opinion and approach.
Even when we unceremoniously learned of our school’s closure via brusque media reports, our first instinct was to protect our families and our students.
We wanted to understand, to preserve our integrity, and to celebrate everything that is and alway has been best about our school, even through our pain and disappointment.
Today, though, we have come into possession of a rather extraordinary bit of communication, which suggests that we have yet to discover the entire truth behind St. Mary’s premature, unnecessary, and unexpected demise. We invite you to consider this bit of data for yourself:
Click image for larger view.
The truth is a rare thing.
We still seek it.
We remain hopeful that we will find reason to delight in telling it.
St. Mary's Matters 
Just when I thought we had read the worst… bold faced lying, yet again. I have no words.
At this rate, I don’t think parking is going to remain a problem.
Kathy, Parking or attendance or the $ is the envelopes… kill the school and the parish, our family and our faith (not in God but the church) all in 1 blow.. Great job!
Bet he gets a promotion for this!
Not to mention all that overcrowding in church and having to have extra masses to serve all the parishioners.
I am sorry to see that persons like this our sending more parishioners to other religions….. ooppss forgot is the lack of parking space.
sorry, meant… are sending
Subterfuge breaks my heart. Undermining is just another form of lying. Both are immoral.
Interesting. When I spoke with Fr. John after 10AM mass last Sunday, one of the questions I asked was, “How will you get the money needed to add on to the church with all the money from parishoners (with school students) leaving?” He rather mystically responded that “Funding for the new church will not be a problem. I do not need to rely on those funds for the addition on the church”. (Now, in retrospect, I wish I had pushed him more on that subject, rather than telling him he and the Bishop would be the ones responsible for Catholics leaving home, rather than returning to it.) Perhaps, he was thinking the elderly anglo parishoners had recently won the Powerball and were going to be donating the funds, but I tend to think not. What his response tells me is that he knew far more about what was going on than he was telling us.
Also, fyi, I asked him when he was going to stop hiding and come out and speak to parishoners and St.Mary’s parents alike. I told him repeatedly that he owed this to us and that his behavior looks cowardly. And that ultimately, if this is not repaired, he will lose parishoners and Catholics because of this lack of communication. He told me that, “Sometimes you just need to give people time to let things cool down”. I can see clearly who has been taking the time. I wonder where he is THIS week???
We’ve had such a rough ride this last week or so, haven’t we? I’ve cycled through every possible emotion, and then cycled through them all again, just for good measure.
Right at this very moment, I am in cooling down mode, and it’s kind of a relief. Seems like what has been most frustrating throughout is the general breakdown of communication. People just can’t grasp how we went from a positive and even kind of exciting (to my mind, certainly) recommendation, to an announcement of closure, and in such a short time-frame. It’s a lot take in, and it’s difficult to understand it all intellectually, much less emotionally. I think it’s possible that we’ll never understand all of it–never really find the whole truth of it. Perhaps truth is more subjective a thing than we sometimes realize.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about that little snippet from Emily Dickinson–about truth being rare and a delight to tell. I think that may be so of only some sorts of truth–that we love and are loved, for instance, or that we see beauty where it isn’t often recognized, or that we are flawed in all sorts of complicated ways, and we know it. A truth that introduces clarity, hope, light, warmth, and understanding is a delight, and an enduring one. That kind of truth is always good to tell. Even some harsh truths can delight, if they ultimately lead us away from darkness.
I begin to think, though, that the facts of our case are so very complicated that the truth of the thing is inherently elusive. Whose truth? To the CFO, the financial difficulties are the overwhelming truth. To us, love of St. Mary’s and all of its beauty is the only truth that matters. I imagine the Bishop sees yet other sorts of truths, including the overall state and future of Catholic Schooling in the diocese, and the particular complexities of St. Mary’s that make it really quite a perfect fit for the kind of work coming out of Notre Dame right now. (My version of truth? We could start working together to realize that vision right now, so why wait?) Our teachers, our students, our board members–we all have our unique takes on the thing. I don’t know exactly what the world looks like from Father John’s perspective (though I can guess that it isn’t great fun to be cornered for heated discussions, or to be blogged about endlessly!). That is incredibly frustrating, at times, but maybe it is also simply inevitable, and maybe there’s a path towards peace in that realization, as well.
A good friend once told me always to remember that facts and truths aren’t at all the same thing. Thus, we can all look at the same set of facts about St. Mary’s–the finances, the demographics, etc.–and find quite contradictory truths (e.g. “this outstanding and historical school must survive and thrive,” vs. “this financially draining and rapidly aging school must close now and be born as something new, later”) in them.
Right now, I’m in a little pocket of peace that lets me see that as simply how the world goes.
Better communication right from the outset would surely have eased things, but we can’t rewrite history, and establishing really good communication is extraordinarily difficult when the stakes are so high, and the subject matter so personal.
I don’t know, Johanna. I suppose I’m just tired. Is there any truth–any communication, any collection of words–that could satisfy? Seems like our situation is uniquely complicated.
I can say that our St. Mary’s family been extraordinary this week. I’ve encountered a full range of emotions and perspectives there, and found something worth learning from everyone. Plus, I’ve been met with empathy no matter where I am in my cycle of emotions, including places that aren’t very pretty. There’s great comfort in that.
There is no place on earth quite like St. Mary’s. That’s one truth that’s always a delight to tell.
Your right Kathy, this has been a rough week and with a rainy week, to me it has seem like a whole month!!
Also you are right about truth and facts, but let us take one at a time, shall we?
Fact: St. Mary’s is in an old building and lacks infrastructure that other elementary schools have; gym, lunchroom with kitchen facilities, computer lab, library to fulfill student body, etc.
Truth: The lack of certain facilities does not mean lack in a good education, the way I see it, it just means that all that is learned is better retained for the coming years. One small example, in our Freshmen year at St. Francis (Fall of 74) in our first day of Typing class we found ourselves in a classroom divided into two halves, one half had new IBM electric Typewriters and the other half had the old black typewriters that the keys looked like they were huge steps and our fingers got stock in between keys. Our teacher told the class that the last to laugh, were the ones who laughed best. You see we were tested on speed and spelling, of course you can imagine who typed the fastest with less mistakes. That was until the middle of the year when one day she told us to switch sides…. Guess who typed the fastest and broke all records of speed of that year. Yes you guessed, we did since we gained experience in technique and due to our difficulty paid more attention to what we were doing. The same when we walked into the gym for the first time, we were awed but that did not put us in the lower end of skills for lacking a gym in our previous school, we were right up there with the rest or even better. Cheerleader’s tryouts, we were teaching our tricks to the rest. So where is the value applied to, in the material things or in the education and spirit?
Fact: There seems to be a strong point in the financial aspects for which apparently the decision was mostly based on. Cost of running a school where there is a 50-50 parish families/non parish families meaning that not all families attend Mass therefore not attending means not giving. The student body dropped in the last years causing revenues to be lower thus fixed costs are higher per capita meaning less for the Church more for the School.
Truth: Financial difficulties are a common thing today in any school, with the economic problem the USA has encountered in these last few years has taken a toll on everyone and in every spectrum of the economic scenario. In addition to that you have had a particular episode in getting approval for a new Church expansion where the funds ended up elsewhere leaving a debt in the Parish’s name. Tuition is always a problem in the private schools, all over the World, St. Mary’s is no exception. I do not know what the tuition is to attend St. Mary’s but I am sure it must be about the same as when I attended in comparison. Times are tough on everyone and sure there are families who struggle to pay their child’s education, but they know it is well worth it. The families who are not perishers do pay a higher tuition than those who are, therefore this should not be an impediment, maybe the difference should be analyzed to make sure that the difference in these tuitions is the right ratio. But then again from what I read these families are the ones who donate the most. The amount of funds gathered from the Mass has dropped and there are factors to be taken into consideration for this and further study this decline. Is it just an economical effect? Is there a deeper reasoning to this lack of interest at the moment of how much to give? Has there been a breaking point somewhere down the line where the decline has been due to a situation affecting the perishers’ decision to give less? From what I briefly read from the letter to the perishers’ from the previous priest, there seemed to be a certain kind of tension and definitely a huge difference of opinion with father John as he stated in his letter. Did he know something that he could not say? Did he know the real intention of the diocese in transferring father John to St. Mary’s? Of course the truth to these questions we might never know or might not want to know. But the truth to financial difficulties can be sought out since it is a very simple mathematical equation. One just needs to know where exactly to look.
Fact: Church too small and lacking parking space. This has been the case back when our family attended mass. A bigger Church is needed and desired for and by the whole St. Mary’s Community. It is not pleasant to get to mass and have to either sit it out till the next mass or if it is raining not even go knowing that you will not have space. Nor is it pleasant going to Church with your car and since there was no more parking space in the parking lot one parks the car on the street only to come out of Mass and find a parking ticket on the windshield or find out that your car has been impounded.
Truth: As far as I can remember the seating capacity of St. Mary’s has been a problem. Remember attending Midnight mass and hearing it from the stairs out in the cold. But the warmth of the mass and the Christmas Spirit in which we all were graced with kept us warm. The priests back then did about the same amount of mass every weekend as they do now, plus in Latin I don’t see they do it any more, means one or two less mass on weekends. The reason one goes to mass is not to get a seat but to gather in Jesus name and give thanks and honor Him. If I want to have a seat then I just rather sit at home. I believe that maybe the perishers who do not attend mass are just giving out any excuse to not attend and give their weekly tithe. The parking space, you should be honored to have a parking space for how ever small it might be. Here in Argentina there is not one Catholic Church with a parking space. No need in explaining how frustrating it can be to find a parking space in the Metropolitan area where there are fewer parking spaces every year, more and more prohibited areas to park. We just leave a little bit earlier to find one or just simply give in when we are running late and accept the fact that we will enter the Church with mass already in the process. This is no excuse for not attending, Jesus gave his sermons in much worse scenarios and had hundreds of perishers, and we are talking of times where there were temples, we are not talking about the stone ages. But then again when one was to avoid the truth, the excuses are much easier.
Fact: Hispanic or Mexican or Poor Community is 40% of his perishers (let’s give him the benefit of the doubt) and the Church needs to address them accordingly as his mission is to assist the poor. “The Hispanic families and their pastor need to find a seat at mass before they consider the possibility of a desk at the school”. I truly believe this not to be a fact, but since father John said as such, then we have to consider it as such. Their families are large, various families live in one same house, lacking space and living conditions are scarce.
Truth: West Chicago has always had a large Hispanic, Mexican Community. We had Mexican neighbors across the street from us. Did they attend mass on Sundays, not that I can remember. Where they a large family, I don’t believe more than the normal for that era, we were a total of 6 (we are 4 brothers and sisters). Did they share their home with other families, no they rented out the basement to illegal Mexicans who worked in the factories and farms of the areas. They worked to send money back home, not to spend it in West Chicago and barely left enough for them to survive. This has always been the case then and now, where ever they go they send money back home first and then what ever is left over they spend locally. Not all families want the same things, not all Mexicans are the same, not all Argentineans are the same just like not all Americans are the same. My parents wanted a better education than the public schools of the area could give us under their eyes. We have an Argentinean family who are friends that lived three houses from ours, they lived in front of Pioneer School, and they could have sent their children to St. Mary’s but that was not their priority, they had other priorities for their families, nor did they manage their income accordingly. But that is them, they decided that and that is fine, we don’t need to be all the same and have the same priorities for our families. Such is the case that at St. Mary’s there is a diversity of nations showing that when a family has a good education as a priority they will sacrifice themselves if need to. Does one have to have a seat at mass before considering a desk at the School? I honestly believe this is just a grab at something to say. There is no truth in this statement. Could the Hispanic families think that a Catholic Education in St. Mary’s is for the elite as is in Mexico, and other Latin American Countries? Definitely. Everyday I am more convinced that the less information one has about something the more they are drawn away from it. But then if the pastor needs to have a seat before considering a desk for his Hispanic perishers, then maybe he is the one that needs to set his priorities straight. Also if he is interested in them attending mass first before he informs them of the School, then there is were the lack of interest lies, not in the actual Hispanic families.
We definitely cannot rewrite history, but we can continue writing it. History continues since everyday we write a new page in its history book. Every step we take to make a difference we are writing history.
So let us not fall in the hands of those who want our failure, but in the hands of those who care by keeping the Faith in our willingness to succeed.
Patty
I just finished the most wonderful conversation with Theresa Hawley of Educare, who could no doubt offer all of us lessons in how to promote positive communication. She very graciously understood why I elected to publish her email (which I had by then received numerous copies of), and equally graciously declined my invitation to remove it if she wished. She wishes everyone to know that she appreciates the complexity of our situation, prays for the best for everyone involved, and is glad to see us working toward peace, understanding, and a brighter future. Educare certainly has an effective champion and spokesperson in Theresa.