Many Catholics in the Diocese of Columbus are familiar with The Catholic Foundation’s role in receiving, investing, distributing and managing donations from people desiring to provide long-term assistance to diocesan parishes, schools and institutions.
But because much of its work is done without fanfare, few might realize the extent in which the foundation is involved in every aspect of Catholic life in central and southern Ohio.
Loren Brown, the foundation’s president and chief executive officer, says it’s easy even for the organization’s directors to underestimate the scope of its activities. So once a year, to showcase its efforts, the board conducts a quarterly meeting away from its downtown Columbus office.
This year, the board met at Newark Catholic High School and heard representatives of the school, Newark Blessed Sacrament Church and School and Newark St. Francis de Sales Church and School tell how those institutions have benefited from the generosity of foundation donors.
“Donors give through the foundation because we are authentically Catholic and because they see growth in the faith, like here in Newark, through its many grants,” Brown said. “My hope is that these positive results will inspire more of our faithful to help us grow these initiatives at our parishes and schools.”
Diocesan school Superintendent Dr. Adam Dufault began the program by saying the diocese has the 28th largest Catholic diocesan school system in the United States, with more than 17,000 students enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade in 52 schools in 15 counties, with several schools having waiting lists. Enrollment in the schools rose by 2 percent in 2020-21, 4 percent in 2021-22 and 2 percent in 2022-23 despite the effects of the COVID pandemic.
“Our story is not one of doom and gloom but of positive growth,” he said. “It comes from being sacramentally based, having a plan and having the support of our pastors, parents, principals, teachers and The Catholic Foundation.”
Diocesan schools are continuing to implement a strategic plan as part of the diocese’s Real Presence Real Future initiative, using the five marks of an authentically Catholic school as defined by Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, of Vancouver, Canada, as a framework. Dufault said the plan was formed with the help of nearly 1,000 people working through a lengthy planning process and that the foundation’s encouragement, cooperation and financial support have done much to make it a success.
Brown said the foundation has awarded the Newark parishes and schools about 40 grants totaling about $500,000 in the past five years for projects of all types.
Newark Catholic principal Tom Pickering said one of the largest and most notable of those projects is his school’s 500-seat auditorium, which was completed in May and was the site for the meeting. Having an auditorium has enabled the school to move many events, including graduation, from the gymnasium. The additional space has been used for production of high school plays, elementary school musicals, a spring cabaret and art show, many all-school faith opportunities and a number of events involving the community beyond the school’s walls.
The auditorium includes a television studio allowing students to produce the school’s morning announcements. That program has been an unexpected success, starting with seven students and now involving 54.
The diocesan strategic plan’s approach of integrating all aspects of the curriculum and showing how they are related has led to activities such as “The Mathematics of Art,” an exhibit in which Newark Catholic students learned the role of symmetry, proportion and calculation in art and then created their own artwork that was displayed in the school.
Pickering said Intel Corp.’s decision to build several computer chip fabrication plants in northwest Licking County, bringing in thousands of new residents, will have an enormous impact on all aspects of life and is beginning to change the curriculum at Newark Catholic. He said what had previously been mainly a college preparatory curriculum is changing to one in which there will be tracks for college prep and for specific positions at Intel and related companies that are expected to locate near the Intel complex.
That change also will lead to creation of a maker’s space in the school for STREAM (science, technology, religion, education, art and mathematics) programs and to upgrades to the school’s athletic and wellness facilities, as well as additions to the student services and mental health services areas.
Pickering said the school’s enrollment has held steady at between 220 and 225 students in recent years, but that number is likely to increase to 300 with the addition of Intel employees’ families. He also noted that over the past few years, there has been a marked increase in the percentage of ninth-graders coming to the school from institutions other than Newark Catholic’s parochial “feeder schools” in Newark, Mount Vernon and Reynoldsburg.
That percentage has risen from 1.8 percent in 2017-2018 to 19.2 percent in the current school year. Pickering said that increase was the result both of Catholic schools staying open when other schools were closed because of COVID and of a growing desire for students to have a morally and spiritually based Catholic education in a time of social upheaval.
Blessed Sacrament’s presentation to the foundation board was given by Father Tony Lonzo, parish pastor; Josh Caton, school principal; and teacher Meaghan Chapman. “To say The Catholic Foundation has been instrumental in helping the school would be an understatement,” Father Lonzo said. “The school and parish staffs have become much more integrated as a team. It’s impossible to say how great the foundation’s impact has been.”
Caton said introduction of the SPICE (Special People in Catholic Education) program and improvements in security are two notable areas in which the foundation has helped Blessed Sacrament.
SPICE, which receives consistent grant funding from the foundation, concentrates on helping special-needs students and has expanded throughout the diocese and elsewhere since it was started at Columbus St. Catharine School 20 years ago. Thanks to SPICE, “more than at any time in its history, Blessed Sacrament is equipped to meet the diverse learning needs of students,” Caton said.
He said foundation grants have enabled the school to provide a full-time intervention specialist and a sensory room and to increase the number of its students with state-required Individual Education Plans (IEPs) from two to 10. The three Newark diocesan schools all are providers of Ohio’s Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarships and alternate from year to year in requesting special needs-related grants from the foundation.
Caton said he first became involved with the foundation after local law enforcement officers conducted a safety assessment of his school and found that its emergency communications system was severely lacking.
“Responsive grants from the foundation helped us fund an entirely new communications system that can broadcast emergency messages throughout the school and church from any phone station,” he said. “They also provided new fencing for our playground and courtyard, key fob access at all doors and additional security cameras, all of which have made our campus more safe and secure than ever before.”
In addition, the school now has a preschool that started with four students in August 2020 and now has 24 and is serving as an effective evangelization tool for students and parents alike.
Chapman said the foundation also has provided funds for the parish’s Alpha for Marriage course, designed to strengthen individual marriages and to build community. She said 15 couples took part in the course in winter 2021, and 10 of them have enrolled in family-based faith formation programs.
Father Lonzo said the parish also is starting a Hispanic ministry, with its first regularly scheduled Mass in Spanish taking place at 1 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 2. He said all six Licking County parishes are cooperating in the ministry, which will be based at Blessed Sacrament.
Blessed Sacrament and St. Francis de Sales were among several parishes receiving grants from the foundation so pastors, staff members and parishioners could attend the Divine Renovation USA Conference in Dallas this past summer. The event’s main themes were creating a vision, focusing on hospitality and renewing a parish’s mission.
Father Dave Sizemore, pastor of St. Francis de Sales, said nine representatives from his parish went to the conference, which focused on a model of distributive leadership designed to have more people share responsibility for parish activities.
“Although there may be others on staff, many parishes in fact have been run by a priest, a secretary, a maintenance director, the school principal and a housekeeper,” he said. “The Divine Renovation model is designed to spread responsibility among more people. In adopting it for our parish, we used the concept of a senior leadership team (SLT) – a group of nine committed people including myself, from whom flow the decisions for everything that happens in the parish.
“They are supported by about 50 parish staff members, half paid and half offering their services not for money but to benefit the mission of the parish because they don’t need the money. It’s the same with the school. This program is working very well for us because of the cooperation and enthusiasm of the team members.
“It’s taken the weight of the world off my shoulders because I don’t have to make all the decisions. I feel more joyful, excited and motivated, and I don’t dread the administrative part of being a pastor anymore. Administration, after all, is Latin for ‘toward ministry.’”
Father Sizemore said his parish’s experiences with the SLT program will be shared with other parishes considering a similar model.
The parish school also is undergoing significant changes in its curriculum. This is the second of three years in which it is implementing a classical Catholic education model.
Classical education is defined as developing the whole child with a Catholic world view that emphasizes the relationship between God and truth, beauty and goodness in His creation. Students are challenged to think critically and creatively while studying traditional subjects.
“It’s unapologetically Catholic, designed to form children to understand themselves and the world around them as part of something greater and of God’s design,” said school principal Sally Mummey.
She said the classical curriculum started with history and literature in 2021-22, is continuing this year with math and will be followed with other subjects in 2023-24, including the addition of Latin.
Its spiritual dimension includes two Masses a week, Eucharistic Adoration once a month, the Scriptural Rosary, Lectio Divina and other forms of prayer and devotion on a regular basis.
“The classical curriculum is giving students a renewed, more profound love for the Eucharist and the sacraments and more confidence in things such as memorizing and learning about different eras of time and the Church’s impact on history,” she said. “It’s also encouraged students to evangelize within their own families. You can see it at weekend Masses. Where you used to see 10 to 15 school families at each Mass, the number today is more like 50 to 60.”