Catholic Educators Call for Formation-First Reform as School Closures Mount

The numbers behind a quiet crisis

Six decades. One hundred schools per year. According to the Front Royal Statement — signed by 45 Catholic bishops, scholars, and educators following a summit at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia — only 6,000 Catholic schools remain in the United States, serving fewer than 1.7 million students.[^1] That figure exists against a Catholic population that has grown substantially over the same period.

If closures continue at this pace, the statement warns, parochial schools will largely disappear within another sixty years, leaving Catholic education to survive primarily through homeschools and small cooperatives. Bishops James Conley, Salvatore Cordileone, Thomas Daly, Earl Fernandes, and Thomas John Paprocki signed the document, joined by Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan Anderson and Society of G.K. Chesterton President Dale Ahlquist.

The statement reads not as an institutional obituary but as a diagnosis — and the diagnosis points toward something deeper than enrollment figures.

Formation is not a supplement to education

Catholic parish schools were founded in the nineteenth century for a specific reason: to protect the faith of Catholic children in a public school environment shaped by Protestant assumptions. The threat was cultural before it was theological. Catholic families understood that the formation of a child's imagination and moral sensibility happens in the hours between lessons as much as in the lessons themselves.

That original insight is worth recovering. The statement notes that Catholic schools remain "indispensable" because no other institution provides so many weekly hours to form a "sacramental imagination" in young people, to present salvation history comprehensively, and to help children grasp the meaning of the Incarnation and Redemption. The claim is not nostalgic. Human beings, particularly young ones, are formed by sustained environments — by repeated exposure to beauty, meaning, and coherent narrative.

The crisis the statement names is correspondingly deep: "soaring rates of disaffiliation among young Catholics, driven by a culture of skepticism and materialism that undermines faith and the Church's moral teachings." Disaffiliation is a symptom. The deeper issue is a formation vacuum, and formation vacuums are filled, always, by something.

The shortage nobody is discussing enough

The Front Royal Statement identifies several compounding factors: declining enrollment, rising costs, families who want Catholic education but cannot afford it, and pastors reluctant to maintain parish schools. One factor carries particular long-term weight: the shortage of well-formed teachers and leaders.

Formation requires formed formers. A teacher who has not inhabited the Catholic intellectual and spiritual tradition cannot transmit it, regardless of what appears on the syllabus. This is a structural observation, not a criticism of individual educators. When formation is treated as optional in teacher preparation rather than as the primary competency, the resulting classrooms reflect that omission.

The document's call to reexamine pedagogy alongside curriculum and culture follows from this. Pedagogy is a relational practice, and relational practices reflect the interior life of the practitioner. Reform focused only on content, without attending to the formation of educators, will reproduce the same fragmentation it aims to address.

What differentiation actually requires

When Catholic schools become culturally indistinguishable from their secular counterparts, they lose the capacity to form the specific kind of identity and belonging that makes them worth choosing. The crisis of enrollment is, at its root, a crisis of differentiation — and differentiation requires the willingness to be genuinely, substantively Catholic.

The Catholic Christian understanding of the person holds that the human being is a unity of body, soul, intellect, and will, created for communion with God and others, and capable of genuine transformation. This framework is not decorative. It is the reason Catholic education, at its best, can offer something a secular school structurally cannot: a coherent account of who the child is, why that matters, and where the story is going.

The Front Royal Statement's call to reexamine curriculum, pedagogy, and culture simultaneously reflects an understanding that formation is systemic rather than modular. The gathering at Christendom College brought together episcopal, academic, and practitioner voices united by a shared conviction: Catholic education is indispensable not despite the cultural moment but because of it.

The work of rebuilding Catholic schools along genuinely formative lines depends on whether the diagnosis the statement offers is taken seriously at the level of culture — and whether the formation of Catholic educators is treated as the foundational investment it actually is.

References

[^1]: EWTN News, "Catholic educators call for reform to buck trend of parish school closures," June 18, 2026.