Up! Up! Up!
Up! Up! Up! As you can see from the front cover of this edition of FAITH magazine, enrollment at Catholic schools across the Diocese of Lansing has grown for the third straight year in a row. In total, we’ve witnessed a 10 percent increase in student numbers since 2020, with our 36 schools now educating more than 8,400 children. Praise God!
Up! Up! Up! As you can see from the front cover of this edition of FAITH magazine, enrollment at Catholic schools across the Diocese of Lansing has grown for the third straight year in a row. In total, we’ve witnessed a 10 percent increase in student numbers since 2020, with our 36 schools now educating more than 8,400 children. Praise God!
In my many years working in education, such sustained growth in the Catholic school sector is unprecedented.
But why is it happening?
I firmly believe that more and more families like what they see in our Catholic schools. In fact, I think they love our aspiration to form young people in knowledge, wisdom and virtue so that they become happy and holy adults who can fulfill their God-given potential in this life and attain heaven in the next.
Put simply: Parents want the best for their children. They want them to become both saints and scholars. That’s exactly what our schools exist to achieve. So, let’s look at both those goals.
Saints
From the moment your child walks into a Catholic school, they are taking one step closer to God. The God who loved them into existence. The God who became man for them. The God who now calls them daily to grow in holiness and happiness in relationship with him. To paraphrase the late Pope Benedict XVI: we are not made for comfort or mediocrity. We are made for greatness. We are made to be saints.
Scholars
Our schools also want to help children be the best students possible. Learning within our Catholic schools is rooted in the traditional understanding that faith, reason, and science coexist in harmony, one with the other. Each emanates from God. Each reveals something of God. Each leads us toward God. That’s the reason why a Catholic school pursues both rigor and excellence in all academic disciplines.
A Catholic school in the Diocese of Lansing is also a safe and happy environment where a child is allowed to be, well, a child. Our parents know they have our guarantee that those contemporary ideologies that seek to confuse and corrupt children won’t get beyond the classroom door.
It’s also a haven for parents. We recognize and respect that parents are the primary educators of their children, and we will never usurp mothers and fathers in that unique responsibility.
Thank you to the growing number of families who are choosing a Catholic education. Thank you to the administrators and teachers who work so tirelessly for the love of God and the children in their care. And, most of all, thank you to almighty God for the many blessings he bestows each day upon our schools since the founding of the Diocese of Lansing in 1937.
With the help of divine grace, we look forward to raising new generations of saints and scholars in the decades to come.
