Flowers: Hallahan’s closing would be terrible loss
When you come from a place like Philadelphia, you know that many of us greet strangers with the question: “What parish are you from?” We are not referring to the term folks in Louisiana use to designate neighborhoods and counties, as in “Y’all, aahm frum Jeffusun Parrish.”
Philadelphians are speaking in the universal language of the parochial school veteran, the child who spent years in plaid and saddle shoes or blazers and clip-on ties. Like a few other east coast cities in the rust belt, including my native Baltimore (that gave us the Catechism), Boston and New York, Philadelphia and its suburbs were known for our attachment to the one holy Catholic and apostolic (or as my irreverent uncle used to say, “alcoholic”) church. The relationship was not just a “see you on Sunday” thing.
Growing up Catholic was part of the identity, the sinew, the blood and DNA of generations. I am a child of that generation. I dream in plaid.
Now, although there are many young people who embrace the fundamentals of the faith with renewed fervor, something is dying: the intangible, evanescent and yet reliable certainty that our schools and institutions will stand forever. When we ask someone what parish they come from, it is more likely than not that now, they will mention a place that has shuttered its doors or has been combined with another parish. Their love and devotion is evident in the way their eyes mist over and they say, “I’m from St. Tommy, Forever More.”
They get excited when they meet someone who was christened, as I was, under the glorious angel frescoes of a tiny Italian parish called Our Lady of Angels in West Philadelphia. They will cry, as I did, when speaking to members of the alumni association at North Catholic, thinking of the ghosts that will forever inhabit those halls. And they will remember the time that they jumped into the fountain at Logan Circle on the last day of school, the Catholic Princesses of Hallahan, glorious, glistening (and soaking wet) under the summer sun.
And now, they tell us Hallahan will close its doors for the last time at the end of this academic year.
It hurts to put Hallahan on the memory list. As a graduate of Merion Mercy, a school that is still going strong more than forty years after I graduated (and almost 50 years after I first walked through the doors and shook the hand of the legendary Sister Christella,) I understand the pure power of uniforms and crucifixes. While Merion was not a parochial school, we drew girls from all over the city and the region, and I am still close to many of my classmates. These schools are the incubators of lifelong friendships, of intertwined families that reach down the generations, of wedding joys and funereal sorrow. As my friend Nancy said to me when I mourned the closure of Hallahan: “I am a 1962 graduate. I got a great education at that school. I met many girls from all over the city that became friends. I think I was in about six weddings and I have about seven God children because of those friends. I also mourn the loss of the school.”
Six weddings. Seven God children. That is the stuff of which life is made, stronger than steel. And these are the schools that give these friendships to us. The fact that they are disappearing is a sorrow beyond the simple regret of expected farewells and the anticipation of new horizons. The loss of these schoolsNorth, Tommy More, Dougherty, McDevitt, and even the dilution of same sex advantages with the mergers of Goretti and Neumann, Prendie and Bonner and my mother’s alma mater of West Catholic Girls with Boys-is an irreparable tear in the fabric of the city and the region.
I know that it all comes down, in the end, to money. I know that the blessed religious who mentored and gave selflessly of themselves without worrying about paychecks and career paths are fading away, each passing generation whittled down until their number is as insubstantial as the whisps of incense at Mass. I know that the large, great, Irish and Italian and German and Polish and Slovak families that poured their children into these schools-sibling after sibling-are no longer filling the world with that volume of childish laughter.
All of this, I know.
But it pains me to see the loss of my heritage, baked into the brick of the walls, carved into the stone of the chapels, solidified in the cement of the playgrounds, and in the music of the bells and the songs that-while once corny and cheesy and “oh God who writes this stuff!,” now make me cry. Your School, and Our School, Long May Fond Memories Dwell ...
Catholic schools, especially the parochial ones, are the glue that kept generations of families functioning. They provided the guidance for kids who, like my dad, didn’t have parents who cared about him. They fed kids who might not have had a hot meal waiting at home (although the wonderful tradition of “walking home for lunch” was something my mother remembered with great love). They provided a bulwark against a society that has never fully accepted the strange rites and tribalism of Catholics, at least not the working class breed I claim as my own. And they taught us that life was not easy, and that we weren’t guaranteed anything, but that there is such a thing as hope, and grace, and saints that match our desires (lose something, St. Anthony, can’t see-St. Lucy, despairing and desperate-St. Jude, angry St. Michael).
When the news broke that Hallahan was on the chopping block, the alumni of their brother school Roman, a place that had been threatened with closure, fought back and survived, posted this message:
“As the nation’s first archdiocesan Catholic High School, Roman Catholic High School has been indelibly linked for over 100 years to John W. Hallahan Catholic High School – the nation’s first archdiocesan Catholic High School for Girls. Indeed, Hallahan has long been known as Roman’s “sister” school, and the number of great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, and wives of Roman alumni who are Hallahan graduates is literally in the thousands.
Roman Catholic High School’s Alumni Association remembers the support we received over 34 years ago from the Hallahan community when Roman was threatened with closure in 1986. Consequently, Roman’s Alumni Association stands with Hallahan’s Alumni Association by fully supporting any viable efforts to keep Hallahan from closing.”
Decreasing enrollment, lack of money, a society that no longer recognizes the unique beauty of a parochial education are all real problems. In some cases, they are insurmountable. But in others, like Roman whose alumni fought tooth and nail to save their school, secular miracles happen.
Hallahan deserves to be the beneficiary of that sort of miracle. If we can manage to save the boys, let’s try and do the same for their sisters. Our sisters.