After the Storm

Sacred Heart is a small Catholic school in Kingston, Massachusetts, and my alma mater. For much of my childhood, it included a Pre-K-8 school and a high school. The Pre-K-8 school remains; the high school closed in 2020, the campus sat vacant until its sale in 2026, and the weight of February’s snow brought down the gymnasium and Student Activities Center.

I had been working on this essay for some time, and I had begun thinking about sending it to Sister Ella Jane Bruen, one of my teachers at Sacred Heart and someone I still thought of as a friend. I wanted to talk with her about Sacred Heart, about the women who built and sustained it, and about what had been lost when the high school closed. So I sent her a message. I wanted her perspective. She was one of the few people who could have challenged my memories, corrected my assumptions, or simply told me where I was wrong.

As I looked through social media afterward, I realized that I had somehow missed the fact that she had become much less active over the previous several months. I did not know whether she was ill or had simply decided that Facebook was no longer worth her time. That prompted me to look at the Sisters of Divine Providence website, where I began scrolling through the names of the women who had taught at Sacred Heart and the records of those who had died. I knew abstractly that many of them were gone. I had not understood how many, or how recently so many of them had died. Then, not long afterward, I learned through Facebook that Sister Ella Jane had died.

I was shocked by how old she was. I had always thought of Sister Ella Jane as young, passionate, and vital. I would have guessed that she was a decade or two younger than my parents. That is one of the strange injuries of growing older: the adults who seemed permanently established in our childhood continue aging even when our memories of them do not. Sister Ella Jane was an alumna of Sacred Heart and spent her working life there. She loved her students fiercely. She was also formidable. She expected students to rise to the occasion, and she made generations of them feel that they mattered.

Her methods would probably not be accepted in the same way today, and not everything about the old Catholic-school model should be defended. But Sister Ella Jane was an extraordinary woman: demanding, funny, perceptive, and deeply committed to the children in her care. She could frighten a room into paying attention, but she also made generations of students feel that they mattered. Our alma mater’s high school collapsed long before the weight of February 2026’s snow brought down the gymnasium and Student Activities Center. The high school had already closed; the building’s final collapse made the loss physical.

I was never much of an athlete, but I used that gym and activities building in other ways. The Sisters of Divine Providence had devoted an expansive amount of space to a massive art room and made a deep investment in the arts. I learned to work with oils and tempera. I learned to draw by paying attention to light and shadow, rather than simply reproducing the superficial outline of what I saw. They also employed an iconic art teacher, Evelyn Dunbar, who wore orange on St. Patrick’s Day in homage to her Presbyterian upbringing. Nobody batted an eye. Evelyn was mercurial, kind, and delightful, but she was also clear about who she was and where she came from. That was how ecumenical Sacred Heart could be at its best: not by pretending our differences did not exist, but by making room for them.

The gymnasium’s collapse injured no one, but it wounded a few thousand alumni. My house was still snowed in when the news broke, and the storm brought back memories of the South Shore winters of my childhood, when a few days without power could leave rural roads impassable. The details were different now: snowshoes, a generator, a well, and a house full of firewood. But the feeling of being cut off, and of watching the outside world arrive slowly, was familiar.

For generations of alumni, the image was devastating. The building had already been empty for years. Sacred Heart High School closed in 2020 after the institution could no longer sustain the financial burden of operating a high school. The campus sat vacant until its sale in 2026. Sacred Heart still exists through its Pre-K-8 school, including the school my goddaughter attends. But the larger institution that once included a joint middle-high school, a chapel, a gymnasium, a student activity center, an observatory, an art room, and an expansive community life is gone. The snow brought down a building. The financial collapse had already brought down a school. That distinction matters.

Sacred Heart was not simply another private school that closed because enrollment declined. It was part of a particular kind of Catholic educational world that has been disappearing across the country. That world was local, imperfect, and often underfunded. It served ordinary families. It gave children a place to belong. It created relationships that lasted across decades. It also created space for people who did not fit neatly into the categories institutions often prefer. I know, because I was one of those people.

Kingston may have had relatively early experiments with racial toleration, and that history belongs in this story. But I do not want to romanticize it. Sacred Heart was not always a comfortable place for students of color. I was disproportionately privileged within that hierarchy, even though I was also visibly read as gay and experienced my own form of marginalization. The school made room for my difference more readily than it made room for every difference.

What Catholic education was built to do

Catholic education in the United States grew in a country where Catholics were often treated as outsiders. Catholic schools gave immigrant and working-class families institutions of their own, a route into public life, and a place where children could be educated without surrendering their religious identity.

Even as more and more men and women from increasingly diverse Catholic backgrounds entered leadership roles, structural issues eroded many of the institutions that had undergirded it. The educational model that helped Catholics gain access to elite professions was not necessarily the model best suited to preserving small, affordable, locally rooted schools for working-class families and children who did not fit comfortably within elite systems. Those schools required a different kind of leadership and a different definition of success. For generations, vowed women religious provided much of that leadership. The sisters built and operated schools, hospitals, nursing programs, teacher-training institutions, social-service organizations, and career-technical programs. Their institutions often served people who lacked money, status, or other options.

The sisters were not perfect. Some carried racist assumptions. Some caused harm. Some failed to recognize their own limitations. Their kindness did not erase their prejudice, and their religious vocation did not make them morally uncomplicated. But many of them also tried to serve the people who were actually in front of them. All the people. Some acknowledged their mistakes. Some adapted. Some went where the work was, even when the work was difficult, unglamorous, socially unpopular, or economically irrational.

Their leadership could be constrained by pragmatism and economics. It could also be expansive because they were willing to go beyond the boundaries of their own comfort and serve communities that elite institutions overlooked. When the number of women religious declined, many of the institutions they had created lost their most reliable source of low-cost leadership. Additionally, while many graduates of parochial and small order private Catholic schools moved on to elite Catholic and increasingly non-Catholic private schools eager to cultivate the financial and political elite, many other students opted to or defaulted to institutions that prioritized the more immediate values and economic interests of their sponsoring communities, be they the neighborhood and parish in the case of multi-generation parochial schools or social justice and service vocations in nursing, education, or social work. Sadly, those schools that invested in catapulting their alumni to high paying jobs thrived, while those who embraced the Catholic worker ethic struggled as alumni in the helping professions made modest donations commensurate with their financial position.

Buildings aged. Finances deteriorated. Lay governance became necessary. But lay governance did not always produce greater openness. In some places, institutional hiring and leadership structures elevated highly ideological people who treated cultural conformity as a condition of belonging. That created a painful paradox. Families could want a Catholic education without wanting a culture war. They could want their children treated with dignity without wanting to litigate every question of doctrine and identity. They could want a school rooted in faith without wanting an institution organized around fear. The available choices increasingly narrowed.

Leaders working in different parts of the Catholic educational world have shown that this narrowing is not inevitable. Tom Carroll, through his work in Boston and now with the Catholic Talent Project, has focused on building leadership capacity and expanding access. Paul Escala has led Catholic schools in Los Angeles that serve a diverse student population far different from the cohort many of us knew growing up. Greg Richmond, in Chicago, has represented another version of the same basic idea: Catholic education can be rigorous, ambitious, and institutionally serious while still being grounded in the dignity of children and families.

These leaders do not all represent the same model or ideology. That is part of the point. The Catholic educational tradition has always contained multiple strands. It can include professional ambition and solidarity with the poor. It can include institutional rigor and practical mercy. It can include a commitment to academic excellence without reducing children to credentials. What it cannot afford to lose is the conviction that the school exists for the human beings in front of it.

The school that saved me

Before Sacred Heart, I attended a local public school in a growing suburb where I was afraid even to use the bathroom. Older students climbed over stall walls, blocked entrances, trapped younger children, and sometimes tore doors off their hinges. When I toured Sacred Heart in fifth grade, I remember being astonished by the basic physical safety of the place. The bathroom stalls had doors that locked. The partitions extended far enough toward the floor that no one could slide underneath and trap you. That should not have felt miraculous. To me, it did. I was a closeted kid living with a constant background fear that I could not explain. Sacred Heart became a sanctuary. It did not solve every problem, and it was not always as welcoming as I needed it to be. But it gave me room to become a person.

I am an awkward, gay guy who is sometimes an atheist and sometimes an agnostic. I do not always know what I believe about God. But I believe there are deep truths in the Catholic tradition about service, dignity, and responsibility for other people. I still find meaning in experiences as simple as receiving ashes. When it fell to me to make sure my goddaughter completed the preparation she needed for First Communion, I did it. I did not do that because I have resolved every theological question or because I possess impeccable Catholic credentials. I did it because the tradition still matters to me, and because she might apprehend a grace that I could not, at that moment.

I was also fortunate to attend a school that taught me I did not have to present credentials every time I wanted to belong. I still think about Sister Dolores gathering a group of awkward, unconventional students to choose music for our graduation liturgy. I persuaded her to let us sing “We Are Many Parts,” a hymn by Marty Haugen based on Saint Paul’s image of the Church as one body with many members and many gifts. The refrain begins, “We are many parts, we are all one body.” That idea has stayed with me for decades.

Sacred Heart taught me that belonging did not require everyone to be identical. It required people to recognize that they were connected, that they needed one another, and that each person had something to contribute. That is what I mean when I say I remain connected to Catholicism even when my beliefs are uncertain. I am not defending every decision of the Church. I am not pretending that Catholic institutions have always been humane. I am trying to preserve the parts of the tradition that taught me how to live.

The word caritas is often translated as charity. But it means more than occasional generosity. It means love expressed through concrete action. It means meeting people where they are and trying to be a good person in the world as it actually exists. That is the legacy I received from Sacred Heart.

The universal middle

I am also not hiding where I stand within the Catholic tradition. I embrace the Second Vatican Council’s emphasis on ecumenism and interreligious dialogue. That does not require pretending that every faith teaches the same thing, or that convictions are unimportant. It means believing that one can remain serious about one’s own tradition while meeting people of other traditions with curiosity, respect, and kindness.

The sisters who taught me often tried to live out that principle. They were not perfect. Some carried prejudices that caused harm; some failed to recognize the limits of their own understanding. But people like Sister Dolores, and especially Sister Claudia, who was the provincial when I was growing up, spoke broadly and seriously about service, openness, human dignity, and the responsibility to encounter people where they were. Those ideas were not abstract to me. They were part of the institutional culture I experienced at Sacred Heart.

Our high-school motto was Veritas et Caritas: truth and charity. I have come to understand those words not as competing demands, but as a description of the Catholic tradition at its best. Truth without charity becomes cruelty or domination. Charity without truth becomes sentimentality. The challenge is to hold them together.

That is the Catholicism I recognize and want to preserve: not a demand that everyone become interchangeable, but a conviction that difference does not make relationship impossible. Faith should not require contempt for the people who do not share it. If Catholic means universal, then universality has to mean more than the expansion of institutional power. It has to mean the willingness to encounter people where they are and serve them as well as we can.

Catholic education now faces a dangerous false binary. On one side are wealthy, highly selective schools that function as pipelines into elite colleges and professional networks. On the other are increasingly rigid traditionalist enclaves organized around doctrinal conformity and cultural conflict. What has been squeezed out is the universal middle. The universal middle included schools that were imperfect but broadly accessible. Schools that served ordinary families. Schools that did not require every child or parent to fit a predetermined cultural mold. Schools where faith could coexist with uncertainty, difference, awkwardness, and growth.

Sacred Heart was one of those places.

The abuse crisis damaged institutional trust. Demographic and financial changes weakened parish life. Public schools improved. Religious vocations declined. Buildings aged. Operating costs rose. All of those forces mattered. But the loss is not merely demographic or financial. When these schools disappear, communities lose institutions that once translated abstract religious values into daily practice. They lose places where children were known. They lose places where adults could see beyond a child’s initial presentation. They lose places where an awkward, frightened, closeted kid could discover that he had a voice, a role, and a place in the body.

What school choice should preserve

This question will become more urgent as federal and state school-choice policies evolve. If public funds increasingly follow students into religious schools, debates about accountability, discrimination, public oversight, and constitutional boundaries will be unavoidable. Those questions matter. But we also need to ask what kind of institutions public policy is trying to sustain. The goal should not simply be to preserve schools as brands, ideological enclaves, or pipelines for the already privileged. It should be to preserve places where children can be safe, known, challenged, and welcomed into a community larger than themselves.

I do not believe most schools begin each day intending to exclude children. Most educators want to serve students. Most school leaders are trying to keep their institutions alive under difficult conditions. But institutional toxicity can narrow a school’s mission. It can drive away families, teachers, and students. It can cause a school to serve fewer children than it otherwise could. That is not a victory for faith. It is a failure of stewardship.

The question is not whether Catholic schools were perfect. They were not. No human institution ever is, even one that is divinely inspired. The question is whether we are willing to let the most relational, accessible, and broadly welcoming forms of Catholic education disappear while preserving only the elite and the doctrinaire. Sacred Heart’s Student Activities Center collapsed beneath the snow. The high school had already collapsed beneath financial pressure, demographic change, institutional exhaustion, and the loss of the people who once made that kind of school possible. But the meaning of the school has not collapsed.

I am still an awkward, gay guy who is sometimes an atheist and sometimes an agnostic. I am not a perfect Catholic. I am not sure I am even a particularly successful one. But I remain grateful for the people who taught me that Catholicism could mean service, mercy, and belonging. I remain grateful for the school that showed me I could be part of something larger than myself.

We are many parts. We are all one body. I still believe that is worth preserving.

The Work Continues

The same day I learned that Sister Ella Jane had died, my goddaughter got into the car and told me that Oreo Pete had died too.

Oreo Pete was the beloved rabbit who lived in the lobby of Sacred Heart’s elementary and middle school. He had been brought to the school by Sister Lydia Steele, whose own life was inseparable from the institution. Sister Lydia taught at Sacred Heart, worked in special education, served for decades as its financial administrator, became principal, helped raise the money for the Early Childhood Center, and continued showing up for children and families while living with cancer. Her obituary describes her greeting students, parents, and grandparents outdoors in all kinds of weather.

Not long before my goddaughter was due to start at Sacred Heart, I had reason to stop by the school one late-summer day. I ran into some people who had worked there for years, and we spent a few minutes catching up.

When Sister Lydia came by, she was wearing a T-shirt and shorts and working through an inventory problem. I asked, “Sister, remind me. I don’t remember what you actually did at the school when I was a child.”

Without pausing what she was doing, she said, matter-of-factly, “I was the business manager.”

Of course she was. I had experienced her as a familiar figure in the hallway without understanding that she was one of the people keeping the entire school functioning.

That was the point I had missed as a child. Her frugality was not about denying the school what it needed; it was about directing scarce resources toward students rather than adult convenience or institutional vanity. The elementary and middle school remain, and appear to be doing well. Their survival depends on years of mostly invisible work by people who understand that a school is sustained not only by curriculum or buildings, but by showing up for children.

Sister Lydia died last year, but the school did not lose its institutional memory when she was gone. A successor was ready, and the current principal has carried that work forward by being present every day at drop-off and dismissal, talking with parents, greeting children, and taking responsibility for ordinary details. A few days ago, my goddaughter decided to jump out of the car, saying that other cars were already disgorging kids. The principal tapped on my window and calmly told me to make sure she waited until I could see adults outside. During pickup that afternoon, when I followed up to say that I would speak with my goddaughter about it as soon as she got in the car, the principal simply said that the rule existed because safety mattered, and that the adults responsible for the children had to own it. That small exchange captured something important about the school’s future. Stewardship is not always dramatic; sometimes it means showing up, paying attention, and accepting responsibility for the children in front of you.

And then there was Oreo Pete. His death was a small loss beside the death of a beloved teacher, but it was not meaningless. The children were sad because he had been part of the daily life of the school. He represented the kind of ordinary care that made Sacred Heart feel like a community rather than merely a place where children were sent for classes. Sacred Heart has lost buildings, programs, sisters, teachers, students, and friends. Some losses are historic; some are almost absurdly small. Children still grieve the bunny in the lobby. The school still has to balance its books, attract families, and find a way forward in a changing educational and policy environment.

But the children are still there. The school is still there. The work is still being done. Whether the next generation of Catholic schools can preserve that sense of welcome, stewardship, and practical mercy remains an open question. New funding and school-choice policies may create opportunities, but policy cannot manufacture the people who make an institution worth belonging to. That requires the kind of care Sister Lydia represented, and the kind of fierce personal investment that Sister Ella Jane brought to generations of students.

The high school collapsed long before the snow brought down the gym and Student Activities Center. But Sacred Heart is not yet only a memory. It remains alive in the school that continues, in the people who carry its work forward, and in the children who are still finding their way through its halls.

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