The Palo Alto Weekly runs a little feature, appropriately called Streetwise, in which they pose a question of current interest to people on the street. The issue in today's paper was: "What was particularly memorable about your high school graduation?"
Among the five people interviewed was Caitlin McCarthy, a classmate of my daughter at Woodside Priory School through middle school and high school, whose mission statement says it is "an independent, Catholic, preparatory school in the Benedictine tradition. [The school was founded by Hungarian Benedictines who fled to the west after the anti-Soviet rising of 1956, but few if any monks remain on the faculty.] Our mission is to assist students of promise in becoming lifelong learners who will productively serve a world in need of their gifts."
Sounds nice, right? Well, get a load of what Ms. McCarthy told the Weekly's reporter:
The survivor from the plane crash in the Andes was going to speak at our graduation, but instead we got a monk who basically talked about how abortion was bad. I was pissed that we were supposed to have this cool guy and got a crappy one.
Good job, Priory! In seven years, you really imbued that young woman with a profound understanding of what matters, didn't you? After all, focusing on something that has killed an average of a million American children a year is so boring compared with a rollicking good story of escape from an airline crash. I mean, after all, what would St. Benedict choose?
In 1867, Matthew Arnold wrote "Dover Beach", a haunting poem evoking the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith. As a boomer who finished Catholic elementary school in 1964 and then watched my Church falter, I've found the roar all too audible. So here I wait, listening for the whispers of that Sea's invincible return.
