In Fall 2020, public schools in cities and wealthy, liberal suburbs all barred their doors and relegated their students to inferior remote schooling, while Catholic schools in those same places mostly opened their doors and showed the world how to educate in a pandemic.
Bishops, pastors, principals, and diocesan superintendents refused to bend to the unscientific consensus of the secular bureaucracy. Would putting children in the classroom increase the chances of COVID outbreaks? Maybe. But that was an open question. What all were pretty sure of was that shutting down communities, isolating children, and sticking them on a computer screen all day would harm the children in a myriad of other ways — not to mention the parents and the communities.
And Catholic schools shined a light that illuminated the way. Catholic schools opened when public school officials, teachers unions, and media elites all proclaimed that it was unsafe. Parents, teachers, and school heads who opened up were reviled by government health authorities, attacked by local politicians, and blasted in the press.
Then, Catholic schools were proven right: Our children were safer than those in remote schooling, and they provided a “control group” of sorts that allowed scholars to see the harm to children of our inhumane experiment with remote schooling.
This is Catholic Schools Week, and so we should celebrate the manner in which Catholic schools — which are not beholden to labor unions, “one size fits all” thinking, or a shallow, secular view that subjugates all other goods to some litigious view of risk — have led the way.
Yet here in D.C. and suburban Maryland, the church is no longer leading on these issues. Specifically, Catholic schools are still forcing children to wear masks, even when the schools and the government admit the masks are ineffective.
In Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, Catholic schools are required to force students and teachers to mask up all day (except for outdoors and when eating). This order comes not from the White House: There are no federal rules about masking in schools. The mask mandate doesn’t come from Annapolis, either: Maryland’s mask rules likewise don’t apply to private schools.
If you’ve followed my writing, you might assume it’s the wretched Montgomery County Council under the feckless and harmful leadership of County Executive Marc Elrich that is forcing little Timiyah at Little Flower to cover her face all day. But no: Montgomery County’s mask mandate applies only to places “accessible to the public.”
The public cannot simply walk into St. Bernadette School or Our Lady of Good Counsel. Doors are locked, ID is checked, and a stranger can’t simply enter. Catholic schools in Montgomery County are not “accessible to the public” in the way a museum or bar is.
So why does little Timiyah have to mask? Because the archbishop says so.
Yes, the Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Washington are under their own mask mandate. This made sense in Fall 2020. This might even have made sense in Fall 2021. Yet, given the avalanche of information about the harms of masking children, the safety of children who get sick, and the limited effectiveness of children masking, the archdiocese ought to repeal its mask mandate this week.
Let Catholic Schools Week 2022 be another occasion when Catholic schools lead the way, this time by letting our students show their faces, overcoming fear, and making rules according to reason and compassion.
