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Apple, books, schools supplies / / Element5 Digital on Unsplash
Washington D.C., Jul 12, 2023 / 08:21 am (CNA).
A new national survey shows students in the United States are still struggling to make up learning loss experienced over the course of the COVID-19 crisis.
The report this week from NWEA examined test scores from nearly 7 million elementary and middle school students in about 20,000 public schools around the U.S.
The researchers found that “achievement gains in 2022–23 lagged pre-pandemic trends” in nearly all surveyed students, with numbers “falling short of pre-pandemic averages by 1–19% in reading and by 6–15% in math.”
The NWEA noted that the decline was sharper than what was observed in 2021-2022. Reading in upper-level grades suffered the most, the researchers said. Overall, the average student at the end of the school year required over four months of additional schooling in both math and reading to come up to grade level, the report said.
The poor numbers come as data indicate that many Catholic students enjoyed markedly less learning loss over the course of the COVID crisis than their public-schooled peers.
A survey late last year from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed fourth- and eighth-grade public school students experiencing a more pronounced drop in test scores compared with their Catholic school counterparts.
Lincoln Snyder, the president and CEO of the National Catholic Education Association, told CNA last fall that the willingness of Catholic schools to quickly reopen for in-person education helped drive those encouraging numbers.
Catholic schools “were the first to transition to distance learning, and then after that brief time were the first to come back to in-person instruction everywhere they could, as soon as they could,” Snyder said at the time.
“Our students benefited from our communities doing everything they could offer,” he said.
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Bishop Thomas Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois, speaks with EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo on “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo” on March 2, 2023. / EWTN screenshot
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Mar 3, 2023 / 15:40 pm (CNA).
In the wake of new restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass, two American bishops spoke with EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo Thursday about how their dioceses have responded.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois, and Archbishop Joseph Naumann of the Diocese of Kansas City, Kansas, both defended the Traditional Latin Mass communities within their dioceses during their interviews on “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo” March 2.
Pope Francis issued a motu proprio titled Traditionis custodes on July 16, 2021, which put heavy restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass. The order directed bishops to designate locations for the Traditional Latin Mass but stated none of the locations should be within parish churches. Because a lot of dioceses already had thriving Latin Mass communities within parishes, some bishops offered dispensations, which allowed those Masses to continue as before.
Cardinal Arthur Roche, the prefect for the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, issued a rescript on Feb. 21, which is a formal clarification from the Vatican. It stated that such dispensations are reserved to the Holy See and ordered bishops who had issued those dispensations to “inform the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, which will evaluate the individual cases.”
Paprocki said during the interview that he questions “the wisdom” of the rescript and suggested that it “seems to contradict what Pope Francis himself said when he issued the motu proprio,” which Paprocki interpreted to say that bishops had discretion to decide how to implement the restrictions “on a case by case basis” within their dioceses.
In addition, Paprocki questioned the legal basis for not allowing the dispensations already granted by bishops to remain in effect.
“I would argue Canon 9 says that laws in the Church are not retroactive, so any dispensations that have already been given remain in effect,” Paprocki said. “But I would also recognize the validity of this new rescript and the restriction that is being placed upon diocesan bishops.”
Paprocki added that these judgments are best made by the bishop based on the principle of subsidiarity, which maintains that “decisions should be made at a local level” unless there’s an overriding reason.
“I’ve yet to see what that reason would be” in the case of these dispensations, Paprocki said.
Instead, he said, “you’ve got a prefect in Rome basically making decisions about what’s happening in the local diocese and the local parishes.”
When the motu proprio was originally issued, the Diocese of Springfield had two parish churches that offered the Latin Mass. Paprocki noted that one of the parishes has a priest from the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP), which was given a dispensation from the Vatican. The bishop designated the other church as a non-parish church.
“My predecessor merged two parishes together, but he kept the two churches open,” Paprocki told Arroyo. “And so when the Holy Father, in his motu proprio Traditionis custodes, said that you can’t have the Traditional Latin Mass at a parochial church, I simply designated one of those churches as non-parochial. And so therefore, we’re in compliance with that decree.”
Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City speaks to EWTN Pro-Life Weekly on July 21, 2022. Screenshot from EWTN Pro-Life Weekly
Archbishop Naumann noted that the Diocese of Kansas City has not been greatly affected by the Vatican’s orders because there are two Traditional Latin Mass communities operated by FSSP, which has a dispensation from the Vatican.
“I would say the people in those communities, I find them to be very sincere,” Naumann said. “And they love the Lord, they love the Church, they love the Eucharist. I think what the pope was trying initially to correct is, there was an attitude, I think, amongst some, that there was a superiority [of] the Tridentine Mass, to the Novus Ordo, and I think that was an error. But I don’t think that’s how most people in those communities see things. And I think they’re confused by the limitations that are being put upon even bishops in making pastoral judgments.”
You can watch Arroyo’s full interview with Bishop Paprocki and Archbishop Naumann here.
Pope Francis speaking to pilgrims on All Saints Day, Nov. 1, 2022 / Vatican Media
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