Boston, USA - He stepped into the middle of the clergy sex abuse crisis at Pope John Paul II's request, then was forced by the Boston Archdiocese's dire finances to do the wrenching work of closing dozens of parishes. Now, Archbishop Sean O'Malley is confronting another persistent woe - decades of decline in enrollment at Roman Catholic schools.
The "2010 Initiative" is O'Malley's effort to turn around the struggling system. Since 1965, enrollment has decreased by 67 percent, from nearly 153,000 to about 51,000 this year. In just the last four years, the church has been forced to close 21 schools, leaving 153.
The schools face a variety of challenges, including aging buildings, outdated management structures and a population shift that left most Catholic schools - but not most Catholics - clustered around Boston.
Yet, none of those issues, or the public beating the church endured through the molestation scandal, have diminished demand for the values-based education on which the archdiocese can build a rebound, O'Malley said.
"I think parents are very interested in that," he said. "I don't think there's any doubt."
O'Malley has appointed Jack Connors Jr., a prominent businessman, to lead a task force charged with devising a plan by the spring to fix the finances and governance of the school system. "This is probably as big a challenge as I've seen," Connors said.
The church isn't setting a specific enrollment goal or promising a certain number of new schools by 2010, but hopes to "stabilize and begin to build," said Sister Kathleen Carr, the archdiocese's superintendent of schools.
O'Malley points to changing demographics as a major reason for the enrollment decline. Two-thirds of the archdiocese's schools are located within the Route 128 belt around Boston, but just one-third of Catholics live there, following a shift over the decades to the suburbs. The result is suburban Catholic schools with lengthy waiting lists and urban schools competing with each other for a diminishing pool of students.
"We have got to get over that and get people working together," O'Malley said.
Dioceses nationwide are facing similar challenges. Enrollment dipped again this year across the country, continuing a trend that has seen the student population drop from 2.6 million in 2000 to 2.4 million in 2004-05, according to the National Catholic Education Association.
In Boston, some mergers and closures of urban schools are likely, but the solution isn't as simple as following the demand to the suburbs.
"We have a commitment to schools in the inner city, to make sure (students) will have the benefit of an education they can afford," O'Malley said.
For guidance, the archdiocese has hired Meitler Consultants, Inc., a Milwaukee-based firm that specializes in helping churches restructure schools and parishes.
Carr said the archdiocese is trying to publicly share hard data illustrating the archdiocese's plight to prepare people for the pain of school closings. This summer, for the first time, two schools the archdiocese believed would be healthy enough to make it through the year were suddenly forced to close before school started, Carr said.
"Nobody wants to go through that again," she said.
Stabilizing finances poses an additional challenge for schools run by parishes, many of which are struggling themselves, said the Rev. Joseph O'Keefe, dean of Boston College's Lynch School of Education. Overall, fund-raising is down since the clergy sex abuse scandal, O'Keefe said, and costs are up.
Teachers, once mainly priests and nuns who were paid very little, are now almost exclusively from the private sector and have higher salaries, though they are paid less than most public school teachers.
Many school buildings "were very appropriate in the 19th century, when they were built," O'Keefe said, but aren't equipped to meet the needs of a modern classroom.
Tuition now ranges between $2,200 and $3,300, according to the archdiocese, and keeping costs down in the face of all the needed improvements is daunting.
Connors said dozens of the area's prominent and prosperous Catholics have contacted him offering to help. And aside from the Meitler study, funded by an anonymous donor, Connors said the task force will work from two other key reports, offered for free. The McKinsey & Company management consulting firm will research achievement for Catholic primary school students and the PricewaterhouseCoopers accounting firm will analyze each school's finances.
Connors said a renaissance in the schools will be a "team sport," including many Catholics who benefited from a parochial school education.
"They are saying, 'You know what? We've got to fix this,'" he said. "This is our faith and our church."