THIS Sunday at 5.30pm we have what is called a “whole school Mass with the parish”. This is a strange idea at best. The school, after all, IS the parish in the faith education of its children through to Year 6. It is not an independent school with a faith orientation. It is made up of parishioners who have children in the parish school. It is not ‘Parents and Parishioners’ but ‘parishioners who are parents’ with school age children.
In this way, the rapid decline in numbers, especially at the end of 2015, would not have occurred if those parents thought of themselves as parishioners. They would have better understood that it was THEIR school that they were leaving and not an independent school. This mindset, it seems to me, results from the alienation of school and parish or from the now tenuous relationship between parenting and parish. And this is by no means unique to Greythorn.