The occasion was the Nov. 20 release of a document, “Educating Together in Catholic Schools: A Shared Mission Between Consecrated Persons and the Lay Faithful,” prepared by the Congregation for Catholic Education.

The congregation said lay teachers now make up the overwhelming majority — at least 80 per cent, according to one official — of the 3.5 million teachers working in the church’s 250,000 schools around the world.

That represents a dramatic shift, reflecting the declining numbers of men and women religious. In the United States, the percentage of lay teachers went from 14 per cent in 1950 to more than 95 per cent this year. Similar figures were cited for places like Australia, France, Spain and Hong Kong.

In the past, the Vatican has exhorted religious orders not to abandon their traditional teaching charism. Closing schools seemed like a costly surrender. But the ever-dwindling number of consecrated religious has made it difficult to keep these schools open even in a Catholic country like Italy, where about 50 Catholic schools close each year.

The new Vatican document seemed to accept that the lay role in Catholic schools is here to stay. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, said Msgr. Angelo Zani, undersecretary of the education congregation.

“Far from being an impoverishment, this transformation constitutes a great potential for the Catholic school,” Zani said. A mature and committed laity has emerged, he said, and they consider church-run schools an important part of their religious community.

Lay salaries, of course, have made Catholic schools more expensive to operate.

Polish Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, head of the education congregation, took aim at countries — including the United States and Italy — where the church has had little success in winning direct state aid to private schools.

“The United States is a disaster, because the state does not recognize full democracy as far as schools are concerned,” Grocholewski said.

Overall, Catholic schools are enjoying success, and Zani gave several examples:

• In Lebanon, Catholic schools are attended by 210,000 students who belong to 18 different faiths or churches. Nearly one-fourth of the students are non-Christian, most of them Muslim.
  
  
• In the Holy Land, where schools have a mixed student body of 55 per cent Christians, 45 per cent Muslims and some Jews, the curriculum is designed to promote interreligious tolerance.
  
  
• In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the archdiocese of Sarajevo founded three new schools — attended by Serbs, Croats and Muslims — during the height of the civil conflict. Today the archdiocesan schools number 15 and serve more than 10,000 students.
  
  
• In Eastern Europe, the fall of communism has unblocked the situation for Catholic schools, many of which now receive state aid.

Globally, church-run schools today serve almost 42 million students, Grocholewski said. According to official church statistics, enrolment at Catholic schools has gone up about 60 per cent over the last 30 years.

The new document did not unveil any major new programs or policies, but it made a few key points. It called for co-operation between consecrated people and laity in three areas: mission, formation and openness toward others. It welcomed the contributions of lay teachers, but it emphasized that all educators in Catholic schools are “required to be witnesses of Jesus Christ” and to demonstrate that Christian life has meaning for everyone.

Beyond the required professional teaching skills, both religious and lay educators in Catholic schools need to have theological and spiritual formation, it said. In places where religious orders have ceded their teaching role, they may still be able to share elements of spiritual formation with lay teachers, it said.

Lay teachers, for their part, can help make better connections between the school and the rapidly changing world, the document said. In view of increasing globalization and the interdependence of nations and cultures, Catholic schools should promote a vision of the human being that goes beyond individualism, it said.

A major goal of today’s Catholic schools, it said, should be to teach students “to respect the identity, culture, history, religion and especially the suffering and needs of others.”