June 29, 2009 (Catholic education, Catholic schools)

I found this story at the blogtcs:

Most graduation stories talk about how many chairs were filled. This story focused on how many were empty. Apparently every year at a Catholic school in the St. Louis area, students drape six empty chairs in their school’s T-shirt. A single-stemmed rose fills the seat.

The act represents their classmates they never met because they were killed by abortion. The students also pray for their deceased classmates and their parents. It’s a 15-year tradition.

One of the graduates who is continuing at a Catholic high school and placed one of the chairs in front of the altar at graduation, said:

Being raised through a Catholic education, it’s important we brought this up.

No doubt Right-to-Life lobby groups would applaud this practice. Why then does it make me very uncomfortable?

As a principal would you do this at your Catholic school Grade 8 graduation? As a parent of a graduate in a Canadian publicly supported Catholic elementary school would you want to see this practice?

As Catholics, who do not support abortion, yet recognize that in a democracy the only way to end the practice is through political action, are we not backing ourselves into a no-win corner when we use the term “killing” or “murder”? If we teach this in our schools, as obviously the school in St. Louis does, do we not run the risk of inspiring another acting out of “taking the law into our own hands” as happened in the recent Tiller murder? What are the implications in this situation for interreligious dialogue with other religions when they may not legitimately view the foetus as imbued with the same degree of personhood as Catholics?

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