It takes a great many individuals, organizations, institutions and businesses to create a community.
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When one of these components is forced to leave, the community is diminished.
So it is with the closing of St. Edmund School. Its closing diminishes all of Oak Park.
Since 1917, St. Edmund has educated thousands of children in that gloriously gothic building at 200 S. Oak Park Ave. For years now, the school has been battling financial shortfalls, dwindling enrollment and a host of cultural and societal changes that make it difficult for parochial schools to thrive.
Finally, and unfortunately, the parish could struggle no longer. St. Edmund School will shut its doors at the end of this school year.
I did not attend St. Edmund School. And though raised Catholic, I didn’t attend parochial school. I was a public school kid.
Parochial school students looked on us as hoodlums in training. And we public school kids looked on Catholic school kids as tie-wearing bookworms.
We also assumed that someday, we’d all be working for the students who had attended parochial school. It seemed to us they were smarter than we were.
But that couldn’t be. It wasn’t that parochial school students were smarter, and it wasn’t because strict sisters scared them smart. Catholic school students were educated in a system that respected, valued and focused on learning and the value of education.
These qualities were not always found in public schools. Not that I didn’t get a good education. But my friends who attended parochial school always seemed to be just a bit ahead, despite those constricting neckties.
Something good goes out of this world when a Catholic school closes.
And something good is going out of Oak Park when St. Edmund School closes.
Something special.
Down the road, we probably can count on the eventual destruction of that like-no-other medieval stone school building and its replacement by a like-everything-else pile of condos.
Change may be inevitable.
But change isn’t always progress.
Paul Sassone is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.