Many were shocked and saddened in January when Archbishop Charles Chaput and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia announced the closing of 48 of its schools, about a quarter of its total. The Archdiocese has lost more than a third of its students in the last decade, leaving it today with about the same number of students as it had a century ago.
Based on numbers, Catholic schools in America have been in a state of decline over the past half-century. In the early 1960s, more than five million children attended Catholic schools compared to a little over two million today. This decline occurred at a time when the overall Catholic population in the U.S. increased by more than 20 million.
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