As a high school student, I took a bus every school day for four years into the center of Newark, New Jersey, passing neighborhoods that bore the scars of the July 1967 riots and the spreading urban decay that followed them. I was headed to a century-old, all-boys Catholic high school, St. Benedict’s Prep, which my parents had determined I would attend no matter how much the inner core of Newark was changing. The school had been founded in the nineteenth century by Benedictine monks to provide an education for the sons of Irish and German Catholic immigrants, who were not always welcomed in the local public schools. Many graduates went on to successful lives. Over time, wealthy alumni started sending their kids to the school. But St. Benedict’s Prep nevertheless maintained its reputation as “the white workingman’s prep school,” educating the sons of successive generations of immigrants through the early and mid-twentieth century.
Then, about a year after I graduated, the monks who ran the school announced that they were shutting it down and closing up their home, Newark Abbey. The shock to the school’s community—students, parents, and alumni—was profound. Some wealthy alumni pledged to do anything necessary to save the institution, but nothing seemed to move the monks. Later we learned of a rift within the Abbey. Some of the monks wanted out of Newark. They left, but a core group stayed and reopened St. Benedict’s within a year with a new mission—principally to serve Newark’s minority children. It seemed like a quixotic task. As Newark deteriorated around them, the monks took on the job of educating teenage boys growing up in a chaotic urban environment. Many students were products of a collapsing public school system that would one day be seized from the city by state officials.
Read Full Article »