Despite being a new school in Columbia, Mo., the principal of Fr. Tolton Regional Catholic High School, Kristie Wolfe, said she has already dealt firsthand with a None student. Wolfe said the student enrolled at the school even though he identified as agnostic. When the student asked if his agnosticism was okay, Wolfe replied: “Well, whatever, you can be agnostic. I’m telling you this school is not, so you have to be okay with the fact that we are a Catholic school. So as long as you’re not trying to pull other kids away from the faith and disrupt what we’re doing, I don’t have a problem with that.”



Nuns may not be as prevalent in Catholic schools as they once were, but Nones are making an impact on how these parochial schools are approaching faith-based education. Tolton, along with St. Joseph Catholic School and Helias High School, both in Jefferson City, all have administrators who have thought about the increase in the religiously unaffiliated.



“Parochial schools, in a way, have caused some of the problem,” said Spencer Allen, the principal of St. Joseph. “Parents have begun to replace their role as religious leaders with religious school, but religion needs to be part of the home as well as the school.”



A former atheist himself, Allen attributes the increase in the unaffiliated to people searching for answers in their lives. He said when it comes to students, if parents aren’t educated enough in their own religion to answer the questions of their kids, the children will be more likely to misunderstand what they have been taught.



St. Joseph is one of several feeder schools to Helias where Principal Jean Dietrich acknowledges the natural questioning that occurs when kids reach high school and college age. She said that the school cannot force faith but can try to guide students to faith through a Catholic education.

“We lay the ground work so the kids have a foundation of faith to come back to,” Dietrich said. “Faith is a gift, and though it’s always there, it’s not always embraced.”



Dietrich said that although she hopes students never fall away from the faith, she knows that many students will not maintain their religious affiliation as they did when they were at the Catholic high school. Because of this, she said she makes it very clear to students who move away from Catholicism that the church will always be there for them to come back.



Wolfe, who has been the principal of Tolton since the school opened in August 2011, said she sees the school’s education as developing the faith of students, though that is not always easy.



“Sometimes we are sowing seeds into rocky and thorny ground,” Wolfe says.



This rocky ground refers to students who may not be able to reconcile their personal beliefs and the teachings of the Catholic Church. If a student has a disagreement with a Catholic teaching that he or she cannot reconcile, Wolfe said it is fine to hold that view privately, but if it becomes subversive to the teachings of the school, it will be handled outside of the classroom.



“I would want the teachers to tell those students to seek out what the church really says on the issue and see if you still disagree,” Wolfe said. “Because very rarely is someone going to really disagree with what the church says.”



Wolfe said that a personal conflict between the teachings of the church and an individual’s belief is not so much a faith issue but a truth issue. This could bring some issues to discussion because 25 percent of Tolton’s students are non-Catholic.



“We don’t say, ‘This is the truth for you Catholics in the classroom, but if you’re not, then it’s not true for you,’” Wolfe said. “Truth is truth, with a capital ‘T.’”

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All three school administrators agreed that the way to combat the disaffiliation of Catholic students is to teach the fundamentals of the beliefs of the church. Without a solid understanding of the basics, it is hard for students to develop the knowledge of why the church believes in what it does.