On June 16, seven Roman Catholic schools in Washington, D.C., were transformed into seven public charter schools by a unanimous vote of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. It’s a conversion story – but in reverse.

The archdiocese is creating faith-based schools without the faith.

Establishing a charter requires the schools to shed its religious identity because “religious charter school” is according to politicians a First Amendment oxymoron. Although free from some regulations that apply to traditional public schools, charters are still public schools which means they must be nonsectarian — neither promoting nor denigrating religion.

Quick question: Since when does godlessness mean neutrality?

So why do people of faith leap to schools of no faith? In the case of the Washington Catholic schools, it’s about the bottom line. Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl told The Washington Post, the archdiocese simply didn’t have the resources to keep all those schools open. So they applied for money and gave up just one itty bitty thing to get it -God.

Take the Catholic out of Catholic schools and what’s left? According to the archbishop, “They will have the same teachers, the same kids, the same environment. There will still be a level of value formation.”

But where do the values come from in a godless school? It seems to me that it leaves a spiritual vacuum which will be filled by our ever spiraling culture.

Signing off with this quote from a book that won’t be in the library of these schools: “No man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one, and love the other: or he will sustain the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” Matthew 6:24