Bishop James Wall was recently installed as Bishop for the Diocese of Gallup. This is the good news. We have very high hopes for the Bishop and hear wonderful things about him.
Now for the bad news. He has a lot of work to do. Far be it from me to give any real advice to a Bishop. My job is to sit in the cheap seats and throw tomatoes. However, in this instance I will violate my own rule and give some advice to the Bishop.
Bishop Walls, you might just want to take a look at the state of Catholic education in your diocese. In a special edition of the diocesan newspaper Voice of the Southwest dedicated to your installment, the Catholic educators in your diocese took out a full page ad. Now I don’t have a lot of letters after my name and no formal background in education, but this just doesn’t look right to me.
May 7, 2009 at 11:37 am
It does look funny, but my guess is that they intend those to be lower-case n’s. The usage is too consistent.
May 7, 2009 at 11:45 am
"It's obvious isn't it."
–>
"It's obvious, isn't it?"
—–
Do schools still have chalkboards or blackboards? I thought such had been replaced by whiteboards and dry-erase markers.
May 7, 2009 at 1:20 pm
College attendance is the only relevant comparison? This is the goal of a Catholic education? Very sad.
May 7, 2009 at 1:25 pm
It appears to me to have been a poor choice of a computer font, not a dyslexic reversal of the “n”s. The “N” in New Mexico is correct as it would be the only “n” that you would need to hold down the “shift” key to type.
Other letters do the same. When the “I” is supposed to be capitalized, like at the beginning of a sentence, it is consistently correct, but when used later in the sentence it appears as a lower case “i”. Granted the rest of the letters are caps, but they seem to be fairly consistent.
The creators of the fonts used in advertising, especially those representing a child’s hand-writing were most likely educated in public schools.
May 7, 2009 at 1:29 pm
OK, OK. It’s not just the font. Catholic education should be so much more than reading and writing. Getting your “n”s right is minor compared to eternal salvation.
Gawl dang idjits!
May 7, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Do you find the bold “your child…your choice” a bit creepy?
May 7, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Yes, the reversed Ns are from the font, but how dopey is that? You are trying to make a point about superior education and you purposely misspell stuff? And the errors in punctuation are likely not intentional.
But, as other commenters have said, is the real point of a Catholic education college entrance. Certainly this is something to promote, but the main thing? I hope not.
Bottom line, whatever ad agency made this mess, the “Catholic Peoples Foundation” (Sounds vaguely like a communist front group, no?) approved it.
Bishop Walls should make sure that Catholic Education in Gallup has at its center, Jesus. And then spelling.
May 7, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Font aside, that first “sentence” is awful anyway. We yanked our kids out of Catholic school (not in Gallop, elsewhere) and put them into public schools because the educational opportunities were much more abundant in the public sector.
May 7, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Wait! I found it! They forgot to reverse the “N” in New Mexico.
May 7, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Impressive catch on how our educational institutions get caught up with worldly success rather than educating the whole person – including their spiritual lives. Kudos on the observation, not on the schools.
May 7, 2009 at 5:03 pm
A little bit of background: Gallup’s territory is primarily made up of Native American reservations. There is rampant alcoholism, poverty, abuse, and despair. Often it is a struggle to get parents to send their kids to school at all.
Is it therefore reasonable to advertise a worldly (but true) benefit of Catholic schools in order to get the children into a situation where they can be catechized?
Also, Patrick, I’m guessing “The Catholic Peoples Foundation” is some kind of inter-tribal organization promoting the faith.
May 7, 2009 at 10:34 pm
What does this ad have to do with Bishop Wall?
May 7, 2009 at 10:45 pm
MH: Read the first sentence of the article. We can wait.
May 8, 2009 at 12:08 am
Done. Again. It says “Bishop James Wall was recently installed as Bishop for the Diocese of Gallup.”
I knew that.
I think this ad is a poor way to estimate the state of Catholic education in the Diocese of Gallup and an even poorer reason for throwing tomatoes from the cheap seats.
Thanks for your patience, David.
May 8, 2009 at 12:45 am
I think the advertising could be interpreted as resorting to being “cute” in order to appeal to its audience, rather than appealing to the benefits of an education grounded in the Faith. The lack of discernment in crafting the message, never mind any regard for its Catholicity, would be sufficient cause for concern. This would be worth bringing to the attention of a bishop new to his diocese.
Incidentally, the Diocese of Gallup is one of the least populated in the country, with less than sixty thousand faithful in eighty parishes and missions.
May 8, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Or the problem could just be NM and AZ. . . I grew up there.
Anyway, I love your blog, and read it almost daily! So, please for give me for ‘tagging you’. My blog has the details: http://www.morningtower.net/2009/05/05/ive-been-tagged/
Keep up the good work guys! Ya’ll are awesome!