Denver Newsroom, Aug 25, 2021 / 17:30 pm
The Louisville archdiocese has made steady progress in enrolling more African-Americans in Catholic schools, and Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz of Louisville has praised these schools’ service in forming Black Catholic leaders.
“What is clear is that Catholic education will continue to have a mighty role in calling forth and developing strong leaders in the African American Catholic community as we look to the future,” Kurtz said in his Aug. 24 column for the archdiocese newspaper The Record.
“While more outreach is necessary to attract and assist youth from the African American Catholic community to benefit from a Catholic education, some steady progress is occurring,” the archbishop said.
Local Catholic school enrollments in the 2020-2021 school year indicated there now were 689 African-American students, a 50% increase from six years ago. The archbishop said that Catholic schools still want to attract more Black students, but these numbers were nonetheless cause for encouragement.