Catholic school leadership revisited

Although the capacity of today’s Catholic school leaders to maintain the Catholic identity of their schools is a global concern, a review of literature from the past 30 years clearly indicates that this is not a recent issue. This suggests that despite the quality of the research and resultant guidance throughout these past 30 years, the issue appears to have become far more prevalent and serious. Therefore, the argument presented in this article is that if the issue is becoming progressively worse then perhaps it is not the Catholic school leadership practice that is at fault but, rather, it is the imprecise theoretical perspectives upon which these practices are founded. Hence, the purpose of this article is to construct a new theory to guide not only the views about what should be expected of Catholic school principals but also about what Catholic school leadership practices readily meet these expectations.

This article “Catholic School Leadership Revisited”, was originally published in Educatio Catholica (Anno VII, 3-4/2021, pp. 121-144), the journal of the Congregation for Catholic Education, a department of the Holy See, Vatican City State. It is reprinted by La Salle Academy, ACU, with the permission of the Congregation, and the Vatican Library (2022).