Talk about bad timing.

The recent announcement that over two dozen Catholic schools in Brooklyn and Queens will be closed or consolidated raises many profound historical, cultural and economic questions.

But the first thing that came to my mind was this- true, there’s no good time to release bleak news like this.

But couldn’t officials at the Brooklyn Diocese have selected a better time to announce this than the beginning of Lent? This is a time of year when people tend to reaffirm their relationship with their parish, some even returning to church after a long absence.

And yet, imagine you are a parent aiming to send your child to say, St. Finbar’s in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, or Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Astoria, Queens, and at the beginning of this holiest time of the year, officials announce that these two, and a number of other schools, will be closing?

This is not to cast the Brooklyn Diocese (which covers Brooklyn and Queens) as the evildoers here. This is a complex problem, and to suggest that this is yet another sin committed by “the church” ignores certain realities.

Catholic officials can do many things, but they cannot print money. And the hard fact is, schools cost a lot of money to run, and when the money isn’t there – even though staff at Catholic schools are criminally underpaid – hard choices have to be made.

Edward Cardinal Egan has suggested other schools in Manhattan and the Bronx might close. But it’s not just church officials who have hard choices to make.

I am the parent of two young children. In my heart I’d want nothing more than to send them to Catholic school.

My bank account, however, does not listen to my heart. Annual tuition these days at Catholic school is running close to $3,000. Then there are all the other fees, raffles, bake sales and more, which keep the lights on and the heat pumping.

The simple fact is that, with but one income flowing into my home, that money would be extraordinarily difficult to come by.

And there is your Catholic school problem in a nutshell. I have a steady, stable income and a desire to send my kids to Catholic school. And yet I probably won’t be able to do it.

Think, then, about immigrants and their children, who in the past built the church from the ground up. How are they to cough up an extra three grand a year?

“The mighty parochial school system that rose a century and a half ago from immigrant ghettos to serve as a portal into American society for millions – and as a virtually unlimited source of power for the institutional Catholic Church – is fading into history,” Jim Dwyer wrote in this past Sunday’s New York Times.

I thought that was a bit exaggerated when I first read it. Upon reflection, however, it may be all too true.

What is to be done? Well, Irish Americans are very much stepping up to the plate.

First, there’s Tom Cusick, who just this week launched a campaign called Teach the Little Children. The drive is aimed at raising money for the numerous Catholic schools targeted for closing.

Cusick, who is also president of the Fifth Avenue Association, was quoted as saying, “As a Catholic, I was brought up to believe you look after those people. There are many people educated in Catholic schools who were born and raised in Brooklyn and Queens and then moved on, in large part because of that good education. If they were approached and asked for contributions to help less fortunate people, they’d respond.”

Jean O’Shea runs a similar outfit called Future in Education. Peter Flannigan runs yet another outfit which creates scholarships for private schools called Students Sponsor Partners.

For all the good work those Irish Catholics are doing, however, one fact remains – a $3,000 tuition a year.

It’s not that this is an unreasonable price for tuition. One could even argue that it is a bargain. But it is also a bargain that costs twice as much as it did just a decade ago. Therefore, it is a bargain that a smaller and smaller pool of New Yorkers can afford.

It was the immigrant working class which built up the mighty Catholic school system in the United States. Yet even middle class New Yorkers now have trouble paying for Catholic schools. This is a deeply unsettling time in American Catholic history.

Say a prayer.