POTTSTOWN >> The Rev. Joseph Maloney, pastor of St. Aloysius parish, announced Friday that enough money has been raised to move the parish school from its site in Pottstown to the former St. Pius X High School on North Keim Street.
The school will open there for classes in the beginning of the 2017-18 school year.
“I am amazed. I am overjoyed,” Maloney said during a school mass Friday morning.
“I am humbled and so very proud to be able to” make the announcement, he said.
“It means that the members of our parish community have joined together to make a concrete statement in support of Catholic schools,” Maloney said.
“But mostly, it means that we are doing everything we can to bring the good news of Jesus to as many children as we can so that they will have the best opportunity possible to become the saints they are called to be,” Maloney said.
According to an announcement from the parish, the fundraising goal of $500,000 to pay for repairs to the former high school, located in Lower Pottsgrove, was recently surpassed.
Discussion about the possibility of the move began in June, when Maloney called a special meeting of the parish and revealed the possibility of a deal with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Foundation for Catholic Education, which offered to buy the St. Pius X building for $1.2 million and lease it to St. Aloysius indefinitely for $1 a year.
The archdiocese has been trying, unsuccessfully, to sell the St. Pius building since it was closed in 2010 in the wake of the opening of Pope John Paul II High School in Upper Providence.
But for the deal to go through, the foundation required that the parish raise the more than $500,000 it is estimated it would take to repair the former St. Pius building to make it usable for the St. Aloysius students.
Last month, Patricia Kerwin, the school’s director of advancement, revealed that the parish was just $100,000 short of its goal and that an anonymous donor had offered to match the next $100,000 raised.
The deadline for raising the money was supposed to be Sept. 15, “but we had so much momentum going that the archdiocese extended the deadline to Dec. 1,” Kerwin said.
The current St. Aloysius school was built in 1912 and will be vacated at the end of the current academic year.
The future disposition of the school building has not been determined yet.
The former St. Pius X building was opened in 1953 and operated as a Catholic High School until it was closed in 2010. It has remained vacant since then.
