A parish in Wisconsin has come up with a novel — and somewhat unnevering — method of getting people to go to church…tuition discounts:

Parents whose children attend St. Jerome Parish School here can save $1,400 off the annual tuition if they sign a contract agreeing to attend church regularly.

“Parents are the primary educators in the way of faith,” said the Rev. John Yockey of St. Jerome Parish, which operates the school. “This is a call to inactive parents to renew their religious practices.”

For years, parents qualified for the stipend simply by registering as church members. But only about half showed up in church regularly, leaving some parishioners miffed.

So Yockey, 63, created the new policy, which will begin when the new school year starts in September. Parents who want the stipend had to sign a contract agreeing to attend church at least seven of every 10 Sundays.

Those who refuse to sign the contract or who don’t meet the 70 percent cutoff must pay the regular annual tuition of $4,500 per child.

The Catholic school in this city about 30 miles west of Milwaukee has 330 students from kindergarten through eighth grade.

“I fully expected upwards of 20 percent of parents would drop out” when the policy was announced last year, Yockey said. But only one of the 170 families did.

Brian Gray, a spokesman for the National Catholic Educational Association in Washington, D.C., said he’s not aware of other parishes implementing a similar policy. But it makes sense that parents who receive subsidies should be active members of the parish, he said.

“If you’re sending your children to school for Catholic values, it would seem only right that the family would model those same values in life outside of school,” he said.

Most St. Jerome parents agree, including Kathy Kellogg, who has a daughter entering sixth grade there. Kellogg said her family already attends Mass regularly, and that Yockey’s policy is only reminding families to cooperate with the church to raise kids in the Catholic faith.

“It wasn’t really asking people to donate extra money,” she said. “It was just asking people to spend an extra hour in church a week.”

It’s a little dispiriting to think that this is what we’ve come to. But it’s one way to get ’em in the door. You can visit the parish website right here.

Photo: St. Jerome School, from the parish website.