Hostility towards faith schools goes against what many parents demand

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin

David Quinn

February 07 2014 12:00 AM

Ruairi Quinn wants less religion taught in school. He wants children taught about all the major religions. The Catholic Church, say the bishops, is happy to teach about those religions but quite understandably wants to continue to affirm the Catholic identity of young Catholics.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin weighed in, saying faith was important for young people but also warned that Catholic schools can't be "watery" about faith.

Let's start with that last statement because the fact is that an awful lot of Catholic schools are "watery" about the faith, to such an extent in some cases that secularists shouldn't be worrying about them so much.

I was talking to a religion teacher the other day who told me a counterpart in another Catholic school won't even say prayers at the start of religion class because she might offend the non-Catholics in the classroom.

Frankly, if that attitude is widespread then the debate over the future of Catholic schools isn't worth the candle. The right to have publicly funded denominational schools might be won, but if the schools are barely Catholic because they lack the courage to be Catholic, or even Christian, then what's the point?

The constant demand is that denominational schools be 'inclusive'. That's fine until inclusiveness collapses into relativism, which is to say the belief that all beliefs are more or less the same and come down to personal opinion. In other words, you can no longer say, however politely, 'this is true, and this is false' and it's not a simple matter of opinion.

From its foundation in 1910 until last year, the Girl Guides in Britain required new members to take a vow to "do my duty to God".

That was suddenly judged to be insufficiently 'inclusive' and has been replaced by a new vow, which says I will be "true to myself and develop my beliefs".

In other words, belonging to the Girl Guides means you can believe in anything and nothing. It could hardly be more 'watery'.

The Girl Guides have basically decided that you can't be an organisation set up specifically for people who believe in God and want to do their duty to God because that might make someone feel excluded.

Extending this logic of 'inclusion' and 'exclusion' no such organisation should exist. But excising from society any organisation that has a shared belief in God at its core would in fact be the ultimate act of exclusion. That's the paradox.

There is a widespread enough myth that Ireland is virtually unique in the world in having publicly funded, church-run schools. I listened to Gemma Hussey on the 'Right Hook' the other week and she certainly seemed to believe this, which is astonishing when you consider she was once our Education Minister.

But in England, one-third of primary schools that are publicly funded are church-run, mostly by the Church of England.

In the Netherlands, 60pc of primary schools are publicly funded and are church-run. It being the Netherlands, they are run by a whole variety of churches because the Netherlands is so multi-denominational. This, of course, is a chief reason why the country developed its tradition of tolerance. But note, all those publicly funded, church-run schools arose precisely out of its wish to be tolerant and not despite it. It would not be a bit tolerant to simply withdraw all public funding from denominational schools in the teeth of big parental demand for such schools.

That would be the state telling parents what's good for them and their children.

It's worth mentioning here the case of Robert Wilson, a multi-millionaire American hedge fund manager who died last year. Wilson in his lifetime gave tens of millions of dollars to Catholic schools in the New York archdiocese. The twist in the tale is that Wilson was an atheist.

Why would an atheist want to give so much money to Catholic schools? He didn't believe in their religion. There must have been all kinds of aspects of their ethos he disagreed with. And yet he gave them millions of dollars.

As he told Bloomberg News following another $5.6m donation he made a few years before his death: "Most of what the Catholic schools teach are the three Rs," meaning, reading, writing and arithmetic. "And they do it better than the union-controlled inner-city schools."

In other words, he was able to look past his own atheism to see that Catholic schools were simply good schools and worth supporting.

I don't believe Ruairi Quinn is an out-and-out critic of denominational education, unlike some of his party colleagues. The problem is that all the reforms he has in mind for the sector would leave denominational schools more watered down than ever.

He wants them to devote less time to teaching religion even though there is no evidence that this is dragging down overall educational standards. He wants them to devote a big section of the reduced time set aside for religion class to teaching about all the main religions.

He wants preparation for First Holy Communion and Confirmation to be done outside of school hours.

In other words, what Mr Quinn says about denominational schools is often friendly but what he does often seems hostile.

I wonder what Fine Gael thinks about all this? Now that they have given Labour what they want on abortion, at the possible cost of a rival political party, are they also going to give them what they want on schools? Or will they say enough is enough?

Hostility towards faith schools goes against what many parents demand

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