The Catholic in Education

Thank God for the way that Catholic education is set up in the United States. Thank God for its almost-total separation from the public school system.

Those are the thoughts that cross my mind when I read about the crisis facing Catholic schools in Ireland.

The system here is way different than what we'd be used to as Americans, but here's what I've gathered:

• National Schools are state-funded schools, all of which teach religion as a core subject, They are allowed to espouse a specific ethos, which is usually religious and most often Catholic.
• "Rule 68" allows schools with such an ethos to permeate the whole of their curricula with that ethos. So Catholicism's influence isn't limited to the time spent on religion.
• Religion class in Catholic schools is taught mostly off a standardized national curriculum, and sacramental prep - Confirmation included - is tended to mostly, if not entirely, within the school and within the subject's time during the school day.

This kind of entanglement of everything is one of the things I can't handle in the Irish socialized (as in "socialism") society.

Various politicians are currently throwing around new initiatives that would require a significant number of National Schools that espouse a Catholic ethos to drop it while other ideas suggest banishing Rule 68 and/or requiring that exclusive religious teachings are banned and comprehensively inclusive teachings are instituted.

This kind of tension shouldn't exist. When I think about what's right or wrong here, my thought process is clouded my the entirely foreign concept of the state funding schools that overtly endorse a religion. Doesn't it seem kind of backwards to reality that in increasingly secular Europe, schools have state funding and a religion? As an advocate of our school system, flawed though it may be, I would be in favor of removing religion from state-funded schools in Ireland, except that such an action would be the end of religious schools in this socialized system.

My fuller instinct is to defend religion, not just Catholicism, especially as the coverage of it that I get - mostly from the Irish Catholic - includes outcry from Church of Ireland, Methodists, and Presbyterians, fewer though they may be.

On principal, I think there has to be a place for religiously motivated schools, and I think if all schools are state-funded, provision has to be made and respected to allow for that within the system. At the same time, it's hard to argue with people who don't want state-funding to go toward the proselytizing of a specific religion or its ethos. BUT AT THE SAME SAME TIME, isn't it silly to say state funding can go to a school that espouses Catholicism but is required to teach, with equal validity, potentially conflicting tenets of other faiths? I'm not sure the proposals would go that far, but the line of thinking carries a fair deal of preposterousness.

My only experience of this is with the primary school I've done some work in here in the parish. The children are well-behaved and have solid discipline, and the teachers are very hospitable to our coming in to do our catechesis. However, some basic things aren't part of the experience at the school, mainly regular visits to the Church and mass. We had to bring ashes to the school and administer them in two assemblies and a handful of classroom visits because, not only do they not have a meeting space big enough for the school to assemble in (an unfortunate problem of space currently being addressed with new construction) but they don't have any kind of a chapel or sacred area. 

If this whole stream of commentary seems watery and incoherent, it's because it is. I don't know how to engage with these criticisms. I agree with some principles on each side, and, as is so often the case with how my college-educated and Notre-Dame-formed mind sees the world, I want to scrutinize and pick apart the flaws in the system. If the State didn't (have to) fund every school, a private school network could support those seeking religiously influenced education and leave others to go to non-religious schools and seek out supplemental religious schooling from the parish.

It's a tough sea to sail in this culture of increasing Irish hostility to faith and its institution mixed in with austerity and recession. The Catholic Church here will need its leaders to hold strong, and I only hope that the future of the overlap between politics and the Catholic Church will be brighter in Ireland, America, and around our world.