Greg Daly
Archbishop Eamon Martin addresses the crowd at The Irish Catholic's education conference in Dublin. Photo: Chai Brady ‘Intentional’ Catholic education is the future for Faith schools in Ireland, Greg Daly writes
“Religion,” Armagh’s Archbishop Eamon Martin said at last week’s The Irish Catholic Education Conference, is “not an added extra to be fitted in during break time or twilight hours or during registration”.
Far from being something extra bolted on to the school day, the Gospel and Gospel values must be integral to life in Faith schools, the archbishop said. “Everything that happens in the school community is rooted in the Gospel values of Respect for Life, Love, Solidarity, Truth and Justice; the Catholic school seeks to harmonise faith and culture,” he explained, continuing that “in an ‘intentional’ Catholic school, prayer and worship form a natural part of the day; there will be opportunities during the year for Confession and for the celebration and adoration of the Eucharist.”
In speaking of ‘intentional’ Catholic schools, Dr Martin drew on comments he made when he returned to Ireland in 2015 after attending that year’s synod on the family in Rome, inspired by those who had spoke at the synod not merely about the evangelisation of families but evangelisation by familes.
“It is primarily in the family that prayer, faith and values are nurtured, the choices between right and wrong are evaluated, that connections with parish and diocese are made and sustained,” he said, noting how Pope Francis made these points in Amoris Laetitia, and how on returning to Ireland he considered how an ‘intentional’ Catholic family might live, citing their prayer lives, their openness about their Faith, their care for their parish and the poor, their willingness to discuss Faith issues and speak up for the Faith, their support for pro-life causes and for vocations.
Pattern
Intentional schools, then, should follow such a pattern, and should remember their role in supporting parents, called as they are to be the “first educators” of their children in the ways of the Faith, the family being the “first school” for well-rounded personal and social development of children and young people, and potentially “a Christian initiation and a school of following Christ” in which “all the members evangelise and are evangelised”, he said, harking back to St John Paul II and Blessed Paul VI.
Although parishes and schools are called to support parishes across a broad range of attitudes towards the Faith, Dr Martin said, this is not a straightforward enterprise, and hitherto the Irish Church’s efforts to introduce catechical projects have been sporadic and disjointed, with a greater attempt to integrate them being needed.
This is all the more important, he observed, given how Ireland’s census figures show that we are moving from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith seems to have become one human possibility among others – as others have put it, we are shifting from a culture of convention to one of conviction. The old pastoral strategy, built upon the three interdependent pillars of parish, home and Catholic school, is evidently not working well, with all three pillars having been “rocked by the waves of secularisation which have swept across Ireland”.
The Catholic school remains, nonetheless, embedded in the Church’s evangelical function, with the archbishop wondering if “perhaps in recent years we have come to rely too much on the Catholic school to be the ‘driver’ in this process, rather than affirming, embedding and building links between the family, the school and the local Church community”.
“It is little wonder,” he observed, “that many teachers today speak of finding themselves left quite literally in loco parentis as the first teachers of children in the ways of Faith.”
Maintaining that schools are called to support parents in this role, not to supplant them, the archbishop reiterated that an ‘intentional’ Catholic school should be confident in its Catholic identity, deliberately nurturing its Catholic ethos while naming and demonstrating the Gospel values.
Planning
As part of this, he said, those charged with running such schools would ensure that Religious Education was prioritised in curriculum planning and resourcing, with this having a strong catechetical component so all pupils can systematically learn the truths of the Catholic faith, be instructed in all aspects of the moral life and grasp the essentials of Catholic social teaching. Other subjects, he added, can also help pupils engage in dialogue about the interaction of faith and culture, promote a culture of life, love and respect for creation and develop a sense of wonder through the beauty of religious art and music.
It must be remembered, he said, that schools are faced with a range of challenges and a temptation to buy into modern cultures of individualism and achievement, “even to the extent of measuring their own success in terms of popularity or in league tables of examination results”, recalling how young people must be prepared to cope with a world that is often harsh and where they will “have to cope as often with failure and disappointment as with success and achievement”.
Noting concerns about how current educational policy could dilute the right of parents to have access to a school which unashamedly and intentionally lives by a faith-based ethos, and that schools cannot allow religion to be sidelined from our schools, the archbishop said it was reasonable for Catholic schools’ boards of management to be concerned about ensuring that children from the local parish – or group of parishes – should be able to access their Catholic school.
Emphasising that inclusion has always been a core value of Catholic schools, the archbishop noted the founders of Ireland’s Catholic schools had tended to stress “a preferential option for the marginalised and poor”, and praised how Catholic schools across Ireland are inclusive and caring communities, often “leading the way in integrating migrants, pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, and pupils with special needs”.
Schools, he said, should continue to evaluate their policies to ensure that those who could be marginalised are not neglected or otherwise unfairly disadvantaged, remaining alert especially to those inequalities in our educational system that mean too many of our young people leave schools without meaningful qualifications or opportunities.
Ethos
Themes pointed to in the archbishop’s keynote address would recur through the day: the nature of ‘ethos’ in a Catholic school, the need for Catholic schools to be ‘intentional’ with deliberate emphases both on the holistic expression of the Faith and the catechetical grounds of that Faith, and the dangers posed to Catholic schools by trends in modern Irish educational policy.
Prof. Eamonn Conway of Limerick’s Mary Immaculate College, for instance, began by cautioning that the decisions that this generation of Catholics parents, teachers and clergy make – or fail to make – “will impact on Christian faith in this country for generations to come”, warning that Ireland is currently on a trajectory that would see the most significant changes to our Constitution in regard to education since the foundation of the state.
There is a real danger, he cautioned, that a state educational system could be on the way that would displace parents as children’s primary educators, imposing a secular education upon all children except those whose parents are wealthy enough to have their children privately educated.
Maintaining that there is no reason why a genuinely secularist and pluralist state should not fund faith-based education, Prof. Conway recalled how the Constitution obliges the state to “provide for” education, rather than simply to “provide” education, and notes the popularity of state-funded Church-run schools in, for example, the Netherlands.
“My concern,” he said, “is that here in Ireland, under the pressure from a well-resourced and highly organised subcultural secularist elite, one that is unrepresentative of the population as a whole, we are allowing ourselves to be persuaded that the privatisation of religion is the only way to go if we wish to be a genuinely democratic country, and therefore there should be an end to state-funded faith-based education.”
Despite how it is so often presented, he said, secular liberalism is not a neutral space, but actively holds that religious convictions have no place in public discourse while maintaining that their own convictions and beliefs should go unchallenged in the public square.
Not, he says, that people of Faith are powerless in this situation, stressing that a Catholic school “must be free to propose Christian Faith to all its pupils – propose, not impose”. This proposal, he said, should be a joyful invitation and is “proposed primarily and most powerfully by the personal witness of staff”, as well as in the timetable, the physical space of the school, and the curriculum, in which, he said, nothing that contradicts the Christian understanding of human life and dignity should be taught.
Warning against succumbing to what the theologian Romano Guardini used to call “the technological paradigm”, Prof. Conway noted how managerialism can drive out beauty in efficiency’s name, and cautioned against how truncated and self-serving forms of religiosity, which don’t have much room for self-sacrifice can thrive in commodified cultures.
We need, he said, to see Catholic schools as field hospitals for those wounded by the wider culture, places of warmth, caring, and humanity where young people should feel free to show their fragility.
Every school has an ethos, Prof. Conway noted, explaining that “ethos is what you teach while you are teaching” and that schools must attend not merely to what they formally teach, but what they implicitly communicate. Cautioning that it can’t be assumed that even those teachers who have studied at Catholic colleges necessarily know the basics of their Christian faith, he added that proper systems of accountability are needed to ensure teachers at least understand what is expected of them.
Asked about internal secularisation and the quality of textbooks, Prof. Conway said that over the years textbooks could often have been better, but that in truth they matter less than the people teaching them. “Any teacher worth their salt knows they teach who they are,” he continued, maintaining that ultimately this comes down to our own Faith conviction.
Policy moves
For the Iona Institute’s David Quinn, Richard Bruton’s policy moves of late show that “Fine Gael does not need coalition with Labour to attack Faith-based education”; he acknowledged that some enhanced form of pluralism is inevitable in whatever future educational landscape should develop in Ireland, maintaining that there must be fewer Catholic schools, but that these in turn should be more Catholic.
One thing that the recent Forum of Patronage and Pluralism showed clearly, he said, was that there was no huge appetite for divestment of schools but also that a hunger for seriously Catholic schools was also a relatively minor interest.
National debates about divestment and so-called ‘baptism bans’ are overblown, he added, noting how research by The Irish Catholic –– he could also have added the Catholic Primary Schools Management Association – has demonstrated that claims of oversubscribed schools are largely overblown, with most of the few oversubscribed schools being in a small number of affluent Dublin suburbs. These suburbs, he noted, tend to be homes to the kind of ‘opinion formers’ that dictate the shape of national discourse, making their local issues seem like national priorities.
The real issue is, of course, a lack of places, but since it would cost money to tackle this issue, he said, the Government has instead opted to distract attention from the problem by pointing to the relative non-issue of the so-called ‘baptism ban’.
At the same time, he said, while census figures might show Ireland becoming less religious, our immigrant profile is largely religious, he noted, arguing that Muslims in England, for example, have tended to prefer Christian schools to state ones, with a general understanding of religious faith being welcomed.
Jonathan Tiernan of the Alliance for Catholic Education later urged that Catholic schools be protected for what they offer children, while maintaining that downsizing our Catholic schools network is not – in itself – a vision for the future, following Prof. Conway and Dr Martin in maintaining that it is necessary to speak of what a Catholic ethos is, even if it might not seem politically correct to do so, he explained that an intentional Catholic school is one “where the works of mercy permeate the school community’s fabric”.
For Baroness Nuala O’Loan, parents often have difficulty explaining what ethos is – though they know it when they see it. Stressing that Catholic schools must embrace all children, she cited one school that recognised how one child with Down Syndrome had been the pupil that had given most to the school community.
At the same time, she wondered, how is it, given how most people of influence in Ireland were educated in the Church, that abortion is being argued for in Ireland – what has happened in our generational shifts that has caused people to think that vulnerable unborn children are disposable?
We’re in mission territory, she said, and whatever has happened, this is territory where schools can help evangelise families. Our schools may be the last places we have for direct evangelisation, and we shouldn’t be ashamed that they are such places.
Recordings of the day are available from eist@eircom.net