David QuinnIreland may be less Catholic, but parents still like Catholic schools, writes David Quinn
The pressure is mounting on Catholic schools, and by extension other denominational schools, to transfer their ownership to non-denominational bodies such as Educate Together and also to severely compromise the ethos of the remaining schools.
The latest attacks have come in two forms. The first broadside was launched by Prof. John Coolahan, formerly head of the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism that was set up by former Education Minister, Ruairi Quinn, to examine the future of denominational education.
Prof. Coolahan has suggested that if the Catholic Church does not speed up the transfer of more of its primary schools to the non-denominational sector, then grants to schools where the Church ‘refused’ to transfer patronage should be cut.
This is the nuclear option. Starving Catholic schools of funding would either make them completely unviable or else would force them to cut what they offer pupils to the bone. How would parents react to this? It is unlikely in the extreme to be a popular move.
In fact, even as it is, the Catholic school sector is poorly resourced by the State (which is to say by the tax-payer) compared with other sectors.
This is certainly discriminatory. Catholic parents who wish to send their children to the local Catholic school are tax-payers every bit as much as other parents. Why should their children not receive the same subvention from the public purse for their education as other children?
Attack
The second recent attack was launched by the Humanist Association and one of its chiefs, Brian Whiteside. Whiteside has criticised the fact that Catholic schools admit Catholic children ahead of other children, just as Church of Ireland schools admit Church of Ireland children ahead of other children.
The way you show a school your child is Catholic is to produce a baptismal certificate. Whiteside says this is forcing some parents to have their children baptised in order to ensure they get into the local school which is almost invariably Catholic given the sheer predominance of Catholic primary schools in the country.
Let’s start by making a concession. Whiteside has a point. It is a very bad thing if some non-religious parents feel they have to choose between having their children baptised and not being able to get them into the local school.
However, we also need to consider the scale of the problem. It is very small. Most Catholic schools have enough places for everyone and therefore it is rare, except in some parts of Dublin or where there has been a sudden surge in the population, to have to turn away non-Catholic children.
Mr Whiteside will surely respond that, if even one child has to be baptised simply to get him or her into the local school, that is unacceptable.
There are two possible responses to this. The first is to change the local Catholic school into a non-denominational school, and the second is to prevent Catholic (and other denominational schools) from enrolling children from their own faith community first.
Option one, making the Catholic school non-denominational, would very likely run into strong parental resistance. Levels of religious practice in Ireland may be far lower than they once were, but Catholic schools remain popular.
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has said that in some parts of Dublin when it has been put to parents that their local Catholic school should be handed over to a new patron there has been a backlash. (RTÉ really ought to cover this more. It is an important story. But instead, it sees fit to give plenty of coverage to anyone who complains about Catholic schools.)
What about ditching the policy of enrolling Catholic children first? The problem with this is that it destroys to a certain extent the very purpose of denominational schools, which is to serve their own faith community.
This is particularly a problem for Church of Ireland schools because the Church of Ireland is a minority Church and with a ‘first come, first served’ policy, it could easily be the case that Church of Ireland children would not be able to get into a Church of Ireland school.
Problems
Personally, I believe there should be many fewer Catholic schools in Ireland than there are at present. This would solve two problems.
The first is the problem Brian Whiteside highlights because most parents of the sort he talks about would have a non-denominational alternative to a Catholic school in their area.
The second is the problem of Catholic schools often being little more than Catholic in name.
After the handover of hundreds of Catholic schools to new patron bodies, the remaining Catholic schools could be truer to their ethos because they would no longer have to accommodate parents who are only nominally Catholic.
This is why parental resistance to the handover of Catholic schools to new patron bodies is actually a problem for the Catholic Church itself. It leaves it vulnerable to the sort of criticism Mr Whiteside launches against it. However, when it tries to do something about this by divesting itself of more of its schools, Catholic parents, including the nominal Catholics, object.
When they object, maybe the proper response of Church authorities should be to tell the nominal Catholics what it means for a Catholic school to be truly Catholic and then see if they still want their local schools to remain under Catholic patronage.
Perhaps that would begin to break the logjam and satisfy the Brian Whitesides of the world, and those parents who want their schools to be meaningfully Catholic.