The right to religious freedom in education does not simply mean freedom from religion and must be understood 
more broadly than this, the Irish Bishops have said in a submission to the UN Human Rights Council.
In a submission to the Universal Periodic Review of the UN, the Council for Education of the Irish Episcopal Conference said that the narrow interpretation of religious freedom had “no objective grounding in the texts of human rights law which are clearly formulated to include both the positive and negative dimensions of religious freedom”.
And they reiterated their belief that parents “were the natural and primary educators of their children and their wishes must be respected in any system of education so far as is reasonably possible”.
The submission added that this interpretation was connected to “a tendency to extend the meaning of ‘coercion’, ‘proselytism’ or ‘indoctrination’ to include any form of uninvited contact with the religious belief or practices of fellow members of one’s school community”.
Such distortions of the idea of religious freedom had the consequence “of extinguishing religion altogether from the public sphere and effectively quarantining it as a purely private matter irrelevant for civic and social life,” the submission said.
It continued: “Such a secularist political ideology is not ‘neutral’ and is contrary to legitimate pluralism.
“It unjustly discriminates against religious citizens and undermines their rights, whether alone or in community with others, to full civic and cultural participation and to associational and expressive freedoms.”
Religious freedom, the submission said, comprised “both a positive freedom for religion, e.g. the freedom to practice, manifest and share one’s religious commitments, and a negative freedom from religious coercion”.
The submission said that some balance had to be struck between these freedoms in practice, but it was “never justifiable to prefer one to the total exclusion of the other”.
This was because either aspect “lost its justifying rationale in the absence of the other”.
The submission said: “The negative freedom from religious coercion only makes sense in the context of a prior positive duty to seek out and live according to the truth, i.e. the duty to inform and follow one’s conscience.”
The submission also defended Catholic schools, saying that they were “caring and inclusive communities precisely because they are Catholic”.
Catholic schools, the Bishops’ said “have adapted to demographic change with significant net migration into Ireland and have led the way in integrating migrants into local communities”.
The submission added that Catholic schools were “leaders in areas such as special needs, social inclusion and Traveller education”.
The document recommends that Irish State policy give equal regard “to the positive dimensions of the human right to religious freedom, in particular the freedom to manifest one’s beliefs in ‘worship, observance, practice and teaching’, and to the important contribution made by religious believers and communities to the common good of a free and democratic society”.
It also recommends “that practices such as coercion, proselytism and indoctrination be clearly and properly defined to avoid any prejudicial implication that such practices are intrinsically or distinctly related to any education within or from a faith perspective or any expression or transmission of religious, as opposed to non-religious, beliefs”.