The Primate of All Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, has strongly defended the contribution of Catholic schools and the principle of parental choice.
Speaking at the launch of Catholic Schools Week in the Emmaus Centre, Swords, Co. Dublin, yesterday, Cardinal Brady said that parents had the right “to have their children educated in accordance with their philosophical and religious convictions”.
Consequently the State had a duty “to support this right with public funds”. It was important to point out, he added, “that Catholic parents are tax payers”.
There was, Cardinal Brady emphasised “no such thing as a value-free school” that would provide a ‘neutral’ education that would not offend Christian parents.
“If parents want the Government of the day to define and manage the ethos of their schools it is important to ask what philosophy of life, of the human person, of the child would the Government of the day promote?” he asked.
In terms of the provision of new schools, Cardinal Brady questioned “why of all the newly built schools in areas of population growth in Ireland in recent years, very few are Catholic?”
He added: “There has to be an effective way of establishing parental choice when a new school is being built as a result of population growth.”
The Catholic Church, he continued, was open to diversity of provision “but parents who want Catholic schools have to be treated as fairly and on the same basis as others”.
Catholic parents, he went on, could not “be automatically excluded from consideration when a new school is being built”.
Cardinal Brady rejected the idea that the only way “to accommodate religious and cultural diversity in society is to remove the Church completely from state funded schools”.
Such an idea, he said, was “unjust, unhelpful and contrary to the principle of pluralism”.
He added: “This proposition ignores the rights of parents and children to a faith based education, a right acknowledged in international instruments of human rights.”
He welcomed the prospect of “what could be the most creative and constructive dialogue about the future of education in this country since partition” adding that the Church was “willing to be an enthusiastic and constructive partner” in such a dialogue.
However, if such a dialogue was “simply a Trojan horse for removing faith from schools”, ongoing tensions were inevitable, he warned. Such an outcome, he added, would be “to the detriment of children and society”.