Faith formation in stand alone Catholic schools, such as preparation for Communion and Confirmation, are “disruptive” to the children of parents who do not share the Catholic faith, Education Minister Ruairi Quinn has said.
And he said he hoped to change traditional faith formation in such schools by next year.
Speaking in UCC at a conference on religion and education, Mr Quinn said that, in areas where the only school is a Catholic school, the rights of non Catholic parents will have to be recognised.
Mr Quinn said: “While schools will reflect a new kind of evolving public-private partnership, where there is a stand-alone school, the recognition of the rights of parents and children who are not of the Catholic faith and don’t want to participate, particularly in what they would regard as the disruptive experience of faith formation, preparation for communion and confirmation, those rights will have to be formulated in such a way that parents can attend that school and not be disruptive, and not be disrupted so to speak.”
He said he hoped that “over a relatively short period of time – but having respect to the process of the delivery of education in the school itself – that the choice of schools will be much more diverse than it currently is,” the Irish Times reports.
But he added that in areas where there is just the one school and to which all children go, he hoped that “not only would that school be inclusive and welcoming as they are at the moment, but they would be respectful to the rights of children as indicated in the various international agreements that we’ve signed up for”.
In areas with multiple schools, he hoped one school could divest to become an Educate Together or other non-denominational school.
However, some 1,700 stand-alone schools that serve the wider community had been identified, Mr Quinn said, and methods as to how to remove faith-formative teaching in these schools needed to be explored.
“In the areas [where] there will be no additional school and this is the only school that’s serving that community, we have to find a way in which existing rights, underpinned by international law and decisions of the Oireachtas, can be implemented in the classroom and the school – and we are trying to explore that,” he said.
Mr Quinn said that while the decision to replace traditional religion teaching with the teaching of world religions is a matter for the patron of the school to decide, the object of the exercise was to recognise “the primacy of parental choice”.