The right of parents to send their children to faith schools is recognised in the Constitution and cannot be brushed aside, the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, has said.
Speaking to the annual conference of the Irish Primary Principals network, the Archbishop accepted that “a system in which 92 per cent of all primary schools is managed by the Roman Catholic Church” was not tenable.
However, he said the notion that all primary schools should simply be handed over to the State, and that “the Church should return to its sacristies” was “a viewpoint which may not brush aside the rights recognised by the Constitution of Ireland to parents and to religious denominations”.
He said “that Catholic education has its place in Irish society today and will continue to maintain its place into the future”.
He accepted, however, that there was a need for change. The current near monopoly which the Church had in education was, he said “in many ways detrimental to the possibility of maintaining a true Catholic identity in Catholic schools”.
This is similar to the viewpoint of the head of the Catholic bishops’ education commission, Bishop Leo O’Reilly.
Archbishop Martin stated: “The Catholic school will only be able to carry out its specific role if there are viable alternatives for parents who wish to send their children to schools inspired by other philosophies.”
“The Catholic school should be clearly Catholic,” he added. Young people had to “be led to face the real world and to survive and indeed flourish there. But if there is no strong ethos to confront and be confronted with then the adolescent will end (sic) without challenge”.
Many parents of different religions in the Dublin area, he said, deliberately sent their children to Catholic schools “because they wish their children to be educated within a religious environment”. Catholic schools, he went on, “must be open to children of a variety of backgrounds when parents wish their children to attend such a school”.
However, he insisted that “a Catholic school must be one with a real Catholic ethos, just as one expects that Church of Ireland Schools or schools for the Islamic community be able to maintain their distinctive ethos”.
There were very few countries, he said “which do not effectively have variety of school patronage models”.
“Uniformity of school models do not necessarily result in equal treatment and access for pupils,” he continued.
He rejected the notion that diversity of educational provision necessarily led to elitism, pointing out that this was not the experience of Catholic schools in other countries.
And he added that, in terms of fostering an inclusive society, there was “no evidence that a totally ‘religiously neutral secularist society’ is the best space in which to foster dialogue between religions”.
A more secularist society may not, he suggested, be the best one to be able to understand and guide the phenomenon of religious diversity.
“There are forms of secular society in which hostility to religious values forces religious groups into a dangerously narrow perception of their culture and thus sharpen religious differences and misunderstanding of a pluralist society,” the Archbishop said.
