The right of parents to choose the type of education they wish for
children “is a fundamental right,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has said.
Speaking last week at the launch of “Share the Good News,” the new
National Directory for Catechesis in Ireland, Dr Martin said that this
right was “not an invention of the Catholic Church in Ireland or of an
out-of-date Irish Constitution.”
“It is clearly present in all the major international human rights instruments,” he said.
Parents who wished their children to attend religious education and
parents who do not wish their children to attend religious instruction
both appealed to this same right, Dr Martin added.
Archbishop Martin was responding to repeated calls by various
politicians and commentators for the Catholic Church to relinquish
control over its primary and secondary schools.
Last year, Government
Chief Whip Pat Carey suggested that Church control of primary schools
should be phased out, and a number of Opposition politicians have
suggested that the Church should hand over control of its schools to the
State.
However, the Archbishop accepted that the dominance of the Church in
primary education “does not facilitate the provision of alternatives and
indeed can damage the principle of parental right and damage the very
idea of the Catholic school.”
Increasing educational choice was not
just a challenge for religious education but also for freedom and
pluralism in education overall, Archbishop Martin said.
The current system favoured parental choice and community rootedness
in education, which reduced the danger of leaving decisions to an
educational bureaucracy and the politicisation of the provision of
education, which had negative effects wherever it happened.
Ireland's religious culture had changed, Archbishop Martin said, and
the faith of young people who had attended Catholic schools could no
longer be assumed.
The religious sense had been undermined in Irish
culture, and there were aspects contemporary culture that can lead us
all to deviate from a true religious sense.
A strong individualism in contemporary culture made it “more and more
difficult to encapsulate the relational dimension of being.”
This had “catastrophic consequences” when the relational dimension of
sexuality is undermined or not adequately appreciated, he added.
Such
radical individualism could also undermine the sense of the Church,
Archbishop Martin said.
Religious education, he said, had to “assist people to enter into the
religious sense in a culture in which it is increasingly absent.”
Archbishop Martin said, “Without this, catechesis would only become
indoctrination, and a catechesis of indoctrination does lead not to
freedom but to fundamentalism. This is not just pre-catechesis; it is a
much more necessary and fundamental pre-condition for the ability to
understand the Gospel and it is something that was not necessary in the
Ireland of the past.”
SIC: CIN/IE