Thursday, January 13, 2011

Parents' have right to choose children's education, says Archbishop

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Catechesis in Ireland, Dr Martin said that this right was “not an invention of the Catholic Church in Ireland or of an out-of-date Irish Constitution.”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