UNDER Canon law, the Roman Catholic Church has two duties in education: to preserve and to proselytise. People forget that.The Church's duty is to ensure that a Catholic education excludes influences that do not accord with Catholic doctrine and teaching, to ensure that it indoctrinates children in the Catholic way, and that it also attempts to convert as many others as possible to its own thinking.
That's its only educational duty in its own eyes. Being inclusive, liberal, and open to outside influences is not part of the package.
The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, tried to spell that out recently in as inoffensive a way as possible. Although for those who care about education, the Church's purpose can't be anything but offensive: to teach in accord with the principle that there is no philosophical or ethical question that can be asked that is not answered fully by Catholic thinking is the fundamental opposite of intellectualism.
And carried down to the level of primary school, it means teaching children what to think, not how to think. It also means that the three Rs run a very poor second to religious indoctrination.
Now Sr Stanislaus Kennedy, the always outspoken, and in Catholic terms, radical, nun, has joined the debate on the future of religiously owned, influenced, and managed schools. Her most recent involvement has been as the founder of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, so her intervention is timely.
Archbishop Martin had defended the over-subscribed Catholic primary schools in north Dublin which had ruled, in line with Catholic teaching and canon law, that preference would be given to Catholic children. This left a number of children who were not Catholic, in (forgive the term) limbo.
And because of the new demographics of Irish society, these children were all black, and mostly Muslim. Cue outrage from various bodies, including the Equality Authority, pointing out that such a policy flouts our own equality legislation and European equality directives.
Of course, it does. But what has that to do with the issue of the Roman Catholic Church's sworn duty to educate Roman Catholic children as good Catholics, and to hell with everyone else, with education, and with inclusiveness?
Everyone's getting confused here, as Sister Stanislaus, bless her cotton socks, has pointed out . . . obliquely, of course.
"To have all those Catholic schools managed by Catholic priests is not the way forward," she told the National Council of Priests last week.
She reminded them that the Church's job was to spread its faith, ethos and values, and the way to do that she suggested, was for the Church to withdraw from running schools and focus on ensuring that faith is transferred.
We cannot have an integrated society until we have an integrated schools system, particularly at primary level, where all the children are given an identical value system.
That means that no denomination, faith or mixture of the same is allowed to influence the ethos of the schools. We could then have the situation where each of the denominations can provide religious instruction for themselves; it might even be possible for the State to subsidise such religious teaching.
But it would be outside the school syllabus, premises, curriculum and hours.
After all, the Constitution guarantees the right of the parents to be the primary educators of their children.
In the past, this has always been interpreted as the provision of religiously run schools, the vast majority of them Catholic, because the vast majority of parents, far from wanting to be the primary educators of their children, wanted somebody else to do it.
But having been indoctrinated by the education system into believing that a Catholic education was actually a rounded one, they wanted it perpetuated for their own children, thereby accepting the right of the Roman Catholic Church (in the vast majority of cases) to run the education system as it pleased: and be paid vast sums of money by the taxpayer to do it.
Sr Stanislaus Kennedy would not agree. In her address to the Council of Priests, she claimed that the Church had been used and abused by the State for years.
In fact, the opposite is true.
The Catholic Church has used State funding to perpetuate its own ethos, instead of accepting that if it wants to help parents to rear children in the "faith of our fathers", then that is the responsibility of the Church and the parents, not of the State.
Certainly if parents want a religiously biased education for their children (which is the only system currently available in this country as there is not even one primary school that offers a secular humanist ethos) they have a right to it. But it should be separate from the State system, and should be subsidised by the churches and the parents who choose it.
Sr Stanislaus has recommended that the Church should plan to withdraw from running schools.
Somehow I have a feeling that she is not holding her breath: she knows her brothers in Christ.
But the responsibility should not lie with the Churches to withdraw. It is long past the time for the woolly thinking to stop, and for the State to move to end religious dominance (or, as it is called, "patronage") of the primary school system.
It is time for even the most self-deluding to take a long hard look at the institutions of State, including the hospitals and the schools, and compare them with the structures used in a country like France, which is certainly as Catholic as Ireland but where religion of any denomination or mixtures of denominations is not permitted to influence the institutions of State.
It is time for them to stop imagining that our schools system is not as religiously sectarian as ever it was: Church thinking, i.e. sectarian thinking, is all-pervasive where it matters: in the structure and teaching of the syllabus and in the employment conditions for teachers.
And in such circumstances, it is a bad joke for the Department of Education to go down on its knees in gratitude to the Catholic Church which has agreed to be the patron of a school in north Dublin which will scoop all the little pagan immigrants (well, that's what they're implying) off the streets because they can't get into the far superior schools where the future of the nation is safe under the Catholic ethos.
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