Secularism And Religion

Sir, - I have long admired Mgr Denis Faul for his courage in standing up to the violent minority within his own Northern nationalist…

Sir, - I have long admired Mgr Denis Faul for his courage in standing up to the violent minority within his own Northern nationalist community. Notwithstanding his Catholic fundamentalism, if forced to choose between him and the "non-sectarian" followers of Tom Paine who are unapologetic about murdering Protestants as long as they can label them "Crown forces" or some such, I will opt for Mgr Faul every time.

However, his article on Catholic education (Rite and Reason, December 1st), with its remarks about integrated and multi-denominational schools, cannot go unchallenged. He sees the advocates of these schools as a "scoffing multitude" who mock others for going to Mass or for sending their children to Catholic schools.

As one who was involved in the setting up of a multi-denominational primary school and whose children have attended it for 14 years, I can confidently state that I have never heard anyone involved in such a school utter a word in denigration of either the religious practice or the choice of school of another person. Such an attitude would violate the ideal of respect for difference on which these schools are founded.

Neither have I heard any of the participants speak of those of different beliefs with the air of moral superiority which Mgr Faul adopts towards his targets, whom he sees as motivated solely by "personal pleasure, greed and pride".

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Integrated education may not be the solution to the problem in Northern Ireland, but can he not allow that many parents, mistakenly or not, were moved to support it from a desire to make a personal contribution to overcoming sectarian barriers? Participants in multi-denominational school projects have come from all faiths and none, with a wide range of mostly idealistic motives even if that idealism often extends no further than their children's welfare. Some are Catholics who have been over-exposed to the type of dogmatic certitudes espoused by Mgr Faul and wish their children to meet adults with somewhat more open minds. (The acquisition of an accent is usually quite low on the list of priorities).

Mgr Faul's views on the unique merits of Catholic education itself are just as questionable. According to him, above the academic and cultural levels is the third level "where the will is trained to resist evil and be holy". Imbued with this resistance, Catholic students "may do wrong, even do evil but they do not `think wrong'. When they see a sin, they call it a sin, not a virtue, as the modern media do". It is unclear if he is here describing Catholic education as commonly practised or as a textbook ideal. If the former, it should be possible to find some evidence that it confers a greater resistance to evil than do other systems. A good test is to hand: the comparative responses of the Christian churches to the crime of the century, the Nazi murder of Europe's Jews. Here there is little to choose between the records of Catholics and Lutherans. Catholic Austria and Bavaria - which had fought the regime successfully to have crucifixes retained in classrooms - were, to quote historian Ian Kershaw, "bastions of vicious popular anti-semitism". An authority on the Holocaust, Daniel Goldhagen, has shown how Catholic publications were indistinguishable from Nazi ones in calling for the elimination of the Jewish "alien bodies" from Germany. At a time when Germany was flooded with rumours that Jews in the conquered East were being shot in tens of thousands, and German Jews were being deported to their deaths, not a single official Catholic spokesman protested. Neither had the Church protested against the 1933 boycott of Jews, the Nuremberg racial laws or Kristallnacht.

Mgr Faul's assertion that Catholic students are in some way immunised against committing genocide is highly dubious when one considers how many graduates of his "Catholic physics" and "Catholic chemistry" there must have been among those who prepared the Zyklon B pellets for the gas chambers, who calculated the optimum number of bodies for suffocation at any one time or who carried out heinous experiments on prisoners. Closer to home, those ethnic warriors with a Catholic education who tried to cleanse the Fermanagh border of Protestants in the 1980s, although now quiescent, show few signs of recognising their deeds as sinful. In fact, the only paramilitaries who have uttered words of repentance were the loyalists in their ceasefire declaration of 1994. Republicans continue to adopt a tone of high moral self-righteousness towards their actions.

Surely the case for Catholic education must rest on a more secure foundation than that set out by Mgr Faul. Hubris in a matter like this is not an attractive trait. Parents choosing a Catholic education for their children might expect that among the virtues imparted to them would be that of humility which recognises that no one tradition has a monopoly of moral virtue or of insurances against evil. - Yours, etc., Dermot Meleady,

Dublin 3.