By Patrick Murtha

The public school system has received no shortage of flack over the past years. And it would be foolish to say that the cause was not just: lewd, sexually explicit, and even blasphemous literature, obscene sex education, the covert propaganda of transgenderism, school boards shutting out parents. These realities, as well as others, have stimulated an exodus of students, and have threatened to gut or to hollow or, at the very least, make lean the so-called “hallowed halls of learning.” But these faults in modern public education are not themselves the true problems. They are no more the true problem of public education than a cough is the true problem of a cold or of Covid. They are symptoms, serious symptoms, but only symptoms nonetheless; they are not the source of the problem. But it has become one of the disorders of modern man to confuse the symptom for the source. And so, parents become enraged at the literary diet their children consume—and rightly so; parents and the general public become infuriated at the arrogance of school boards when they are barred and banned from conversations about their own children—and rightly so. But to scorn the symptoms, to attempt to find a solution for the symptoms, but not to be incensed at the source and not to attempt to find a solution for the source is part of this modern madness.

The root of the evil that has come to fruition today dates back not merely a decade but nearly two centuries in the United States. It can, not without good reason, be argued that the heart of the problem dates even farther back, to the time when Protestants first stole the keys to the Catholic colleges and the Catholic curriculum that had made Catholic education the envy of the centuries. In the United States there has never been a time when the state afforded the citizens the opportunity of a solid education. In the earliest days of the country, the schools were religious, but only in a narrow sense—they taught a sort of religion. Certainly the Bible was a key text and God’s name flowed regularly off the tongue of every teacher and was repeated by every student—not in that vulgar or blasphemous manner His name is regularly mentioned in schools today; but the religion was no sensible or real religion.. It was a false religion: Calvinist, Episcopalian, Methodist, Unitarian. And under those conditions, the Catholic parent endangered his child’s soul to send his child’s body to a school that taught a God that was not God. This the Catholic bishops in the U.S. acknowledged at the First Provincial Council of Baltimore in 1829, writing in their pastoral letter, “[T]he school-boy can scarcely find a book in which some one or more of our institutions or practices is not exhibited far otherwise than it really is, and greatly to our disadvantage: the entire system of education is thus tinged through its whole course; and history itself has been distorted to our serious injury.” Fourteen years later, at the Fourth Provincial Council, the Bishops, without mincing words, warned again against the danger of a Protestant education: “We have seen with serious alarm, efforts made to poison the fountains of public education, by giving it a sectarian hue, and accustoming children to the use of a version of the Bible made under sectarian bias, and placing in their hands books of various kinds replete with offensive and dangerous matter… We admonish parents of the awful account they must give at the divine tribunal, should their children, by their neglect or connivance, be imbued with false principles and led away from the path of salvation.” Such already were the warnings by the Catholic bishops in 1829 and 1843! And these warnings continued throughout the rest of the Provincial Councils, and then into the three Plenary Councils of Baltimore. How often nostalgia hypnotizes the mind with a hallucination of a better and more moral age!

Under the influence of Horace Mann, the schools were diverted into another direction: tossing even the false God, the false Christ, from the classrooms. In the name of “getting along,” in the name of religious liberty, Secularism was enthroned in the school-master’s chair. Mann, a fellow who seemed “moral” enough, who appeared to have the vestures of virtue and religion—I mean, again, a general and shallow religion—promoted personal religion, that notion of some “superior being” arising out of the inner chasms of the soul or the gut. But for him, “organized religion” was not a matter of the classroom, but only for the individual heart. The Bible was permitted, but only as a literary text promoting general morality and not the knowledge of God, and definitely not for the propagation of a particular religion. In other words, the Word of God was to lead to “good deeds” without leading to a particular deity. This idea of Mann was, and still is, rooted in liberalism, one of whose worst symptoms was, and still is, religious liberty. The secularizing of schools, the segregating of God from the daily studies of the student, perverts the idea not only of learning, implicitly and explicitly saying that God is not relevant to reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also not relevant to material life and living. If reading and writing and arithmetic have such value that it must be studied daily and yet religion is assigned merely to Sunday, or to a catechism class, then what lesson does it teach the youth?

The Catholic, in regarding this question of education, seems caught in a conundrum: should the Catholic angle towards Scylla or Charybdis? The Catholic, in the words of that great American idiom, is “caught between a rock and a hard place.” And rhetoricians will employ this “either…or…” as a dichotomy: would you rather a Protestant teach your child, at least he will get some semblance of religion and morality, or a secularist who may possibly give a veneer of natural virtue? Are these the only two options? But the rhetorician in this sense is a sophist. Concerned more with winning an argument than with truth, he presents the options as if there were only two. This is a false dichotomy. There can never be, in any moral decision, only two evil choices: how can God be good or just if He permits only two options, and both evil and both leading, very possibly, to damnation? God forbid! It cannot be. There must be a third option, and possibly a fourth: a Catholic school, or homeschool at least. In this particular era, there are very few Catholics, I believe (maybe naively so), who will risk their child’s soul by sending him to a Protestant school, to have his faith be tainted by adulterated doctrines. The great temptation, I suppose, lies not with Scylla, that multi-headed monster who reaches out to pluck the sailors from their boats and devour them; but the greater temptation lurks with Charybdis, that monster of the deep, hidden beneath the water, gulping down whole ships and vomiting up mere shards of timber. Too often, even with the terrible symptoms of today, Catholics, without sufficient and significant reasons, send their children to a public school.

The problem, I think, lies in a loss of, or a blindness towards, the principles of Catholicism and education. What Catholic parents—or any parent at all, worthy of the name parent—does not desire the best for their child? Quintilian, the famous teacher of orators, though a pagan, says as much: “I would, therefore, have a father conceive the highest hopes of his son from the moment of his birth” (Institutio Oratoria. I.1.). And is it not Christ who says, “Among yourselves, if a father is asked by his son for bread, will he give him a stone? Or a fish, will he give him a snake instead of a fish? Or if he asked for an egg, will he give him a scorpion?” (Luke 11: 11-12). Just as no one does anything without seeing some apparent good, so no parent sends his child to the public school without some thought of seeming goodness. But what is this goodness? To one, it is participation in sports. To another, more variety of classes. To another, more options for college. The reasons are nearly as infinite as human excuses. But the reasons are principally material, disregarding the spiritual; primarily temporal, devaluing the eternal. For what is a football season in relation to eternity? What good is landing scholarships to Harvard or Yale if the soul sinks into Hell? These must be, in the Catholic conscience, if the Catholic truly believes in eternity, among the first considerations. But the excuses themselves indicate a certain secular spirit or a materialistic attitude: “How is a man the better for it, if he gains the whole world at the cost of losing his own soul?” (Mt. 16: 26). The parent is short-sighted, at the very least. To lose one’s own soul, I dare say, is a careless and appalling thing; to lose another’s is callous, cruel, and contemptible. “How would your hearts be torn with grief did you foresee, that through eternity those objects of all your best feelings should be cast into outward darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth! ... But, dearly beloved, this is too frequently the necessary consequence of a neglected or an improper education. God has made you guardians of those children to lead them to His service upon earth, that they might become saints in Heaven” (Pastoral Letter, 1829). What conscientious and vigilant parent does not frequently shudder at and even lose sleep over those terrible words of the Eternal Judge: “And if anyone hurts the conscience of one of these little ones that believes in me, he had better have been drowned in the depths of the sea, with a mill-stone hung about his neck” (Mt. 18:6).

The great danger and evil of secularism in the school, as well as in society, is not my own concoction. My mind does not arrive at this judgment solely on its own, even though it has often seen its paganized and atheistic fruit in students once Catholic. I hold it most strongly by the authority of the Church through the magisterium of the popes. Leo XIII, in no fewer than eight different encyclicals, rejected the notion that a school can separate God and religion from education. (These schools were often called “mixed” or “neutral.”) “To divorce these,” writes the pope, “is to wish that youth should be neutral in regards its duties to God; a system of education in itself fallacious and particularly fatal in tender years, for it opens the door to atheism and closes it on religion” (Nobilissima Gallorum Gens, 1884). He says that such an education not only risks the child “drinking in the poison of impiety” (Sapientiae Christianae, 1890) but “prepares, not defenders of the nation, but a plague and a scourge on the human race. Once God is suppressed, what can keep young people dutiful or recall them when they have strayed from the path of virtue and fall into the abyss of vice?” (Militantis Ecclesiae, 1897). Pius X, following in his predecessor’s footsteps, issues similar warnings, saying, “There both teachers’ lips and students’ ears are inclined to godlessness. We are referring to those schools which are unjustly called neutral or lay. In reality, they are nothing more than the stronghold of the powers of darkness” (Editae Saepe, 1910). Pius XI encourages founding schools with religious instruction, saying that without them they “quickly become, by logical and psychological necessity, pagan things” (Non Abbiamo Bisogno, 1931), and warns that this wrenching of Christ from the curriculum “foster[s] materialism which is the fertile soil of Communism” (Divini Redemptoris, 1937). In six different encyclicals, Pius XI condemned this deviant divorce of the schools from God and promoted the necessity of Catholic education, writing in Divini Illius Magistri (1929)—a jewel of the Catholic ideal of education, “From this it follows that the so-called ‘neutral’ or ‘lay’ school, from which religion is excluded, is contrary to the fundamental principles of education. Such a school moreover cannot exist in practice; it is bound to become irreligious. There is no need to repeat what Our Predecessors have declared on this point, especially Pius IX and Leo XIII, at times when laicism was beginning in a special manner to infest the public school. We renew and confirm their declarations, as well as the Sacred Canons in which the frequenting of non-Catholic schools, whether neutral or mixed, those namely which are open to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, is forbidden for Catholic children, and can be at most tolerated, on the approval of the Ordinary alone, under determined circumstances of place and time, and with special precautions.” And Pius XII, in speeches—many of which can be found in volumes of The Pope Speaks—and encyclicals, decries this same aberration. So the popes taught until the Second Vatican Council after which the voice of the pontiffs became enfeebled, devitalized, and wearisome with the specter of so-called dialogue which is poor excuse for spiritual pacificism. Paul VI’s anxiety, for example, was for immigrants “los[ing] their respect for the priceless cultural heritage of their native land” and “reminding [all men of good will] that civil progress and economic development are the only road to peace” (Populorum Progressio, 1967). What is culture and economy and civil society without Christ, but tepid, vapid, and dead! How little is said of losing the Faith and the consequence of that, losing the soul!

In the same spirit of the pre-Vatican II pontiffs, the 1917 Code of Canon Law is most explicit about “the most grave obligation to take care as far as [the parents] are able for the education of children, both religious and moral, as well as physical and civil, and of providing them with temporal goods” (Can. 1113). This is similar to the current Canon 1136: “Parents have the most grave duty and the primary right to take care as best they can for the physical, social, cultural, moral, and religious education of their offspring.” This is another instance of the post-Conciliar Rome switching priorities: before the Council, religious and moral education held the opening thought; after the Council, they hold the tail-end of the sentence. While Canon 1113 (1917) and Canon 1136 (1983) seem similar, if having same words is all that matters and order is no concern, the Johanno-Pauline Code is missing one of the vital pieces that the Church, in her right as parent to the spiritual life of the child, issued: “Catholic children should not frequent non-Catholic, neutral, or mixed schools, namely those that allow non-Catholics to attend. Only local Ordinaries can make decisions in accord with the instructive norms from the Apostolic See concerning circumstances of things and any necessary precautions that will prevent the danger of perversion, [and] whether these things can be tolerated and such schools used” (Can. 1374). This law specifies that the parent or the student, not only in grammar and secondary schools, but also in colleges and universities, must obtain permission from the diocesan bishop to attend a non-Catholic school. So immediate and so grave is the menace of secularism to pervert peace of soul and the preservation of faith, that this permission must be sought from the custodians of the faith, from those Fathers of the spiritual life in their dioceses. Archbishop Joseph Ritter, whom Time magazine reported to be a progressive in the Council, was no progressive in his reminder to Catholics of their obligation in 1960:

We are indeed gratified and pleased to see so many high school graduates decide to pursue higher studies… At the same time, however, we are alarmed and grieved at the number of graduates who are selecting secular and non-Catholic colleges… Many do not follow the requirements of the law that they seek our permission which is to be secured through their devoted pastors to attend these secular schools… we remind them and their parents that they must always be far more concerned about nurturing and protecting their Faith than they are about pursuing higher studies… Parents and students have, therefore, the grave responsibility of choosing Catholic colleges where the atmosphere and the teaching are conducive to the proper end of Christian education. Only a grave reason will excuse this responsibility. (Canon Law Digest, 1963)

And lest the should not frequent in the translation of the Canon confuse a person into thinking that this law is more or less a suggestion, a strong recommendation, Rome issued specific guidance on the circumstances when permission can be granted, such as for a lack of a Catholic school or for a lack of suitability. But as Fr. Augustine clarifies in his Commentary on Canon Law (1923):

This suitability must not be identified with mere fashionableness, for there is no proportion between danger to faith and “stylishness.” Hence the instruction continues: “Parents who neglect to give this necessary Christian training and instruction to their children, or who permit them to go to schools in which the ruin of their souls is inevitable, or, finally, who send them to the public schools without sufficient cause and without taking the necessary precautions to render the danger of perversion remote, and do so while there is a good and well-equipped Catholic school in the place, and while they have means to send them elsewhere to be educated;—such parents, if obstinate, cannot be absolved, as is evident from the moral teachings of the Church.”

For such is the attitude of the Church: “Make it your first care to find the kingdom of God, and his approval, and all these things shall be yours without the asking” (Mt. 6:33).

The current code has softened the law, and by softening the law has lost the urgency and the justification. First, it is stated that “Parents must possess a true freedom in choosing schools” (Can. 797)—is this freedom to choose only among Catholic schools or license to choose any school? It is not specified, though the following Canon might suggest the former: “Parents are to entrust their children to schools which provide a Catholic education. If they are unable to do this, they are obliged to take care that suitable education is provided for their children outside the schools” (Can. 798). This final Canon in no way carries the weight of its former counterpart Canon 1374 (1917). While Canon 798 (1983) states the obligation, there is no insistence, there is no mention of the explicit danger, there is no consequence. The urgency and the significance of the law is watered down. And, for legalists and literalists always looking for a loophole, Canon 797, with its ambiguous pledge of freedom, counters the obligation of Canon 798 to choose rightly.

If the current Canons create an ambiguous situation, Archbishop Lefebvre, in his defense of orthodoxy, is not ambivalent in the least. If a Catholic truly believes that Christ is king of all and everything, then he must hold there is a great danger to faith, and if danger to faith, then danger to the salvation of the soul, if Christ is removed from even one subject, one class, one moment of life of a Catholic student. It is for this reason that Archbishop Lefebvre insists on Catholic schools and insists that parents be willing to make great and significant sacrifices for the Catholic education of their children. “Do not hesitate,” says the Archbishop in a sermon on July 27, 1980, “to send your children, however far away it may be, to Catholic schools.” This imperative is no small thing: protecting reason, religion, salvation. How trite are the excuses that excuse a Catholic child for attending a public school: sports, friends, college opportunities. This imperative is for a great and significant thing: that the Catholic may grow in reason and wisdom and virtue in his youth, that with these virtues he may work out his salvation in the society in which he lives his adult life, and that he may attain salvation for his soul and the souls of those entrusted to him. But with the principles of secularism tainting the young scholar, the pupil runs no remote risk of converting into a pagan, or worse an atheist. If Christ is expelled from the classroom, there should be no surprise to find no Christian principles in the classroom. It should be no surprise to find the young apostatizing, from both faith and reason; doubting not only the definitions of doctrines they cannot see but even definitions in nature that they can see. And if a student survives the onslaught of immorality and dechristianization, which no doubt some have, it must be chalked up to another miracle of grace. Archbishop Lefebvre says:

No doubt we would need many more priests, many more Catholic teachers, but whatever it may be, we shall bend all our efforts, I am sure, and you will do the same, to refound Catholic schools, so that your children, after a careful upbringing at home, may not be corrupted in the schools and put you in a hopeless situation. How many parents tell us this—by letter and in person! Their children are fine until about the age of ten, or twelve or fifteen and then—all of a sudden—they fall away from the straight and narrow path of faith and morals. Parents are grief-stricken at this terrible situation—the ruin of mind and heart. (Sermon on July 27, 1980)

 

IMAGES: Schoolboy, Young Girl Reading, Albert Anker, 1883.