Madam, – Was it editorial mischief that led to the side-by-side placing of two reports in page 8 of Thursday’s edition? One reported the Catholic primate’s public insistence on educational apartheid in the name of the “Catholic ethos”, while beside it stood the sad picture of the funeral of a young soldier, murdered by one of the many vile offshoots of the IRA, and who was one of the three victims of two separate attacks on members of security forces in Northern Ireland.
It seems likely that the perpetrators of these outrages at some stage of their youth attended schools in which the cardinal’s “Catholic ethos” held sway, and therefore did not meet and mingle with their non-Catholic contemporaries during this most formative period of their development.
What is this “faith school” tenet, so adamantly held on to by successive senior Roman Catholic (and, be it said) Protestant dignitaries? Faith, of its nature, is not something that can be taught. But what can be instilled into young minds is a sense of divisiveness and particularity which inevitably leads to alienation, distrust and active dislike as the years pass and political manipulation turns these failings into livid intolerance and eventual bloody violence, the like of which has tragically surfaced once more at the gates of Masserene Barracks and in a quiet suburb of Craigavon.
An ethos that has encompassed the cover-up of many decades of shocking child abuse by members of the Roman Catholic clergy is hardly one which recommends itself to right-minded people who would wish to see their children schooled alongside other children of differing faiths. Their wish is for these youngsters to grow up together, free from teachings and disciplines which are strongly against their proper sharing of each other’s joys, dreams and ambitions – the birthright of the young, and a sound foundation for a future in which mutual knowledge and respect have been properly nurtured, free from sectarian and triumphalist brainwashing.
If the cardinal is so obsessed with inculcating in the impressionable young an ethos which his church favours, then let him and his church set up extra-curricular and separate classes, outside normal school hours, and open on a voluntary basis to willing young members of his congregation. Is his particular brand of “faith” so insecure and unattractive to the young as to require special and exclusive schooling for these eager and questioning minds? Or is it that these very minds, free of heavily slanted “faith” indoctrination, are considered to be unlikely to embrace, at a more mature stage, this so-called ethos which the cardinal and his church are so insistent on imposing on them?
Young people deserve better than this. – Yours, etc,