Catholic Education: It Is On

When the story broke about the Archdiocese of Southwark standing up for children in Catholic Schools, I recognised this could be a crunch point for Catholic education in the UK.

The pressure on Catholic schools has been slowly increasing, just as it did before Catholic adoption agencies were forced to close. The problem is, Catholic Schools face an enemy on the inside: teachers who are antagonistic to the Catholic ethos they agree to promote.

Faced with a forced closure on Thursday, due to striking staff who said they were “fighting for inclusive education” and against a “very concerning precedent for LGBT rights and representation in schools”, the Archdiocese has come out fighting!

Writing in The Catholic Network, Joseph Kelly says:

It seems hard to accept that the school chose to emphasise simply that this was an obviously well-known and talented new writer, without giving any thought to the material he represented.

Kelly continues:

it is perfectly in order for a Catholic school to decide what is appropriate or even permissible in a Catholic school, and in fact it has not only a legal obligation to do so but also a deeper moral obligation to act as pastors to the teachers, pupils and families who have associated themselves to the school precisely because of its avowed Catholic ethos.

Given that Catholic schools have a perfect right to sustain their ethos, there can be little complaint about refusing a platform to a high profile LBGTQ+ rights author. So the procedural and legal aspects of the sackings are the main focus of today’s strike action, though undoubtedly this will re-ignite far wider debates about the future of Catholic schools, and religious education across the UK generally.

Kelly goes on to point out that anyone with half a brain has been able to recognise the great danger of ‘rendering unto Caesar’ in our schools. The trade off of accepting government funding was always going to be that the government would inevitably – and quite justifiably – start imposing its secular values on Catholic principles.

He recognises the reality that it can be hard to sustain a Catholic ethos when many schools have a large proportion of teachers and staff, and an even larger proportion of pupils, who are non-Catholic or even antagonistic to faith matters.

He also hints at the fact that quite a few teachers should be a bit frightened now. If they have been pushing a secular agenda, as Gemma Ackred and Philip Maxfield have been at Saint Thomas More School here in Westcliff-on-Sea, they might find they soon have to compete in a much wider field than the comfortable Catholic sector. Their constant undermining of Catholic principles may not be quite as clever as they thought then!

Kelly finishes his piece like this:

It seems to me that if we can’t be fully Catholic, then we really should just call it a day. Trying to muddle through and juggle conflicting agendas just isn’t practical or achievable. That’s not a religious or evangelical position, it’s just a pragmatic one. If you’re going to put a sign on the gate saying what’s inside, then it has to be that.

Meanwhile, the Archdiocese don't pull any punches in their latest statement where they state:

the narrative employs sexual imagery which we believe is not appropriate for school age pupils in a Catholic context. The use of this prayer in this way, and for this to be promoted in a Catholic school, is a source of deep disquiet...It is important to record again that sexual orientation is not, and never was, the reason for concern. It is the content of the material. If a passage such as that above had been written from a heterosexual perspective, it would have been equally unacceptable.

A huge thank you to the Archdiocese for standing up for children and the faith.

Interestingly, this also means the Archdiocese is standing up to the dreadful Catholic Education Service, who wasted no time in stabbing the Archdiocese in the back (their actions are detailed in my post here). This is actually drawing blood against the CES who backed the teachers instead of the diocesan education department. Despite all the excerpts of the books made available on social media in which it was clear that the author was going to talk about a book in which there was a blasphemous parody of the Lord’s Prayer, the CES chose not to defend the faith but to defend the protesting members of staff and governing body. There can be no doubt that the CES are the crux of the problem. When are the CES actually going to be held accountable by the Bishops, or will individual Bishops have to take matters into their own hands, such as +John Wilson has done here?

It does have to be said that we are only in this position because, in an attempt to "be kind", Catholic authorities have failed to speak to this issue clearly. They have slowly and steadily ceded their moral authority to the secular culture and failed to care enough about Catholic ethos.

While it is fantastic to see the Archdiocese standing up to this agenda, it is also worth noting that it may just be too late!