2. Opposition of Roman Catholicism to the Adopted System and its Foundations. The Fundamental Distinction Between the Systems of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Education According to the Catholic View. The Roman Catholic Church’s Efforts to Isolate the Catholic Population From the Influence of Protestantism. Conflict With the State and Struggle Against it. (Cont.) (2)

The dispute was finally decided by law of April 11, 1842, in which the paragraph concerning the religious question itself was formulated thus: “No school shall have a right to receive a portion of the school fund if there are taught, inculcated, or professed in it religious doctrines or teachings of any separate Christian or other religious sect, or if there are used books containing writings favorable or hostile to the separate doctrines or teachings of any Christian or other religious sect. But nothing contained in this provision shall empower the ‘Department of Education’ to exclude Holy Scripture, without notes or interpretations, or selections from it, from any of the schools coming under this provision”[1].

The effect of this law preserves its full force to the present time. But it evidently did not resolve the disputed question, but only, so to speak, skirted it, and naturally did not satisfy the chief disputing party—the Roman Catholics. The dispute has not ceased from that time until the present, only weakening occasionally only to flare up again with new force. Catholics constantly sought occasions to begin agitation against the system of school education. Thus in 1853, a Roman Catholic pastor, Keigley, brought a complaint to the school superintendent in which he says that in many public schools the religion and faith of Catholic children are offended by forcing them to participate in prayers and to read and memorize parts of the Bible translation which the Catholic church does not recognize; that once a female teacher ordered one of her students, a twelve-year-old boy, to read and study the “Protestant Testament,” and when he declined to obey such an order, based on his reluctance to violate the commands of his parents and the rules of his religion, she severely punished him and shamefully expelled him from school[2]. This complaint naturally led to new debates and new discussions of the question concerning a way out of the difficulty, but again without success.

To show the state of the disputed question at present, it suffices to cite several excerpts from Catholic journals that tirelessly agitate against the school system they abhor. “All education,” in the opinion of Catholics, “should be religious and intended to educate the child for an eternal purpose”[3]; therefore “secular education, in order to achieve its purpose, must be inseparable from and, so to speak, intermixed with religious instruction, so that the student, as his mental capacities develop with years, could be gradually but firmly led to knowledge of those divine truths which the church teaches its children, and so that his character would thus be internally formed on a true Christian foundation”[4]. Granting that “religion is an essential element in education, we come to the question: to whom belongs the right to teach it? Certainly not to the state, because according to our theory of government, the state knows no religion, and in no way can have claims to apostolic power to preach and teach the Gospel to peoples. This power is far higher than all existing governments. That the state is or should be religious in the character and conduct of its actions cannot be denied; but it must borrow this character from the teaching of the church and its individual members, and this does not give it the right to prescribe to the church what it should teach or allow to be taught, because the power of the church to teach comes from God, and the power of the state from man”[5]. “We consider education to be a function of the church, not of the state, and therefore we do not accept and will not accept the state as an educator”[6]. Meanwhile, according to the existing system, education is taken by the state as its own function, and moreover the state already intrudes completely into a domain not belonging to it, prescribing a certain system of religious instruction in the form of Bible reading, sacred hymns, and religious exercises. If the very idea of an educating state contradicts Catholic views, then the religion prescribed to them in school is, in their view, direct blasphemy and violation of their rights of conscience. “In the Declaration of Independence it is clearly designated among the inalienable rights of man—his life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A child is my highest happiness and I must have the freedom to educate him as my conception of happiness requires. What value has freedom for me when I am forced to send my child to a public school where he will hear the reading of the Bible, which I, in the best sense, consider to be a corrupted and mistaken copy of Holy Scripture, and will be obliged to repeat prayers and hymns which—alas—are often nothing but blasphemy against the Name of Him Who died on the cross for the redemption of mankind”?[7]. But even the exclusion of the Bible translation not recognized by Catholics would not at all have satisfied them. “The exclusion of the Bible would not help the matter. It would only make the schools purely secular, which would be worse than making them Protestant, because in regard to the state, society, morality, all interests of this world, we consider Protestantism better than the absence of all religion. The question lies deeper than the reading or not reading of the Bible in schools, in this translation or another. Of course, our church does not approve the Protestant translation of the Bible as an incorrect translation of a corrupted text; but its exclusion from public schools in no way would eliminate our objection to them”[8]. Although in principle we decidedly oppose the reading of the Bible in our public schools, our main objection is directed against the schools themselves[9]. Summing up their objections against the existing system of public schools, the leading Roman Catholic journal formulates them in the following propositions: “1) all education should be founded and conducted on true religious principles; 2) the state has no right to teach religion in its schools; 3) state or public schools without religion would be godless; 4) as such, they are incapable of developing the character of our children or teaching them morality in accordance with the Christian principle; 5) striving to avoid what is called sectarianism, they undermine even the aims of merely secular education”[10].

It is thus clear that Catholics rise up not only against the system or program of public education as it is now established, but rise up against the very principle of state education, considering the latter to be a matter of the church rather than the state. State education they consider not only as not achieving the goals of education, but as directly hostile to that goal—as far as Catholics are concerned. It naturally follows now to ask: does this opposition of Catholics to the public school in its present form have a real foundation, or is it only a manifestation of the usual policy of Roman Catholicism by which it always and everywhere struggles with the state for predominance and power in different spheres of public and political life? In the subject we are discussing, these two motives do not exclude each other; rather they so closely converge that the difference between them is determined more by time than by essence. They serve one for the other; the first provides more or less justificatory material for agitation, while the second, using this material, acts in favor of the fundamental Roman Catholic principle—predominance in the state.