3. Difficulty of Applying in School Practice the Principle of Religious Equality. The Protestant Character of the State School. The Inevitability of Such a Fact. The Disadvantageous Position of Catholics and Their Efforts to Escape From It

The system of public education now adopted by the state is doubtless unfavorable, or even harmful, to Roman Catholicism. In establishing it, the state aimed at implementing the basic principle of the federal constitution in the realm of public education—the non-interference of the state in matters of religion, the separation of church and state. Recognizing the school as a public or state institution, it intended to make it an instrument of purely state purposes, without any relation to religion. Yet this goal proved unattainable in practice. First, by the very nature of education and instruction, it proved impossible to completely isolate it from religion, since the latter, as the theoretical foundation of all morality, necessarily constitutes one of the most important elements of education, which aims at implanting and developing moral principles in a person. But even granting religion as a necessary element in the system of education, the state encountered another difficulty, which appeared in the form of the diversity of churches, confessions, and sects. The preference for any one of them would have been a violation of the rights of the others and would have contradicted the Constitution. Therefore the state resolved to find a way out of this difficulty—by recognizing, even for the schools, an impersonal, common religion composed by abstracting from all confessions and churches their particular characteristics, while retaining the essence common to all of Christianity, what is called “Common Christianity.” This religion, in a confessional sense, does not constitute any single confession; it belongs to none of the existing churches and sects; it is an invention of the state itself and therefore can rightfully be called a state religion. As such, it is naturally designed to satisfy equally all the churches, confessions, and sects into which the population is divided. In introducing it, the state did not intend to give any advantage to a single denomination at the expense of others; on the contrary, by so doing it sought to place all of them on an equal level of rights and privileges, to avoid any appearance of privilege of one confession over another, to realize the basic principle of the Constitution requiring equal and free worship for all churches and sects. However, the goal proved unattainable; the state religion could not satisfy everyone, did not guarantee full freedom of worship for all citizens equally, and instead proved favorable to some and harmful to others. This depended on the internal structure of the state itself. If the state consisted of diverse churches, sects, and confessions differing from one another only in particulars of religious doctrine, then a state religion in the form of “Common Christianity” could not have provoked serious objections. But this division runs deeper, and with respect to Catholicism and Protestantism it touches the very internal principle of their life, to the point of mutual exclusion. Therefore they could not meet on any common ground, however abstract and free from particular differences. Because of this, it was impossible to satisfy both by accepting a single common basis for them, and the state necessarily, in adopting its religion, if it did not contradict both, had to favor one or the other, thus coming into contradiction with the rights of the other. So which side did the state take? It took, and could not help but take, the side of Protestantism. A republican state, as the product and expression of the people’s will, necessarily reflects, in all spheres of its life and activity, the principle of the majority that dominates it and is inevitably permeated by it. In this case the majority proves to be Protestantism in its various forms, since the Protestant population constitutes at least six sevenths of the country’s population. And indeed, the Protestant character makes itself felt throughout the entire system of public education, from its general principle to minor details.

Protestantism declares itself in the general principle already in the fact that the school adopted by the state is a secularized school—that is, a school in which education is divorced from an organic connection with religion. This approach to public education does not contradict Protestantism; on the contrary it is the logical consequence of its essential nature as a religion of “faith” separated from “works.” Meanwhile, Roman Catholicism holds to the opposite principle, by which there must be an organic connection between religion and life, between church and school, between faith and works, and therefore a secularized school is an impossibility for Catholicism, standing in contradiction to its primary principle. By adopting a system consonant with the principles of Protestantism and contradicting the views of Catholicism, the state thereby took the side of the former, to the disadvantage of the latter. The school, in this way, proves to be Protestant in principle and consequently hostile to Roman Catholicism. It is Protestant also in the measure of the religious element introduced into the secularized school. That “Common Christianity” which the state adopted as its state religion is doubtless possible only from a Protestant point of view and is in essence a Protestant religion, although abstracted from its various forms. For Roman Catholicism such “Common Christianity” is unthinkable; it recognizes only that Christianity which is embodied in an unchanging, strict, historically developed and strengthened form, outside of which every form, for it, is a deviation from the one true form, is Protestantism and thereby a denial of Catholicism. The particular forms in which this “Common Christianity” is introduced into the school inevitably bear a Protestant character. According to the Massachusetts statute of 1826, adopted in most states, the religious element enters the school in the form of “the Bible, prayers, hymns, and piety”[1]. This is obviously a very vague definition, and in this connection the Roman Catholic press could rightly pose such questions: “What does this mean? Will your children be instructed in religion according to the parliamentary doctrine of the Anglican church, or taught in the complete absurdity of Calvin’s followers? Will they be obliged to deny the divinity of Christ with the Unitarians, and the eternity of punishment with the Universalists? Surely children are not given to us so that we subject them every day to instruction in the wanderings of Methodism, Congregationalism, Presbyterianism, Muggletonianisim, Mormonism, or any of thousands of ‘-isms’ born from that fertile mother of discord, the so-celebrated and notorious reformation? Or must we teach them one part from each of them in turn, depending on which teachers the political upheaval brings to the fore? The idea itself is obviously absurd”[2]. Yet in public schools precisely such an order can exist. The Bible accepted in them is only such a one as Catholics consider corrupted and spurious[3], and the hymns sung are such as, in Catholics’ view, constitute only “blasphemy” against the divine persons[2]. In school it is permitted for Catholic children to use the translation of the Bible recognized by them, the Douay; but the choice of one translation or another is determined primarily by the composition of the teachers, and these, being appointed by the votes of trustees and superintendents elected by the people, are naturally mostly Protestant, and therefore most likely use the commonly accepted Protestant translation. Besides, the use of the Catholic translation of the Bible, given the predominant number of Protestant children, would be an injustice to the latter. Moreover, in schools for reasons of economy there is adopted a Bible which in the view of Catholics is even worse than the rejected King James version, namely a “translation (as a Catholic author says) concocted by a Bible society. The Lord’s Prayer itself in this so-called Bible, in the opinion of all scholars, is false; and if false, as all American translators recognize, then it is blasphemous, and yet in a sectarian spirit of proselytism they forcibly introduce it into schools”[4]. The proselytism of such an arrangement of school affairs is not merely a product of Catholic imagination; it is acknowledged by the Protestants themselves. “We cannot expect the conversion of parents,” says a Protestant pastor; “but between two millstones—the Bible and public laws—we will grind Catholicism out of their children”[5]. Protestantism makes itself felt not only in the Bible adopted and in the arrangement of religious instruction in schools, but also in the secular textbooks themselves. “Veiled mockery of Catholicism,” writes a historian-publicist, “appears in some of them even now. A Catholic child would search in vain even in the best of them for so much as one praiseworthy word about the great ancient church of his fathers, or his glorious faith. We know one cultured young Catholic, educated in public schools, who was long convinced that Catholics had never written anything worth entering into school anthologies. And one could not expect him to have a better opinion”[6]. All these facts do not go beyond the realm of possibility and constitute an inevitable result of the numerical superiority of Protestants both among pupils and among teachers. The collision between Protestantism and Catholicism, as between two opposite principles, is inevitable even in the purely scholarly sphere, and in this collision any reconciliation necessarily works to the advantage of Protestantism, if it is only impossible to eliminate the subject of dispute itself. And its elimination is often completely impossible without harm to science itself. Doubtless, the collision between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism can be strongest in the field of history as a science, whose recent facts consist for the most part of the struggle between these two faiths. “As regards history,” the Roman Catholic press justly declares, “even with the greatest care it is impossible to reproduce it without constantly touching on disputed events and personages, regarding whom Protestants and Catholics can never agree with one another. Can one imagine a history of modern Europe from which were omitted the great facts of the civilizing mission of the Church in the Old World, the establishment of the secular power of the popes, the ‘Peace of God’ and the crusades of the Middle Ages, the great uprising against spiritual power, erroneously called the reformation, the criminal persecution of Irish Catholics, and the French Revolution? At best such a book would be a miserable compilation of numbers and distorted facts, and yet any exposition of these great epochs in European history, for all possible accuracy, would inevitably be an affront to the opinions or prejudices of Protestants or Catholics. If history is ‘philosophy teaching by example,’ then we must seek it somewhere else, not in our public schools”[7]. It was impossible, of course, to avoid these facts in history textbooks, and they are included in them, and their exposition could not appear in any form other than that acknowledged by Catholics, and consequently they inevitably appear with a Protestant tint, or at least in the view of Catholics, for whom all non-Catholic is thereby Protestant. Finally, there were cases when Catholic children found themselves in collision even with school discipline, owing to its Protestant character. Among Catholics there are holidays which Protestants do not recognize and which therefore were not taken into account by the school program, and in such cases Catholic children are placed in a difficult position between two opposite demands—those of the church and the school. “A case that occurred in Vermont,” says a Catholic author, “proves that in some places Catholic children cannot attend public schools and at the same time fulfill the requirements of their religion. For daring to attend Mass on the feast of Corpus Christi in 1875, they were expelled from public schools in Brattleboro. The case was taken to court. But the law(?) upheld the side of the fanatical education department. From this it is clear that a child must cease to be a practicing Catholic, otherwise it will be expelled from public schools”[8]. In general the entire system of public education is hostile to the spirit of Roman Catholicism. “On the basis of the oldest and best Catholic testimony one can say with confidence that with few honorable exceptions, Catholics educated in mixed schools may be respectable and honest people according to the Protestant sense of this word; but as practical, religious, scrupulous observers of the rules of their church they are not. They are Catholics in name, Protestants or half-pagans in reality”[9].

Thus the opposition of Catholics to the present system of public education has real foundations. The school system, contrary to the Constitution of the country, which assures all confessions equal, identical rights of religious conscience, proved, by the operation of the inevitable laws of the rule of the stronger, to be Protestant in all its parts, and as such is doubtless harmful to Roman Catholicism. And yet it exists, and the state, in levying taxes for its support, does not exclude Catholics, thereby laying upon them an indirect obligation to make use of a school which they do not recognize.

“The system of public schools in the United States,” says a Catholic author, “in its present form excludes religion from the school; or if it admits any at all, its influence is in any case hostile to the Catholic faith. In consequence of this Catholics must, with great sacrifices, build and maintain their own schools. But they are also forced to support public schools. They are placed between two evils: 1) if they send their children to public schools, it means exposing their faith to danger; that the atmosphere of the public school paralyzes the love of a Catholic child for the religion of his fathers has never been refuted; 2) if, on the other hand, they build their own Catholic schools, it means subjecting themselves to a double tax. In this respect the Catholic element suffers a glaring injustice. It bears a tax for the support of institutions whose use is forbidden by conscience”[10].

It is understandable that Catholics strive to escape this difficult situation, and the prolonged agitation of the Catholic press against the existing system is an expression of these efforts. The goal of their agitation is to achieve such an arrangement by which Catholics could make use of public schools without violating the requirements of their conscience. They seek to ensure that “the fund of public schools would be distributed between Catholics and Protestants on such a fair basis that each religious organization could have its own school and conduct religious instruction according to its own method”[11]. “Allocate,” says a Catholic newspaper, “from public funds for the support of Catholic schools a sum proportionate to the number of children studying in them, and entrust the selection of teachers, instruction, discipline, and all internal management to the Catholic educational authorities, and then you can, in all other respects, in all reasonable matters, leave them as they are, under public control and management, under the supervision of public committees, trustees, superintendents, if you wish”[12].