Part 5. Conflict of Roman Catholicism With the State in the Sphere of Public Education (Cont.) (3)

To show the state of the disputed question at the present time, it is sufficient to cite several excerpts from Catholic journals, which tirelessly agitate against the school system they detest. “All education, in the opinion of Catholics, should be religious and designed to educate the child for an eternal purpose”;[1] therefore, “secular education, to achieve its aim, should be inseparable from and, so to speak, intermingled with religious instruction, so that the student, as his intellectual abilities develop with years, might gradually but steadily be led to the knowledge of those divine truths which the Church teaches to its children, and so that his character might thus be internally formed on a true Christian foundation.”[2] Granting that “religion is an essential element in education, we come to the question: to whom does the right to teach it belong? Certainly not to the state, because, according to our theory of government, the state knows not religion, and in no way can claim apostolic authority to preach and teach the Gospel to peoples. This authority is far above all existing governments. That the state is or should be religious in the mode and character of its actions cannot be denied; but it must derive this character from the teachings 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 Church’s authority to teach comes from God, while the state’s authority comes from man.”[3] “We consider education a function of the Church, not of the state, and therefore we do not accept and will not accept the state as an educator.”[4] Meanwhile, according to the existing system, the state has taken education into its own hands as its proper function, and moreover the state has already completely entered into a sphere that does not belong 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 in schools is, in their view, direct blasphemy and a violation of the rights of conscience. “In the Declaration of Independence it is clearly marked among the inalienable rights of man—his life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For me the child is the highest happiness and I must have the freedom to raise him as my understanding 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 a corrupted and incorrect 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?”[5] But even the exclusion of the Bible translation not recognized by Catholics would not satisfy them in the least. “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 relation to the state, society, morality, all the interests of this world, we consider Protestantism better than the absence of all religion. The question lies deeper than reading or not reading the Bible in schools, in one translation or another. Certainly our Church does not approve of the Protestant translation of the Bible as an incorrect translation of a corrupted text; but its exclusion from public schools would in no way eliminate our objection to them.”[6] “Although in principle we decidedly oppose the reading of the Bible in our public schools, our principal objection is directed against the schools themselves.”[7] Summarizing their objections to the existing system of public schools, a leading Roman Catholic journal formulates them in the following propositions: “1) all education should be based on and conducted according to true religious principles; 2) the state has no right to teach religion in its schools; 3) public or state schools without religion would be godless; 4) as such, they are incapable of forming the character of our children or teaching them morality in accordance with Christian principle; 5) in trying to avoid what is called sectarianism, they undermine even the aims of purely secular education.”[8]

It is thus clear that the Catholics are not only opposed to the system or program of public education as it is now constituted, but are opposed to the very principle of state education, considering the latter to be a matter of the Church, not the state. State education they consider not only as failing to achieve the aim of education, but as directly hostile to that aim—with regard to Catholics, of course. Naturally the question now arises: does this opposition of Catholics to the state school in its present form have real grounds, or is it merely a manifestation of the usual policy of Roman Catholicism, by which it always and everywhere struggles with the state for predominance and dominion in various spheres of public and political life? In the matter under our consideration, these two motives do not exclude each other; on the contrary, they come so closely together that their difference is more a matter of time than of essence. They serve one another: the first provides more or less plausible material for agitation, while the latter, making use of this material, acts in favor of the basic Roman Catholic principle—predominance in the state.

XIX

The system of public education now adopted by the state is undoubtedly disadvantageous or even harmful to Roman Catholicism. In establishing it, the state had in view the realization of the fundamental principle of the federal Constitution—non-interference of the state in religious matters, the separation of state and religion; and therefore, 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. But such a purpose proved unattainable in practice. First of all, from the very nature of education and learning, it proved impossible to completely isolate it from religion, since the latter, as the theoretical foundation of all morality, must necessarily constitute one of the most important elements of education aimed at the implantation and development of moral principles in a person. But even in recognizing religion as a necessary element in the system of education, the state encountered another difficulty, which presented itself in the form of the diversity of churches, denominations, and sects. The preference of any one of them would have been a violation of the rights of others and again would have contradicted the Constitution. Therefore the state resolved to find a way out of this difficulty—in the recognition for the school of a depersonalized, general religion made up of the withdrawal from all denominations and churches of their particular peculiarities, with the retention of the essence common to all of them: Christianity, in recognition of so-called “Common Christianity.” This religion, in the denominational sense, does not constitute any single denomination; it does not belong to any of the existing churches and sects; it is an invention of the state itself and therefore rightfully may be called a state religion. As such, it is naturally calculated to satisfy equally all the churches, denominations, and sects into which the population is divided. In introducing it, the state did not intend to give advantage to any one denomination at the expense of others; on the contrary, by this very means it sought to place them all on an equal level of rights and privileges, to avoid any shadow of privilege of one denomination over another, to realize the fundamental principle of the Constitution requiring equal and free profession for all churches and sects. The aim, however, proved unattained; the state religion could not satisfy everyone, did not provide a guarantee of complete freedom of religious profession for all citizens equally, and on the contrary proved favorable to some and harmful to others. This depended on the internal composition of the state itself. Had the state consisted of a diversity of such churches, sects, and denominations that differed from each other only in particulars of denominational teaching, then the state religion in the form of “Common Christianity” would not have been able to provoke any fundamental objections. But this division is deeper and with regard to Catholicism and Protestantism it touches the very inner principle of their life, to the point of their mutual exclusion of each other. Therefore they could not have agreed on any common ground, however abstract and free from particular differences. Consequently, it was impossible to satisfy both by accepting one common foundation, and the state by necessity with its religion, if it did not contradict both, had to side with one or the other, thereby coming into contradiction with the rights of the other. On which side did the state stand? It stood, and could not have failed to stand, on the side of Protestantism. A republican state, as a product and expression of the will of the people, must by necessity reflect in itself, in all spheres of its life and activity, the dominant principle of the majority and is inevitably permeated by it. The majority in this case happens to be Protestantism in its various forms, since the Protestant population constitutes at least six-sevenths of the entire population of the country. And indeed, the Protestant tint makes itself felt throughout the entire system of public education, from its general principle to its small details.