Scottish Catholic Observer

Kevin McKenna

OPPOSITION to the existence of Catholic schools in Scotland usually falls into three categories. There’s the traditional orange, if now slightly quaint, view that they sow the seeds of vile and idolatrous papishness in impressionable young minds and the state has to pay for it. Occasionally I get quite nostalgic for the times when such an attitude was widely prevalent in lowland Scotland. For then, anti-Catholicism was simple, open and unambiguous.

Then there is the TV celebrity category. This is when someone from the world of popular culture (let’s be generous here) chooses to address a subject of which they know little. Sadly, our favourite and still much-loved sofa interviewer Lorraine Kelly, wandered into the debate a few weeks ago when she claimed in her Sun column that the existence of Catholic schools was partly to blame for sectarianism. Yet it’s a free country and Lorraine is entitled to her innocent, if uninformed, view.

Of a far more sinister timbre are the views of such as Sam Galbraith, the former Labour minister and Kirsty Wark, heavyweight political interviewer and part-time Spanish holiday villa entrepreneur. Their criticism of Catholic schools, though equally simplistic and uninformed as Ms Kelly, nevertheless is rooted in a far more sinister, atheistic and humanist tradition. This holds that any manifestation of the Christian religion in public life is undesirable because it enslaves people in ignorance and superstition. They are furious that in post-Christian, modern, enlightened Scotland the state still continues to pay for our Catholic schools.

I have never yet met an atheist or humanist who gives a fig about sectarianism in Scotland. “A plague on both your houses,” is their view. Yet sometimes they wring their hands and pretend to be pious and careworn about it. How can it be right, they ask, that childhood friends are split up and told to attend different schools according to their parents’ faith? It teaches them the wrong message. Presumably, they would also shut down all fee-paying schools, or single sex schools for the same reasons. Presumably, too, they must be unaware that faith schools exist in other countries where there is no anti-Catholicism.

In the last few months Neil Lennon, the Celtic FC manager, has had two attempts on his life and been physically assaulted during a match. Two of his Irish players have been sent bullets in the post. Paul McBride, the respected QC and Trish Godman, the Labour politician, have also been subject to murder attempts. They are all Catholic or Irish or of Irish descent. What sort of perverse logic dictates that Catholic schools somehow led to this? Are people being serious when they advance such views?

Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Education in Scotland have long been entrusted with the task of ensuring that our standards of schooling are still among the highest in the world. If there was any evidence that Catholic schools fomented religious intolerance HMIe would condemn them. Instead they are routinely praised, not only for their academic standards but for their pastoral approach. By ‘pastoral’ they mean treating all children as equal, promoting their material and spiritual welfare and teaching them ideas of inclusiveness, tolerance and respect for all creeds and none; all of it absolutely grounded in the Christian tradition.

So what is there of which to be afraid? What’s not to like? Do they breed too many ‘Sellick’ supporters? Are there too many Holy pictures and Rosary beads? Do they not like too many children with Irish surnames to be gathered in the same place? I think we should be told.

Ask yourself this though. When was the last time your parish priest spoke out in defence of Catholic schools? And when did our hierarchy last give a clear, unambiguous and unequivocal message to the nation that Catholic schools are here to stay?