The Catholic World, Vol. 09, April, 1869-September, 1869

by Various

The sensational writer in Putnam complains of the city for leasing to Catholics valuable real estate, at a nominal rent, for a long term of years. Only one such lease, that for the House of Industry for the Sisters of Charity, has been made in this city since 1847. The site of St. Patrick's Cathedral, which he pretends is leased by the city, at a rent of one dollar a year, has been owned by Catholics for over sixty years, and was bought and paid for by them with their own money, as the venerable Bishop of Rochester asserts. The only other instance named, that of the Nursery and Children's Hospital, Fifty-first street and Lexington avenue, is a Protestant, not a Catholic institution. The writer should not take grants and donations made to Protestants as grants and donations made to Catholics. Between Catholics and Protestants there is a difference!

The writer's statement of the huge endowments the church will have, at the rate the city and State are endowing her, in 1918, we must leave to the consideration of the future Putnams. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. We will only say that the church has had, thus far, in this country, no endowment, and has no source of revenue but the unfailing charity of the faithful. The magnificent revenues of our churches, colleges, hospitals, asylums, etc., so dazzling to the writer in Putnam, are all in his eye. We have not a single endowed church, convent, college, school, hospital, or asylum in the Union! We do great things with small means, and what to Protestants would seem to be no means at all, because He who is great is with us, and because we rely on charity, and charity never faileth.

We have sufficiently disposed of the property question, and vindicated the State and city from the charge of undue favoritism to our church. No charge can be more untrue or more unjust. A few words on the common school question, and we dismiss the article in Putnam, which has already detained us too long.

The writer in Putnam attempts to be so ironical and so witty, and so readily sacrifices sobriety and truth to point, that he must excuse us from following him step by step in his account of our relation to the common schools. We know well the common school system of this and other States. We—we speak personally—received our early education in the public schools, were for five years a common school teacher, and for fifteen years had charge of the schools in the place of our residence, as school committee-man. We have not one word to say against them as schools for the children of those who are willing to secularize education. We make no war on the system for non-Catholics. If they wish the system for themselves, we offer them no opposition. Indeed, for those who hold the supremacy of the secular order, and believe that every department of life should be secularized, no better system can be devised. We oppose it not when intended for them, but only when intended for us and we are taxed to support it. We hold the spiritual order superior to the secular, and wish our children to be educated accordingly.

We hold that education, or the instruction and training of children and youth, is a function of the church, a function which she cannot discharge except in schools exclusively under her management and control. This education and training can be successfully given only in the Catholic family and the Catholic school. In this country, for reasons we need not stop to enumerate, the Catholic school is especially necessary. We do not, by any means, oppose what is called secular learning, and in no country where they have not been prevented by a hostile or anti-Catholic government, have Catholics failed to take the lead in all branches of secular learning and science. All the great literary masterpieces of the world, since the downfall of Pagan Rome, are the productions either of Catholics or of men who have received a Catholic training. Few as we are, and great as are the disadvantages under which we labor in this country, Catholics even here compare more than favorably, at this moment, in secular learning and science, with non-Catholics. The religious training they receive from the church, the great catholic principles which she teaches them in the catechism and in all her services, tend to quicken and purify the mind, and to fit it to excel even in secular science and learning. The Catholic has the truth to start from, and why should he not surpass all others? No! we do not oppose, we favor secular learning and science; but we oppose separating secular training from religious training, and can never consent to the secularization of education. Here is where we and the present race of Protestants differ. It is because the common schools secularize, and are intended by their chief supporters to secularize, education and to make all life secular, that we oppose them, and refuse to send our children to them where we can possibly avoid it. Even if religious education is given elsewhere, in the family or in the Sunday-school, the evil is only partially neutralized. The separation of the secular from the religious tends to create a fearful dualism in both individual and social life, to place the spiritual and the secular in the relation of antagonism, each to the other, which renders impracticable that concord between the two orders so necessary to the harmonious development of the individual life and the promotion of the well-being and progress of society. We insist, therefore, on having our children and youth trained in schools under charge of the church, that in them the spiritual and the secular may be harmonized as necessary parts of one dialectic whole.

Such are our views and wishes, and such our conscientious conviction of duty. Whether we are right or wrong, is no question for the state or civil authority to settle. The state has no competency in the matter. It is bound to respect and protect every citizen in the free and full enjoyment of the freedom of his conscience. We stand before the state on a footing of perfect equality with non-Catholics, and have the same right to have our Catholic conscience respected and protected, that they have to have their non-Catholic and secularized conscience respected and protected. We do not ask the state to impose our conscience on them, or to compel them to adopt and follow our views of education; but we deny its right to impose theirs on us, or even to carry out their views of education in any degree at our expense. The Catholic conscience binds the state itself so far, but only so far, as Catholics are concerned. Non-Catholics are the great majority of the population, at least five to our one, throughout the State, and they have the power, if they choose to exercise it, to control the State and to deny us our equal rights; but that does not alter the fact that we have equal rights, and that the State is bound to respect and cause them to be respected. The State no doubt is equally bound to respect and protect the equal rights of non-Catholics, but no more than it is bound to respect and protect ours.

On this question of education, we and non-Catholics no doubt stand at opposite poles. We cannot accept their views, and they will not accept ours. Between them and us there is no common ground on which we and they can meet and act in concert. They feel it as keenly as we do. Now as the State owes equally respect and protection to both parties, and has no right to attempt to force either to conform to the views of the other, its only just and honest course is to abandon the policy of trying to bring both together in a system of common schools. Catholic and non-Catholic education cannot be carried on in common. In purely secular matters, Catholics and Protestants can act in common, as one people, one community; but in any question that involves the spiritual relations and duties of men, we and they are two communities, and cannot act in concert; and as both are equal before the State, it can compel neither to give way to the other. This may or may not be a disadvantage; but it is a fact, and must by all parties be accepted as such.

The solution of the problem would present no difficulty, were the non-Catholics as willing to recognize our rights as we are to recognize theirs. They support secular schools, and wish to compel us to send our children to them, because they hope thus to secularize the minds of our children—enlighten them, they say; darken them, we say—and detach them from the church, or, at least, so emasculate their Catholicity that it will differ only in name from Protestantism. They regard common schools, in which secular learning is diverted from religious instruction and training, as a most cunningly devised engine for the destruction of the church; and therefore they insist on it with all the energy of their souls, and the strength of their hatred of Catholicity. It gives them the forming of the character of the children of Catholics, and thus in an indirect way makes the State an accomplice in their proselyting schemes. Here arises all the difficulty in the case. But, whether they are right or wrong in their calculations, the State has no more right to aid them against us, than it has to aid us against them. If it will, as it is bound to do, respect and protect the rights of conscience, or real religious liberty, the only solid basis of civil liberty, it must do as the continental governments of Europe do, and divide the public schools into two classes; the one for Catholics, and the other for non-Catholics; that is, adopt the system of denominational schools, or, rather, as we would say, Catholic schools—under the management and control of the church—for Catholics, and secular schools—under its own management and control,—for the rest of the community. Let the system stand as it is for non-Catholics, by whatever name they may be called, and let the State appropriate to Catholics, for the support of schools approved by their church, their proportion of the school fund, and of the money raised by public tax for the support of public schools, simply reserving to itself the right, through the courts, to see that the sums received are honestly applied to the purposes for which they are appropriated. The State may, if it insists, fix the minimum of secular instruction to be given, and withhold all or a portion of the public moneys from all Catholic schools that do not come up to it.

This, if the State, for public reasons, insists on universal education, is the best way of solving the difficulty, without violence to the equal rights of either Catholics or non-Catholics. The State would thus respect all consciences, and at the same time secure the education of all the children of the land, which is, no doubt, a public desideratum. Another way would be, to exempt Catholics from the tax levied for the support of the public schools, and give to the schools they maintain their proportion of the school fund held in trust by the State, and leave Catholics to establish and manage schools for their own children in their own way, under the supervision and control of the church. Either way of solving the difficulty would answer our purpose, and we venture to say that one or the other method of dealing with the public school question will ere long have to be adopted, whatever the opposition excited.