Should Taxpayers Pay for Catholic Education and the New Evangelization Project? No.
Jesuit journal America publishes a Christofascist opinion piece by a National Review and Federalist contributor who favors using United States dollars to fund Catholic education.
I used to like America Magazine, a Catholic journal founded run by members of the Jesuits orders. I used to subscribe. I even submitted poems to them twice over a period of 25 years. But about a dozen years ago, I stopped subscribing. I stopped reading America Magazine for a while, somewhat resolutely, in about 2016 when they began to occasionally soft-stump for Trump. I began to not so much read as monitor America sporadically during the pandemic, because I came to see that it was important for me to do so. More recently, I began to read the magazine carefully, regularly, and entirely because it has become clear to me that this publication is a good indicator of what I have come to see as the hocking of Vatican II. I am quite accustomed to being appalled by things I see in America, but this chilling January 17th piece of Catholic propaganda in the Jesuit online journal was somehow able to break my Catholic heart.
John Ireland served as the Roman Catholic archbishop of Saint Paul, Minnesota between between 1875 and 1918. Ireland’s mission was to get public government funding for his Catholic school system:
He failed utterly in his most cherished project… an energetic effort to pilot a new model for Catholic education. He wanted to negotiate a political arrangement that would enable taxpayer money to be channeled into parochial schools…The project generated massive controversy and ultimately failed. (America)
Ireland’s story is somewhat interesting. He was a Republican during the Civil War Era, a Union Army chaplain and seems to have had a interest in educating poor people during a time when this ethic was not a moral given. What is disturbing is that the writer of the piece, Rachel Lu, a regular contributor to The Federalist and the National Review, uses Ireland’s legacy to make a case for revisiting Ireland’s plan. She points to the effort to open St. Isidore, an online Catholic charter school in Oklahoma. This is a Leonard Leo-sponsored project.
More than a century later, however, American Catholics again find themselves thinking about Catholic schools, educational choice and the possibilities of public funding. It would be a vindication of John Ireland if it turned out that now, more than a century after his death, the hour had finally come for his most cherished plan. (America)
Citing the plight of parents who find public education and home schooling unsuitable and Catholic school tuition unaffordable, the writer argues that revisiting John Ireland’s plan a hundred years later would lighten the burden of Catholic parents who feel strongly that their children must avoid secular education settings and be enrolled Catholic schools.
We are living through an era of expanding school choice, and recent examples like St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in Oklahoma have reopened the possibility that Catholic schooling might become a recognized form of publicly financed education…
Lu beefs up her argument by pointing to the patriotic character of Ireland, who was an Irish immigrant. Here the author highlights, or perhaps bathes in a soft glow, the the potential connection between muscular patriotism (in this context, nationalism) and Catholic education in the United States. Please read the American Civil Liberties Union’s October 9, 2023 statement on the opening St. Isidore online charter school:
The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board is continuing on a misguided path to create the nation’s first religious public charter school in clear violation of Oklahoma law and the state’s promise of church-state separation and public schools that are open to all. The board is ignoring the legal and public education experts, religious freedom advocates, and Oklahoma taxpayers who all oppose St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School – a public school that plans to discriminate against students, families, and staff and indoctrinate students into one religion. Our plaintiffs are fighting the approval of St. Isidore in court because they are committed to public schools that welcome and serve all Oklahomans. (ACLU, Oct. 9, 2024)
The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board is continuing on a misguided path to create the nation’s first religious public charter school in clear violation of Oklahoma law and the state’s promise of church-state separation and public schools that are open to all. The board is ignoring the legal and public education experts, religious freedom advocates, and Oklahoma taxpayers who all oppose St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School – a public school that plans to discriminate against students, families, and staff and indoctrinate students into one religion. Our plaintiffs are fighting the approval of St. Isidore in court because they are committed to public schools that welcome and serve all Oklahomans.
The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board is continuing on a misguided path to create the nation’s first religious public charter school in clear violation of Oklahoma law and the state’s promise of church-state separation and public schools that are open to all. The board is ignoring the legal and public education experts, religious freedom advocates, and Oklahoma taxpayers who all oppose St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School – a public school that plans to discriminate against students, families, and staff and indoctrinate students into one religion.
This plan to open a Roman Catholic charter school is horrifying to me, a former Catholic school educator who holds believes supporting public education is a moral imperative for anyone who cares about children and the future. (This move may also give the “Tax Churches” movement some fresh Grade A ammo.) But the big idea here is that using United States tax dollars to fund Catholic education would expedite entrenching a Roman Catholic worldview, and make enrolling children in Catholic easier for Catholic parents:
Archbishop Ireland was an enthusiastic believer in the American Dream. He wanted Catholics to be patriotic Americans, and he believed that the church had an important role to play in building the United States into a great nation. (America)
The Catholic Church and Catholic schools, Lu suggests, might have “an important role to play in building the United States into a great nation.” Translation: “Make America Great”:
In our own time, this view may seem unremarkable—indeed, many of Archbishop Ireland’s speeches sound like something one might hear today at a Fourth of July fireworks show or from the stage of a national political convention. For a late-19th-century prelate, though, this attitude was quite distinctive. (America)
No writer can write every necessary thing on a given topic, and it is generally neither fair nor helpful to critique a writer for what they fail to write. However, it is simply not reasonable to discuss the “American project,” the growing entrenchment of Catholicism, and United States education policy without at least nodding in the direction of the enormous profits the Roman Catholic hierarchy and its religious orders gained from American Slavery, legal segregation, redlining, and various iterations of white flight, in Ireland’s day — and until now. The Roman Catholic Church in the United States was built on white supremacy. Lu does not go there.
Nor does she discuss even a little the burden of families who feel that a Madras education is an imperative and should be funded by the government. I live in Brooklyn among many Yeshiva students whose families fear their culture and faith will wither without the instruction they receive in religious schools. What about schools for the children of Wicca students? Do Buddhist kids deserve Buddhist schools? Should we pay for them all?
Although I am a person of deep religious faith, and a person who, because I was a teacher by nature and trade who had strong interest in and a bit of a feel for imparting religious lessons, taught my own children about God in our interfaith home. I had strong feelings about wanting my children to have a secular education. Will the indication of Bishop Ireland extend to interfaith families like mine?
And what about atheists? I have always had strong religious belief, but atheists have some very good arguments, and there is no reason to think that their beliefs in the absence of God — their convictions that God is a fiction, an opiate, a sky fairy — are not as precious to them as my beliefs in the truth of the Gospels. Should not any plan to use government money to find religious schools also offer funding for atheist families?
Should we pay to put kids on Sea Org for Scientology formation?
Proponents of public funding for Catholic schools want one kind of school funded. That’s the tell. They want the government to fund the schools that advance the “one true faith,” Roman Catholicism. Schools are the next frontier. When the United States bishops yap and whinge about “freedom of religion” they’re talking about religious freedom for the Catholic hierarchy. They’re blinded by chauvinism to their “Bells of Saint Mary” chauvinism to see that their religion is one of many, and that the belief that theirs is the “one true faith” is a belief — and an opinion — not a fact. Moreover, many of these men who currently embrace an integralist Catholic agenda don’t really care all that much about the teachings of Jesus. Their passion centers on a sexist, variously white supremacist, anti-queer, sex negative, avarice-based, no scruples worldview. And they’ve bought the Ad maiorem gloriam Dei boys. Heaven help us.
MMS
January 18, 2024