Catholic schools remain firm on religious ethos

CATHOLIC schools are to hold firm to their religious ethos despite the growing numbers of children from other faiths — or no faith — on their enrolment.

In a pastoral letter published yesterday, the Catholic bishops said religious instruction and prayer remained a “matter of priority” for the schools under their control.

“Specifically religious education, designed to confirm and deepen an understanding of the faith, forms an essential part of the curriculum in Catholic schools and functions at its core,” they said.

They stressed this was not meant as a deterrent to children of other faiths or no religious beliefs, insisting their schools welcomed and valued local and migrant children of non-Catholic backgrounds.

However, Bishop Anthony Farquhar, of the bishops’ department of education and formation, said mixed enrolments presented a challenge for schools eager to preserve their Catholic ethos. He said there was a danger of providing purely academic religious instruction if the whole school could not actively practise their faith together.

“There is a problem there in how do you have active worship, how do you avoid trivialising it, if you don’t have shared worship?”

Bishops’ Education Commission chairman Bishop Leo O’Reilly said the Catholic Church wanted to accommodate children of different faiths as far as it could and would always try to provide religious instruction for all of them.

But he added: “It will try to respect the religious beliefs and convictions of parents but it will not wish to dilute its own ethos.”

The bishops’ conference yesterday announced the establishment of an all-island Catholic Education Service to advise and support schools striving to keep Catholicism at their core despite the changes occurring in society.

The service is inviting the public to comment on “the best way of ensuring that Catholic schools can develop in the coming decades” by emailing [e-mail] or by writing to Pastoral Letter on Education, Irish Bishops Conference, Maynooth, Co Kildare.

The initiative comes after the Church was forced to defend criticism that non-Catholic children were being left without primary school places in parts of Dublin because Catholic children were receiving priority.

Bishop O’Reilly insisted Catholic schools prided themselves on being inclusive, not just with children of different faiths but of different physical and intellectual abilities too. However, he said he knew of one school that was denied funding to install a lift for children with disabilities and another that wanted to introduce the Leaving Cert applied curriculum for students who struggled academically but was told it couldn’t as a vocational school in the area was already offering the course.