Get rid of the Catholic Church’s ability to bully and threaten us

A PARISH priest in Co Meath has come up with a novel form of penance for lapsed Catholics, which is tantamount to casting their children into an educational limbo.

Fr Michael Daly has put Stamullen on the map by making children of wayward parishioners feel unwelcome.

Unless their parents recant, reconsider and resume full membership of the Church, their children will be banished from his school. Article 42 of the Constitution apparently does not apply in the parish of Stamullen.

"From now on, the non-practising, non-believing and non-contributing families will need to get in touch with the Department of Education and ask that a school with an ethos and culture similar to theirs be provided for their children," he declared in the parish newsletter.

If the crusading cleric gets his way, parents who no longer contribute to the plate on Sunday could find themselves tied up in bureaucratic red tape trying to get their children into school, especially if its controlled by the scourge of Stamullen.

I presume this rule would not apply to children fathered by members of the clergy, because at least under those circumstances the father is still a practising member, in more ways than one.

Telling his parishioners to make their minds up as to whether they want to be Catholics or not, Fr Daly said if there was a squeeze on space in the school in the future, he would give priority to practising Catholics. The truly frightening aspect about this issue is that the man may have the backing of our current Education Act.

According to that, it is the responsibility of the managerial authorities of schools not in a position to admit all pupils seeking entry, to then implement an enrolment policy in accordance with the Act.

"In this regard, a board of management may find it necessary to restrict enrolment to children from a particular area or a particular age group, or, occasionally, on the basis of some other criterion."

The last seven words, "on the basis of some other criterion," is the frightening door-opener which allows the likes of Fr Daly to go off half-cocked.

By no stretch of the imagination could the authors of that clause have foreseen how it would be used in the manner of a modern Inquisition to whip lapsed Catholics back into line like this.

But even in the days of the Inquisition it was the unfortunate adult adjudged to have fallen foul of the Church who was punished, not their innocent children.

According to the Education Act, where a board of management refuses to enrol a student in a school, the parent of the student or, where the student has reached 18 years of age, the student himself has a statutory entitlement under section 29 of the Act to appeal that decision to the Secretary General of the Department of Education, following the conclusion of any appeal procedures at school level.

Then a committee is established to hear the appeal, with hearings conducted with a minimum of formality. In most cases, appeals must be dealt with in 30 days.

Where appropriate, the secretary general may give whatever directions to the board of management are considered necessary in order to remedy the matter complained of.

Despite the constitutional right of children to education, there is an acceptance by the Department of Education that there is nothing the State can do to stop Church-run schools from banning the children of non-practising Catholics.

Stamullen could well be in Mississippi as far as lapsed Catholic parents are concerned.

Now, as a priest, Fr Daly has every right in fact he's obliged to show errant members of his flock the error of their ways and try to entice them back to the "one, true Church". In his newsletter to parishioners, he said that Catholics should accept the entire teachings of the Church and attend Mass on Sundays.

He said: "I don't believe Roman Catholics should pick and choose from the Commandments. I don't agree with this à la carte approach to religion".

Nobody can have any problem with the priest in relation to his stance on à la carte religion. It's his own à la carte attitude to education that's causing the problem here.

In days gone by, his line of bluff and bluster was often used by the Church to remind congregations of their duty to adhere to the Church in all things. Those who strayed were threatened with all manner of divine retribution, up to the guarantee of a very hot and uncomfortable hereafter. Obviously, the non-Catholics in Stamullen are modern and practical people, and Fr Daly decided on a more temporal tack to teach them a lesson: ban their children from school.

On January 5, 1973, the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution Act, 1972, was signed into law. This amendment removed from the Constitution the special position of the Catholic Church.

Nobody can gainsay the tremendously valuable and influential role the Church has played in this country, but the separation of Church and State was an essential move to build the modern Ireland.

At the time it was welcomed and endorsed by none other than the Primate of All Ireland, the late Cardinal Conway.

However, some vestiges of the Church's special position of power remain, one being the control it retains over Irish primary schools. In itself, it's not necessarily a bad thing and most of us have benefited from this system.

Like the 170-pupil Stamullen school, most of our 4,000 primary schools are Catholic, and a parish priest is normally involved in management, very often as chairman of the board.

Yet, given that very few clergy are at this stage actually involved in teaching, the influence they exert is totally out of proportion. The latest graphic example of this is Fr Daly in Stamullen, who believes he can discriminate against children whose parents are lapsed Catholics.

Last month, the principal of a Gaelscoil in Dunboyne, Co Meath, was sacked after he suggested in March that matters of doctrine which separated Catholic and Protestant pupils in the school should be placed outside school hours.

The problem, of course, is that the Catholic Church owns, or at least manages, many of the primary schools in the country, even though the State pays for the education provided in them.

It is about time the Government did something about rectifying this situation. In fact, none other than Fr Daly has already offered the solution.

The State should indeed provide schools to suit the ethos of lapsed Catholic parents, schools free of the autocratic censure of the Fr Dalys of this world.

It's also something which Fionnuala Kilfeather, chief executive of the National Parents Council, agrees with.

"If it (the Catholic Church) proposes that it will not provide an education service for all the children in the community served by the school, the State needs to plan to make provision for other schools," she said during the week.

"We will then have the position, common in most countries, where there is a non-denominational State education system, in parallel with schools owned by groups with a specific religious or other ethos," said Ms Kilfeather.

We would also have a school system dedicated to teaching children, rather than recapturing their lapsed Catholic parents.