CATHOLICS AND EDUCATION

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 11876, 25 April 1904, Page 4

CATHOLICS AND EDUCATION

«, RESOLUTIONS OF THE BISHOPS. (PRESS ASSOTIATIOS TKLEORAM.) DUNEDIN, April 22. At a meeting of the Catholic Bishops of New Zealand, held at Wellington on Wednesday, the subjoined resolutions were adopted and recommended to the most earnest consideration of the citizens and Government of New Zealand:— I. A sound civiliration depends upon a suond popular education, and a sound education consists essentially in the harmonious development of tlie physical, the intellectual, and the moral faculties of children. For this purpose secular and religious instruction must ever go hand in hand, forming the minds of children to useful knowledge and their hearts and wills to the civil, social, and domestic virtues, so that each shall contribute the unit of his goodness to form the sura of righteousness that '"exalteth a nation." 11. The indi.spensible feature of true education is the lormation of high character in children by the knowledge of Divine things, and by the acquisition of the virtues that perfect their being. Any system of education is. therefore, defective which relegates the religiuus and moral training of children to a secondary or unimportant place. Much more so is the system of public instruction prevailing in New Zealand which divorces religion from education, training the intellect to natural knowlodge without inculcating those eternal truths and principles of action which are the only real incentives to the individual to keep* his life in order. Such a system done at the charge of the public treasury, tive ignorance of religion and moral duty ; (2) to generate in the minds of the young the false impression thpt religion is only for the home end the Church, and not for the practical affairs of daily life; (3) to weaken or destroy religious and moral sentiment by training children to pass a notable portion of the tenderest and most impressionable periods of life without reference to God and without tho sense of responsibility to Him as the supreme legislator, whose will alone can give to evenlaw its binding force upon the hidden conscience ; (4) it offers no compensating principle to strengthen the rising generation in the hour of temptation, and (5) it is in the highest degree calculated to pave the way for the decay which overtook every civilisation that allowed religion to die out of the hearts of its people. 111. With a profound conviction of the sacrcdness of their duty in regard to the education of youth, Catholics in New Zealand have been for more than a generation building, equipping, and maintaining their own schools, wherein some j~,UW children of their faith are trained in the higher tilings of life to come as well as in the full State curriculum of secular knowledge. We endeavour to surround them with an atmosphere of religion to mould them to virtue, and, by making >»em good Christians, to make them good citizens also of our young country. Ihe least of the services which we liave been rendering to the State is that of relieving the general taxpayers of the burden of having to provide some £60,000 a year Which but for our labours and sacrifices, they would have to pay for the instruction of those children in the public schools of the colony. We have never asked, nor i desired, a grant for the religious educa- ! tion whioh w» impart in our schools. We are compelled to contribute our quota of taxation for the maintenance of a system of public instruction of which, from motives both of conscience and of the highest patriotism, we cannot avail ourselves, and until justice is done to us, we shall continue to urge our claim to a fair portion of that taxation for the purely secular instruction which, in accordance with the Government programme, is given in our BC IV Valuing as we do the written Word of God, and teaching it in our schools we would gladly we it brought home to the mind of every child, Catholic and Protestant in New Zealand, we would willingly use the sacred volume in use in the denominationol schools of other creeds. We are in sympathy with every effort made to impart religious instruction to nanCatholio children in the State schools after working hours, so long as those of our faith axe first permitted to retire without taunt or interference, hut we strenuously object to the introduction of Scriptural or other religious lessons or exercises »n public schools as part and parcel of the profrramme of education. . For this reason we wholly disapprove of the following proposals, which have been for some time before the public of New Zealand, namely: —(1) To introduce into the State schools a programme of Scripture lessons hymns, and prayers which, except for "slight modifications," are identical with the Scripture lesson books drawn up four years ago by the Victorian- Royal Commission on religions instruction in State schools; (2) to accompany these lessons with "simple explanations of a literary, historical, and ethical character"; (3) to make thesei lessons and their explanations "form part ol the school curriculum under the inspectors with (4) a conscience clause for pupils and t£_.clic*rs* V. The following are our chief grounds of objection to the project of Scripture lessons outlined above :—{l) Under the sanction of the State, it would introduce into the public schools the well-known Protestant principle of the interpretation of the Scriptures by the exercise of private judgment. This is wholly incompatible with the position -of Catholics with regard to the Bible, which is briefly summed up in the follow. ma words by the Archbishop of Melbourne : —"We hold that the Bible is the depository, not the organ of God's revelation to man. We hold, therefore, that it requires an interpreter, and we hold that the Church, through it« representatives, • ;s the Divinely constituted interpreter t organ of revealed truth. We hold, that dogmatic truth is the bo*U both cf faith and of morality.'* (») The religious education of youth is a fundamental duty of parents and of the Christian Ministry. That sacred duty the clergy can never abdicate, either wholly of in part, in favour of the State. The proposals referred to above are an attempt on the part of a number of clergymen of various denomina.tiorm to renounce one of the most hallowed obligations of their calling and transfer it to paid officials of the State and to get done at tlie charge of the public treasury duties which Catholics perform as n matter of eourae at their own expense. (3) It is the function of tlie Stats to protect the natural and acquired rights of Its citizens and generullv to promote their temporal well-being. The State can neither claim nor exercise any authority in matters of conscience; it lias neither right nor com-

peteney to 6<?t up as a teaclier of religion nor to usurp the spiritual duties of any of its subjects. The reading and explanation of the scriptures cannot be regarded a* merely a proposed new feature in the course of language or literature in our public schools: they are exercises of religion. In the case under consideration they are avowedly intended to afford a certain measure of religious instruction and that instruction cannot be ••unsectarian" for the simple reason that unsectarian religious teaching is a mental fiction and an impossibility. Tin.* proposals outlined above are in fact an invitation to the Civil Governn_*jt to set up a bureau of religious teach£jj, viz., to found, establish, and endow a now State creed as the official religion of the public schools and to make good at the expense of the general taxpayer the failure of the clergy of some denominations to adequately discharge their duty of the religious instruction of youth. 4. Our objection to the proposed lessons is strengthened by the following facts:—(a) They were drawn up as a compromise by a heterogeneous assembly of representatives of various reformed denominations, who. while unanimous in rejecting Catholic principles of Biblical interpretation, differed profoundly among themselves upon the most fundamental truths of the Christian religion. (b) The Scripture lessons are taken from vie Protestant authorised version of the Bible, and the incorrect Protestant form of the Lord's Prayer is set down for the daily us<; of the pupils. (c) The basic dogma of Christianity—that of tho incarnation and virgin birth—is outlawed from the New Testament narrative, and the Christ that is presented to the mental eye of the little ones is not the God-man of Holy Writ, but the Christ of the Unitarian, "(d) Protestant hymns form part of the scheme. Protestant teaching is suggested throughout the Scripture lessons by the free use of unauthorised headings, capital letters, italics, etc., and it has been truly observed that "in what is omitted as well as in the general tone of what is expressed, the lessons are made as Protestant as they could well be made in the circumstances!" 5. It would be obviously impossible for the teachers of various creeds and of no creed, to whom it is proposed to entrust these lessons, to do such watchful and continuous violence to their convictions as to avoid colouring their "literary, historical, and ethical" explanations with their own beliefs or unbelief. In a great number of cases they would no doubt consciously or unconsciously derive from the lessons conclusions prejudical to the faith of Catholic children, and cases might readily occur in which teachers would foster scepticism or unbelief. In a word, the projected scheme of Scriptural instruction would, under the specious appearance of relieving the consciences of a section of the Protestant clergy aggravate tho double financial burden which we Catholics now bear by adding the greater grievance of compelling us to pay for the conversion of the State schools into Protestant Sunday schools. VI. A conscience clause for pupils and teachers it, offered as an offset to the proposed Protestantising of the public schools, but a conscience clause, if seriously intended by its framers as a protective measure for dissidents, should, on principle, exclude all children from Scriptural or other religious instruction except those whose parents positively signify a wish that they should attend, but (1) by what we understand to be the terms of the proposed or suggested conscience clause, Catholic children, m order to avoid proselytism, would be compelled to go to school armed with written protests against religious instruction. (2) At least one State of the Australian Commonwealth, namely, Victoria, furnishes (as the late Royal Commission's report abundantly shows) plentiful evidence of the flagrant manner in which the religious rights of minorities may be violated with impunity in public schools, despite the provisions of Acts of Parliament, and the pretended protection of this form of conscience clause. (3) Even a scrupulous observance ol an ideal conscience clause by teachers would still leave Catholic children exposed to a serious measure of moral pressure or compulsion to remain for Protestant religious instruction, namely, to the jeers and insults of their companions and to the other forms of, social martyrdom which children know so well how to inflict on those whom they deem foreign to their modes of thought and action. Catholic pupils In State schools would in a word be placed between these two alternatives —proselytism or penalties to which no children should be exposed.' (4) For teachers a conscience clause would in many cases inflict a grave degree of compulsion upon conscience or feeling. It would, moreover, inevitably lead to the general imposition of a religions test in the matter of appointments to schools.

VIT. It is proposed to submit the suggested alterations in our State school system to a referendum of the electors of the colony. We. for our part, hold to the sound principle of statesmanship that no question should be submitted to the referendum that affects the rights of conscience of minorities. These remain for ever sacred and inviolable, but if this miestion he ever submitted to the voice of the electors of New Zealand, we should look with confidence to the result, feeling sure that our fellow-colonists would approach it as the people of South Australia did in 1896, in a spirit of justice, and with a firm and unalterable determination to respect the rights of conscience which a minority, however small, can never sacrifice. But the issue should be placed fairly and honestly before the electors, and the first issue to be determined is whether our State school system of education is to he secular or not. The form of ballot paper contained in last year's abortive Bill was suggested by the framers of the Bible-in-Schools project. It was rogue end reticent to the last degree. (1) I+. gave no information whatever regarding the nature and source of the scriptural and other religious instruction proposed to be introduced, or (2) regarding the nature of the explanations thereof which it was intended to give. (3) Worst of all, the terms of reference were so worded aa to suggest that the new scheme would he simply something added by way of extension to the present system of State instruction, and not, as it would really be, an alteration of the mcs=t radiaal kind in our Education Act. It is difficult to avoid the conviction that the ballot paper to which we allude was deliberately intended to confuse the electors of the colony, and to snatch a victory rather by a ruw-de-guerre than by a straightforward appeal to the country on a clear cut and definite. i«sue. VIII. Much as we deplore the hard secularism of the present Education Act, we would rather tee ib retained in its integrity until modifications are Jortheoming which would confer a substantial benefit on the rising generation, without endangering the faith and exasperating the feeling of a large class of children* who frequent our public schools.