RELIGION AND EDUCATION

Evening Star, Issue 12875, 26 July 1906, Page 8

RELIGION AND EDUCATION

Though a Catholic, the late Michael Davitt abhorred the bigotry of the Roman Catholics, and we (‘British Weekly*) remember gratefully his opposition to Mr Balfour’s Education Act. In a series of trenchant letters he exposed the pernicious influence of the priests in the domain of national education, and challenged “the Church's divine right to teach Galileo astronomy and the son°of an Irish peasant arithmetic.” Replying to Bishop O’Dwyer, of Limerick, Mr Davitt 6a id: I have never written or spoken a word against religious teaching in my life. I am as strong for it as your correspondent (the bishop), but all this talk about “Godless Queens’ Colleges.” and “Godless schools,” and the necessity for “ Catholic and Protestant atmospheres” hi schools and in universities simply stands for the assertion of control by Churchmen over secular as well as over religious education in Ireland. No Catholic country in Europe permits this secular control. It has been a failure wherever it has existed- It has been a double failure in this country—a ghastly failure in its educational results, and a barren one so far as religious fruits are concerned; for Ireland is less religious, not more Catholic, and less moral to-day than she was fifty years ago, when the rosary was repeated as a family religious duly in most Cathblic homes every night. In a subsequent letter he said: It is the eternal hungering after political influence and temporal power; the meddling and bungling in secular affairs; the assumption of authority to dictate to laymen what they shall think and do in the affairs of the nation; the monetary power and control of public schools; the rule or ruin of universities; and above all a close alliance with the aristocracies and classes of society. These are the very aims and ambitions which have reduced the Catholic Church in France to-day to the pitiable position which it occupied before the world, with 37,000,000 -of - a Catholic population looking on almost indifferently at the ruin caused: by the blind unwisdom of reaction, and anti-democratic prejudice. .These fearless words deserve to be recalled in the strife from which Michael Davitt has b6£t> taken away.