For God's Sake, Not Alan Johnson

Alan Johnson launched a ferocious assault on Catholic schools while he was Education Secretary (just as Gordon Brown's own preferred successor, Ed Balls, is doing now), even if he was successfully seen off. Yet look at the company, so to speak, that he was keeping at the time. Why are Catholic state schools at public expense bad, but creationist private schools at public expense good, or at least acceptable? Johnson, though not without his good points, is most certainly unacceptable.

Meanwhile, how very sad, considering that the curriculum time obviously exists for both, that Berlin has yet to find any way of teaching both Reli and Ethik to all pupils without offering teenagers a choice between Reli and the sports field or the ice cream parlour. Is it just that the old Honecker hands behind Ethik do not want it discussed by those properly instructed in any Ethik other than their own?

And I rather liked Pro Reli's argument that State involvement was necessary in order to ensure the quality of teaching. They intended it against the sorts of Muslims who do not appear on their own Establishment platforms, of course. But the spirit of the thing is as Catholic as it is Lutheran (or Anglican): that was where Luther (or Cranmer) got it from - from Christendom.

The rubbish passed by the Bishops' Conferences as RE in this country's Catholic schools would not be permitted, even now, in any other discipline. We need people in Parliament who will put down an amendment, such as would probably get through with only an angry Tablet and a quietly exultant Catholic Herald (and possibly Daily Telegraph) noticing, that all RE textbooks, resources and inspectors in State-funded Catholic schools (and I can't see where else the money is supposed to come from, nor is the separation of Church and State anything other than a direct disobedience to the Magisterium) must be approved directly by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

There are many constituencies that ought to return such MPs, and I hope that they all do. One such is certainly the constituency that contains the old Irish Catholic stronghold of Consett, the remarkable Recusant village of Esh, and Ushaw College, with the great Passionist monastery at Minsteracres just outside (Consett is its postal town) in a seat which is itself a major historic centre of Recusancy.