I am going to keep coming back to this one, because I am most concerned that Archbishop Vincent Nichols, who has done sterling work in the past defending Catholic education, including the richly deserved humblings that put paid to the Prime Ministerial ambitions of Alan Johnson and Ed Balls, has not quite made the right choice for his latest cause.
While I am not without sympathy for the English Baccalaureate (and, unlike Michael Gove, I am a supporter of the institutions necessary to deliver it, namely the grammar schools), I have far graver reservations about the calls being made in the Catholic press for RE to be recognised alongside History and Geography for Baccalaureate purposes. In principle, yes. But 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 noticing, that all RE textbooks, resources and inspectors in State-funded Catholic schools must be approved directly by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Most people probably assume that this is already the case. Would that it were.
If there were still a Labour Party responsive to the communities that sustained it, then that would indeed already be the case. Roll on electoral reform, and decisive public participation in the selection of candidates.
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David Lindsay, the link man between Tory Catholic fundamentalists with priest-holes in their manor houses and Labour Catholic fundamentalists with floor to ceiling pious tat in their council houses.
ReplyDeleteYou are too kind.
ReplyDeleteI would have thought that a Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur would be sufficient for such texts. I was crap at RE at school so what do I know.
ReplyDeleteNo, you sat on the same table as I did, and it was the material that was at fault. It still is. And books from which the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur have been removed are actually being used in some places.
ReplyDeleteTell you what RE at school didn't do. Provide me with some substantive, reasoned defences to the many questions, some malicious, others less so, that I've faced and fielded about my faith in the years since.
ReplyDeleteI do feel that young Catholics leave our schools into a hostile world entirely unequipped to deal with the challenges they face almost immediately outside the school gates. We're setting them up to fall at the first hurdle. Took me 'til I was working for a Catholic diocese to discover apologetics, and even longer to work out that it wasn't saying sorry for all the wars waged by religion (on examination this number approaches zero, BTW).
You have got the point of this post, then.
ReplyDeleteRemember what we were doing in other subjects at 16, and compare it with what we were doing in RE. Matters have not improved, and the staggering lapsation rates among school-leavers and undergraduates bear only too ample witness to that sorry fact.