To Cap It All?

Socially and culturally, does your parish need twice as many schoolteachers as it already had? I probably opposed the admissions cap on here at the time, but the very last thing that the Church needs in this country is more schools. Teaching what? An hour of every day, a day of every week, all the way up to the age of 16 or beyond, is given over to colouring in pictorial illustrations of trite little moral messages, at best interspersed with showings of The Life of Brian, or with if anything even more bogus assertions such as that people remembered that Jesus had given good advice for practical living so they started calling Him "the Son of God", or that in the early centuries local congregations elected someone on the spot to preach and to say Mass. There are textbooks in use that say those things. If you wanted to know anything more, including the Truth, then you have always had to teach yourself, or you have needed to do so for so long as to amount to the same thing. Thankfully, there is now the Internet.

Children who did not get places at Catholic schools because of the cap did not therefore cease to be practising Catholics. How many Catholic pupils are there at your local Catholic school? How many of them will you see at Mass this weekend? How many teachers have you known who became Christmas and Easter attendees once they had either made it as far as they were every going to go professionally, or retired? The route to Priesthood from the Catholic cradle via 13 years of Catholic school, with altar serving at the weekends plus a brief interlude at and after university before entering the seminary, is in fact now vanishingly rare even among such ordinations are there still are in Britain. More of our priests are adult converts, very often former Protestant clergymen and quite often married, than have trod anything like that path. A growing number are from the thriving heartlands of accurate catechesis and edifying liturgy in Eastern Europe and the Global South; we shall soon have more of those, too, than of the old school Catholic Boys. An almost entirely Catholic-schooled electorate legalised abortion by popular vote in Ireland. Schools may rule the roost in the Church, although there is no ecclesiological basis for that. But what do they do for the Church?