Voice of the Family

A LAY INITIATIVE FORMED TO DEFEND

CATHOLIC TEACHING ON THE FAMILY

Catholic education: learning the lessons of the past

By Liam Gibson   |   25 September 2024

In late September 1979, Pope John Paul II visited the Republic of Ireland. By comparison to the rest of Western Europe, the faith of the Irish people was still robust. On the day of his departure, however, the holy father delivered a stark warning. The Irish Church, he said, was “living again the temptations of Christ”. 

“Ireland is being asked to prefer the ‘kingdoms of the world and their splendour’ to the kingdom of God. Satan, the tempter, the adversary of Christ, will use all his might and all his deceptions to win Ireland for the way of the world. What a victory he would gain, what a blow he would inflict on the Body of Christ in the world, if he could seduce Irish men and women away from Christ.”1

In an address to young people the previous day, he urged them to resist the forces, which, under the pretext of greater freedom, would seek to enslave them.

“… do not close your eyes to the moral sickness that stalks your society today, and from which your youth alone will not protect you. How many young people have already warped their consciences and have substituted the true joy of life with drugs, sex, alcohol, vandalism and the empty pursuit of mere material possessions.”2

Forty-five years later, the words of the Pope reveal a prophetic insight into the approaching danger that most Irish Catholics at that time failed to recognise. What centuries of poverty and ruthless persecution could not achieve, the false promise of economic growth and material possessions accomplished in just two generations. Ireland chose to follow the way of the world.

In The Pope’s Children (first published twenty-eight years after the papal visit), the economist David McWilliams examined how the generation that chanted the Pope’s name (but failed to heed his message) made Ireland “wealthy, aspirant and materialistic”. Drawing on the results of the 2002 census, he describes the upward social mobility experienced by a significant section of the population, stating:

“… the middle class has grown by 25% in the short time since 1996. … In the past ten years, 200,000 people have moved out of the poorest classes into the middle class. Think about the extremes: the number of people in the very top social class has increased by 22.34%, while the number at the very bottom, as noted, fell by 29%.”3

And, as the Pope predicted, the pursuit of material gain was accompanied by an unbridled growth in hedonism; perhaps most clearly depicted in the alarming statistics McWilliams cites for the consumption of alcohol. 

“Young Irish women drink not twice or three times but ten times more than their Italian equivalents. Four out of five of our young men are regular drinkers compared to 34% of the EU average. We drink more pure alcohol than anyone else in the world at 25.3 pints on average per person per year. … Back in the early 1960s, Ireland’s boozing was the fifth lowest in the OECD with eight countries guzzling more than us.”4

Since the publication of McWilliams’ book, same-sex marriage and abortion were introduced by the Irish government following referenda in 2015 and 2018, with 62 per cent and 64 per cent approval respectively. McWilliams attributes the rapid economic and social change in the Republic to the effects of education. If he is correct, then this can only be seen as a damning indictment of the Irish bishops’ management of Catholic schools. Official statistics show that in 2019, 88.4 per cent of primary schools (2760) and 48 per cent of post-primary schools (344) were under the patronage of the Catholic Bishops.5 And while on paper these schools maintain and promote a Catholic ethos, an in-depth survey published earlier this year paints a very different picture. The report of the Global Researchers Advancing Catholic Education (GRACE)6 outlines a “pattern of neglect” regarding the teaching of religious education and the development of a Catholic ethos which, the authors argue, needs to be remedied urgently.7

Although 94 per cent of the roughly 4,000 respondents (principals, teachers and school governors) identified as Roman Catholic, only 86 per cent said they believe in God. Less than a quarter of teachers attend a religious service each week. Among head teachers, over 90 per cent of those over the age of 50 say they are committed to the faith, but this drops to 56 per cent for those under 50. The make-up of personnel in Catholic schools is becoming increasingly non-Catholic, a trend set to continue in years ahead. Almost all of these teachers are themselves a product of Catholic education.

Speaking to The Irish Catholic newspaper last April, Dr Daniel O’Connell, one of the authors of the report, expressed his concern that, unless action is taken soon, the Catholic ethos could disappear. “Whatever it’s like now,” he said, “whatever capacity for articulating and acting on Catholic ethos there is, that is going to diminish and shrink in [the] leadership of schools.” 

In 2016, the Irish government gave an undertaking to the United Nations that it would open 400 additional non-denominational and multi-denominational primary schools by 2030.8 The majority of these will be Catholic schools taken over by the state. Yet, the most worrying aspect of this scenario is not the hostility of the government but the apparent indifference shown by the leaders of the Church. Indeed, even under the sustained and systematic persecution of previous centuries, Catholic education not only survived but flourished. 

“Hedge” schools

Before the Reformation, there were two educational traditions in Ireland: the monastic schools, which came to an end with the dissolution of the monasteries, and the Bardic schools, which had existed (with adaptations) for over 1,000 years. Under the patronage of the Gaelic chieftains and the Anglo-Irish earls who adopted Gaelic ways, scholars would study Ireland’s indigenous legal system, the Brehon laws,9 as well as medicine and poetry. This tradition too was suppressed by the Tudor and Jacobean regimes which decapitated the ancient system of patronage. St Edmund Campion, who was in Ireland in 1570 and saw a school at work left this description: 

“Without either precepts or observation of congruity, they speak Latin like a vulgar language, learned in their common school of Leach-craft and Law, where at they begin Children and hold on sixteen or twenty year conning by rote the Aphorismes of Hypocrates, and the Civil Institutions, and a few ether parings of these two faculties. I have seen them where they kept school, ten in some one Chamber, grovelling upon couches of straw, their books at their noses, themselves lying flat prostrate, and so to chant out their lessons by piecemeal, being the most part lusty fellows of twenty-five years and upwards.”10

The Restoration of the English crown in 1660, brought some relief after the national trauma of the Cromwellian conquest. Under the Commonwealth, the penalty for corrupting the youth with “Popish principals” was transplantation to Connaught or “the Islands of the Barbados”. Despite this, some level of schooling persisted. Between 1582 and 1681, about twenty colleges for Irish Catholic students were also established on the continent.11 The introduction of the Penal Laws in 1695, however, brought this to an end. From then on, Catholics were forbidden to send their children to be educated abroad. The only option open to them which did not involve their exposure to Protestant proselytism was the illicit “hedge school”. Like the open-air liturgies of the Mass Rocks, the classes of these schools were sometimes held outdoors but more often in a farm building or the teacher’s own home. 

Despite conditions unimaginable today, the government failed to suppress the spread of hedge schools, with an estimated 9,000 of them across the country with 400,000 students attending them over the years.12 While teachers were often appointed by a local priest, fees were paid directly to the teacher, leaving him largely independent of any kind of authority other than market forces and the ire of parents. Families paid for their children to be instructed in mathematics and literacy, (especially poetry in Irish, Latin and sometimes Greek), along with history and geography. In Irish-speaking regions, English was taught through the medium of Latin. The emphasis on Latin provided a basic education for the priesthood but it also allowed other young men to pursue a career in the service of France or Spain or Austria. Contemporary sources confirm the high quality of the education provided.

Having failed to stamp out Catholic education, in 1782 it became legal for a Catholic schoolmaster (with a licence) to instruct Catholic children. It remained unlawful for them to teach Protestant children or to be employed in a Protestant school. 

The network of hedge schools reached their peak in the 1820s. In 1825, a report by the Commissioners of the Board of Education established by the London government denounced the alleged failures of the schools which, it was claimed, frequently encouraged pupils to pursue “lawless and profligate adventure, to cherish superstition” or “to lead [them] to dissension or disloyalty”.  

The Catholic Emancipation Act was passed in 1829 and, just two years later, the Board of Education introduced their own National School system. Its aim was to exercise control over the education of a population the government did not trust. Eager to demonstrate that “Catholic” did not mean disloyal, the Bishops gave the initiative their support. Ultimately, the nationalisation of education greatly reduced the direct involvement of parents in their children’s education. 

When Cardinal Newman arrived in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century to establish a Catholic university, he gave a series of talks to the Dublin faithful. In his fourth lecture he recounts the following story:

“I recollect, some twenty-five years ago, three friends of my own, as they then were, clergymen of the Establishment, making a tour through Ireland. In the West or South, they had occasion to become pedestrians for the day; and they took a boy of thirteen to be their guide. They amused themselves with putting questions to him on the subject of his religion; and one of them confessed to me on his return that that poor child put them all to silence. How? Not, of course, by any train of arguments, or refined theological disquisition, but merely by knowing and understanding the answers in his catechism.”13

Before his departure in 1979, Pope John Paul encouraged parents in their duty and privilege to hand on the faith to their children. The home, he told them should be the first school of religion, as it must be the first school of prayer. 

“The great spiritual influence of Ireland in the history of the world was due in great degree to the religion of the homes of Ireland, for here is where evangelisation begins, here is where vocations are nurtured.”14

Today, Catholic parents in Ireland (and the greater part of the Western world) are faced with the duty of educating their children in a climate that is hostile to their faith and an episcopate that seems only too eager to prove its loyalty to the ruling class. Even where a Catholic school structure exists, the institutions often seek to promote values and beliefs incompatible with the tenets of the Catholic Faith. While such schools don’t provide enough exposure to Catholicism for the majority of students to catch it, there is just enough to leave them with a lifelong immunity. In a cultural landscape that no longer bears any resemblance to that of forty-five years ago, the long and troubled history of Catholic education in Ireland is proof that even the harshest of climates can be overcome.

  1.  Pope John Paul II, Homily at the Mass, Greenpark Racecourse, Limerick, Republic of Ireland, 1 October 1979. ↩︎
  2. Pope John Paul II, Homily at the Mass for the Youth of Ireland, Galway, 30 September 1979. ↩︎
  3. David McWilliams, The Pope’s Children: The Irish Economic Triumph and the Rise of Ireland’s New Elite (Wiley, 2008) p 17. ↩︎
  4.  Ibid, p 7. ↩︎
  5. “Education in Ireland: Statistical snapshot”, Oireachtas Library & Research Service, Houses of the Oireachtas, 2020. ↩︎
  6. GRACE (Ireland) National Research Project 2021-2024 Findings, Report 6: Catholic Schools in Ireland: Responsibility, Oversight and Governance. ↩︎
  7.  Ruadhán Jones, “Investment, divestment needed urgently to safeguard Catholic education – report”, The Irish Catholic, 25 April 2024. ↩︎
  8.  Jennifer Hogan, “Removal of faith from schools is moving at a snail’s pace”, 24 June 2024, Irish Examiner. ↩︎
  9. “Prior to English rule, Ireland had its own indigenous system of law dating from Celtic times, which survived until the seventeenth century, when it was finally replaced by the English common law. This native system of law, known as the Brehon law, developed from customs which had been passed on orally from one generation to the next. In the seventh century AD, the laws were written down for the first time.” – from “History of the Law in Ireland.” An tSéirbhís Chúirteanna/Court Service of Ireland. ↩︎
  10. Patrick John Dowling, The Hedge Schools of Ireland, (Phoenix Press, Dublin, 1935) p 6. ↩︎
  11. Ibid p 18. ↩︎
  12.  Tony Lyons, “’Inciting the lawless and profligate adventure’—the hedge schools of Ireland’” (2016) 18th–19th Century Social Perspectives, 6, 24. ↩︎
  13.  John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University. Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin. (9th edt) (Longmans, Green & Co, New York, 1889) p 379. ↩︎
  14.  Homily at the Papal Mass, Greenpark Racecourse, Limerick. ↩︎

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