Lecture, The Catholic Columbian, Sept. 23 and 30, 1876 Lecture before the Young Men's Society of the Church of the Sacred Heart, Columbus, Ohio. (Printed by Reinhard & Fieser, Columbus, 1876; also printed in The Catholic Columbian on September 23 and 30, 1876, no doubt shortly after its delivery) (source: Catholic Record Society - Public Words of Bishop Rosecrans - Catholic Diocese of Columbus (columbuscatholic.org) )
Catholic Schools
Gentlemen of the Society: Education, in its most comprehensive state, is the "bringing out" of all the powers of soul and body, in their proper order, to the fulfillment of their true end. Years ago, when education began to be provided for by the state, here, in the West, we did not understand it in so broad a sense. To know how to "read, write and cypher," was to be educated. A few gifted souls might attain grammar and geography, as then taught; and the favored few might be rich enough to go to college for higher studies. What we then understood by common schools were houses in each district, where, for certain months of the year, a man or woman was hired to teach all the children of "the district" every branch, from the a, b, c, to the end of the spelling-book; from the multiplication table to the Double Rule of Three in Daboll's Arithmetic; from making straight marks with a quill pen to following copies in a fine hand. We had no idea that the government intended to assume possession of us, body and soul, in all the early years of our lives, and run us through the primary, intermediate, and high school courses, as they take marble through successive departments of the manufactory, until it becomes a polished vase, a full formed image, or a finished tombstone.
Now, however, the idea is put forward that the state owns the people; and the state must mould the individuals into unity by educating them all in the same schools, to perpetuate our free institutions; and anti-Catholic prejudice is appealed to in order to make this new view of education come into favor with the American people. We must furnish such teaching as will favor or offend no one's peculiar notions. Therefore, there must be no particular religion taught in the public schools.
We Catholics have to take ground on this question as follows. To all non-Catholics we say: "You have the right to educate your own children as you please, since you, not we, answer to God for their souls. If schools in which religion is sought to be excluded suit you, use them. But for us, our eternal salvation, and the knowledge of the means of attaining it, are the first and most important consideration; so important, indeed, that we see no use in education,--in fact, no use in living,--if this is neglected. Therefore, schools in which religion is ignored are not for us. We leave you your liberty; leave us ours. The world is wide enough to give ample room for all of us. Take your space, give us ours. There are enough things to contend about, in matters purely temporal, without borrowing themes of strife from questions that cannot be settled until the Judgment Day. If you are satisfied with your religious convictions, and we with ours, let us live according to those convictions, and await the Last Term of the SUPREME COURT for a decision as to which are right, and which are wrong."
On the abstract question of the kind of education which is so good that it ought to be forced upon all citizens of the Republic, indiscriminately, there is an irreconcilable difference of opinion between Catholics and non-Catholics. It arises from the essentially different views they take of the meaning and purpose of human life. The Catholic view is: Man lives for Eternity, and his supreme good is to know and serve God, and his supreme evil is not to know God, and to sin. He must aim at eternity and the interests of time will take care of themselves. The non-Catholic view is: Man lives for Time, and must be educated to understand its interests. If there is any Eternity, that will take care of itself. He must be educated that he may know to take care of his body, his health, his property and his liberty. This difference is as irreconcilable as that between the ideas of going South or going North on the same train, or of climbing up or climbing down on the same ladder at the same time.
It was this, His fundamental teaching of human destiny, that the Founder of Christianity ran athwart all the prejudices of his time. "Take no thought of food or drink or clothing," He said, "Fear not them that can kill the body," "what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?" "He that loseth his life shall find it." "If thou wouldst be perfect sell all thou hast and give to the poor." "Deny thyself, take up they cross and follow Me." He placed blessing in what non-Catholics dread as a curse. "Blessed are the POOR, the MEEK, the SIMPLE MINDED, the UNKNOWN, the DESPISED, the CALUMNIATED the persecuted with prisons, chains and death.
Pagan Rome was the most tolerant of governments towards all religions that would acknowledge the Emperor's divinity. A man was free to be of what religion he pleased so long as he did not mean anything by it. Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and the rest of them have beautiful sentiments about truth, justice, piety, patriotism, and other virtues; and were popular for having them. But the moment a "sect" arose that did more than sentimentalize about God's dominion and the soul's destiny; that quietly proclaimed truth to be supreme and not Caesar, and went joyously to death rather than disobey God, all the fury of Jew and Gentile was aroused to crush it.
This is very like the toleration among us to-day. Our people tolerate the Chinese "Josh," the Mormonism of Utah, which would never have been disturbed had not the valley of Salt Lake become wealthy enough to call the attention of Bible admiring adventurers--the filth of spiritism and free love, and all shades of sects of every stripe and kind. To them they say, educate your children as we please; or educate them any way you please provided you do not bring them up Catholics. If they are Catholics they will think their religion is a reality; and will never become homogeneous with the rest of their fellow citizens. The state can tolerate no rival in the business of education.
Now, we Catholics cannot comply with this exaction, for many reasons:
1st. Doing out share, as we did, to found and uphold this fabric of free government, we want a share of liberty according to our own taste. American Catholics were not hooted out of the armies of the revolution, whether in the old Pennsylvania and Maryland line, or when the gallant Frenchmen were welcomed to the tent of Washington.
In the dark days of the late war, Irish, German, and American Catholics never heard a nickname or a word of abuse at their place in the front. American liberty is no boon conferred by those outside of the Church on Catholics, as alms thrown to a beggar. It was won by them as well as by others with God's help. Now we want liberty after our own taste. We want no liberty to domineer over others or to annoy and abuse and calumniate them; but simply liberty to follow the dictates of our conscience, in our care of our souls and of our children.
We do not want the liberty of communistic European manufacture, which consists in forcing upon people opinions they reject, and practices they loathe, in making a homogeneous mass of all classes of society, wiping out the family; and, under pretext of raising up the poor, pulling down the rich, and with promise of making all alike prosperous and happy, bringing in envy, strife, murder and despair to the hearts of all. We do not want the liberty of free love, divorce and child murder; but old-fashioned Catholic liberty which CHRIST brought to earth from heaven, which the martyrs won by their blood, which flourished when Catholic conscience, without a drop of blood shed, struck the shackles from every slave in Christendom, when the bishops and barons of England wrung their Charter from King John; which had its home in Germany, though often buffeted, until the great rebellion against the Church paved the way for modern imperialism; in Switzerland, before the time of Calvin and Zwinglius, and still flourishes among the simple people that dwell contented in the mountains of Tyrol. We want our own kind of liberty, Catholic liberty, true American liberty.
We Catholics cannot accept Godless education.
2d. From the nature of the thing. "'Tis education forms the common mind. Just as the twig is bent the tree is inclined." "Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it." Though the mind is no unwritten tablet, nor tablet of any kind, but a spirit, essentially active, yet it goes where it is led. It sees what is spread out before it, trusts to those who assume the office of forming it, values what they value, despises what they despise.
Now the fundamental doctrine of all Christianity is that we must take care of our soul, whatever happens to our body. If "the world and all the glory of it" is to pay us for sinning we must not sin. If exile, and dungeons, and scaffolds threaten us, unless we say that an idol is God, or a lie the truth, we must not "fear them that can kill the body, but only Him who has power to cast both soul and body into hell." Baptized people are in the world, but not of it. Their model is a MAN, who voluntarily put aside riches, honors and pleasures, was born in a stable, lived among the poor and despised, and died a felon's death.
To them human knowledge is only one of the means of living in the grace of God by obeying the Ten Commandments. They have nothing to do with the strifes of factions, the turmoil of those pursuits which have their beginning and their end in this fleeting life. They live the life it is true, and fulfill all the duties of it as zealously, as bravely and perseveringly as those who have no expectation of anything substantial, beyond the grave. But their aim is far away from the thoughts of the Gentile. They treat themselves as stewards awaiting the day of settlement, and handle all their employments with a view to the time when accounts will be made up, and receipts exchanged.
Here then is the plain reason why Catholics cannot accept an education from whose teaching their faith is excluded. The business of life, its whole bearing and meaning, is to learn from the Son of God what He would have us believe and practice, and having learned, to believe and practice. What we do outside of this is utterly useless--wasted time, squandered opportunity.
But the godless school would take our children from their seventh to their sixteenth or eighteenth year, and keep them studying matters with which Jesus Christ is ostentatiously pronounced to have nothing to do. This separates fatally in two ways. It distorts science and roots out faith.
God is the source of all truth and of all right knowledge. To know truth and not connect it with Him, is to know the wheels of a watch, scattered and separate, without understanding why they were constructed or what end they are to serve. It is not true knowledge. But the godless system of education allows no other knowledge of truth than this. It forbids the student to consider what he studies in its bearings on religion. He learns words, but he dare not think of the Eternal Word. He is taught the ways of the stars, but may not meditate on their Author, or of the Star of Bethlehem. He is compelled to have no daily contact with his religion, but to hold it aloof for all times of the day, except two minutes or so in the morning and evening, and all times of the week, except Sundays. His knowledge is necessarily fragmentary and disconnected. He knows some facts and some rules, some history and some literature; but he does not know the meaning of anything; because science outside of God is vain--"falsely so called." And this despising of faith subverts it, in swift degrees. What result can be expected in a contest where six days of the week are spent in alert study of things which imply that religion is of no practical value, and an hour of one day is spent in droning over the words of Catechism, or listening with yawning impatience to a priest urging the supreme importance of what the main drift of your life treats with contempt? Of all the pitiful inconsistencies in human conduct, that of parents pretending to teach enough religion by giving a few fugitive lessons in their Catechism to their children, or rushing them through all of it when they are old enough for First Communion, is among the foremost. The character of a child is not formed after it is fifteen, but before it is ten; and it is not formed from what the parents and teachers say, in their set speeches, and didactic moods, but from what their lives say. Children see through hypocrisy, and become too familiar with it to be surprised at it, long before their parents and teachers dream of. They learn very young that honesty, obedience, industry, humility, purity, truth-telling, are very convenient qualities for parents to have in their children; and they are not slow in suspecting that these virtues are urged upon them for that reason. This, particularly, when they observe that their parents have no fondness for the practice of the virtues they recommend. So, when they see that the all-important business of life is put out of their studies, banished from the school-room, postponed to out of the way times, made subordinate to dress and all other kinds of convenience, they quietly fall into their elders' habits of acting and their unmeaning ways of speaking. They will act as if religious duties were something painful and constrained; like putting on a solemn face at a funeral when they are really glad he is dead; and speak very solemnly about the sin and theft and the duty of restitution, when their little brothers have stolen their pencils or pen-knives. Faith ceases to be reality with them, and becomes mere feeing and sentiment at first, and later an idle superstition of the past. No Catholic parent, therefore, can consent to abandon the education of his children to schools in which religion is ignored.
3. But after all, reasons like them, however conclusive and unanswerable, do not form the precise and peremptory motive of our rejecting non-religious schools. We might see the results of pagan education in French atheism, Italian diabolism, English mammonism, American sentimentalism, without learning the lesson they teach; and, deluding ourselves with the folly that in every generation repeats itself in other matters, think that we could incur their peril without sharing their shipwreck, had not the Church spoken and ended the controversy for loyal Catholics. "Education must be made more Christian," is the saying of Pius IX. To study pagan authors as if they were oracles; to learn science, as if life had no other end than to puzzle over mathematical combinations or empirical experiments, is to make religion the recreation of the learned, and the business of only the vulgar; and so the upper classes of European countries were the first victims of infidelity. The Church tried to stay the movement by raising her voice loud in earnest condemnation of godless education.
The present Pontiff, the great and saintly Pius IX., has again and again spoken the mind of the LORD JESUS CHRIST in unmistakable words. In 1849 the theory of government control of education was boldly advocated in Upper Italy. Conscience--the voice of the Church--had nothing to do with what was taught to children; let bishops have no voice in any other school but their own episcopal seminaries. They and parents have no say as to the discipline of schools; the choice of studies; the conferring of degrees; the selection and employment of teachers.
This was condemned in the Allocution of the Pope in November, 1850, and again in a Brief September 5, 1851.
The same parties who exaggerated the power of the civil government in the matter of secular education, went on to maintain further the maxim of pagan tyranny, that she has the right to prescribe the course of studies in ecclesiastical seminaries, and dictate what shall be taught in the same. This proposition was condemned in a Brief of the Holy Father, December 15, 1875.
The point of the question lies in this: "Is there such a separation of the temporal and eternal interests of man as to allow the study of one set of interests to be absolutely separated from the study of the other?" Can a person say secular education ought to be entirely removed from the domain and control of conscience in such manner that Catholic parents may, without scruple, allow their children to be brought up in schools in which religion is treated as a thing of naught? This question was answered in the negative, in emphatic terms by our Holy Father in his letter to the Archbishop of Fribourg.
The whole controversy between Bismarck and the Catholic Church has hinged on this question: Has the Church the charge of the souls of men, or does this charge belong to the state?
The fact that the authority of the Church has distinctly and emphatically pronounced against the surrender of Catholic children to godless teaching is beyond controversy.
There is, therefore, but one honest conclusion. All Catholics must either accept the decision, or become non-Catholics. Those who persist in defying authority are no more Catholic than Luther or Calvin, or Henry VIII. or John Knox.
Yet you will meet with many who will not see this plain conclusion. They make evasions; suppose ignorance on the part of the Pope; feign a distinction between their rebellion and that of other schismatics; appeal to anti-Catholic and infidel prejudices; calumniate the quality of the teaching in Catholic schools; and go through all phases of meanness and hypocrisy, instead of coming out honestly with the declaration that they no longer desire to be considered children of the Church. In their abject submission to their worldly inclinations they sacrifice all independence, and try to persuade the world that they do this rather than bow down to the dictation of priests. They "link their bonds, shouting that they are free."
As for us, my friends, who consider our Catholicity no empty name, but the great reality that gives meaning to life, let us not be deceived by the sophistry of infidels, or daunted by the threats of demagogues. Our Faith is worth as much to us as it was to the army of the martyrs who for centuries preached it by their sufferings and death: It is worth as much to those who are to succeed us, as it is to us; therefore let us think it a privilege to brave obloquy and spend life in the effort for its promotion.
Those who instruct many unto justice shall shine as stars for ever and ever.
