St Patrick's Church of Irleand (Anglican)
Cathedral, Dublin
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When the President spoke in Belfast last Sunday, June 17th, he said:
“There are still
wounds [in Northern Ireland] that haven’t healed, and communities where
tensions and mistrust hangs in the air.” … “If towns remain divided – if
Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs – if we
can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to
harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.”
Northern Ireland
has come a long way since President Clinton mediated the “Good Friday Peace
Accords” of 1998. Sectarian violence has
receded and Catholics have been given a more proportionate share in the economy
as well as government and social services.
But prejudice, anger, and hatred still simmer below the surface. And the separate schools do not help but
provide reinforcement for the stereotypes and intolerance that still run
through Northern Ireland society.
You will notice
that the President challenged not Catholic Schools but sectarian schools—Catholic
or Protestant—in Northern Ireland. Don’t
compare the situation in Ireland—North or South—to the American experience of
Catholic Education. The Republic of
Ireland, which does not include the six counties of “Northern Ireland,” has an
excellent system of public schools. It does
not have “parish schools” as we have had in the United States and what Catholic
Schools there are, are what we would call “private schools”—rather upper crust
and select—and inclusive of students from a variety of religious
backgrounds. Unlike American public
schools, there is room for religion in the public school curriculum. The vast majority of citizens in the Republic
are Catholic. Until the recent scandals
the vast majority were devout Catholics.
But the Catholic Priest, Church of Ireland (Anglican) Minister,
Methodist and Presbyterian Parson all have access to the school where their
congregants study to teach religion to their respective students. Such public schools put Catholic and Protestant
youth on the same teams rather than pitting them against one another. Friendships are formed across denominational lines. And the
political, social, and economic tensions that continue to divide the Catholic
and Protectant communities in the North have long vanished in the South.
It is a bit of a
canard to go after President Obama for “attacking” Catholic Education when he
did nothing of the kind. But then the
voices raised against him are the same voices that decry his administration’s
lead on health care , immigration reform,
same-sex marriage, and other
contemporary issues. And the dissatisfaction with these policies more often
than not is, like this flap over Northern Ireland, based on faulty facts and
distorted simplifications. It becomes
obvious over a period of time that the problem is not the issues, but the
man. And what is there about the man
that excites such anger? Hmmm. The answer is too obvious to name, is it not,
Paula Deen?
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