Chapter 12 - FILL IN HERE

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Liberty in Education

“Teaching should have as an object only true things.”

Leo XIII

The third of the new liberties condemned by the popes is the liberty in education.

Be scandalized then, unsophisticated souls, liberal minds who do not know yourselves, brain-washed by two centuries of liberal culture! Yes, admit that you cannot get over it, that you cannot understand it at all: the popes condemn liberty in education. O surprise! O scandal! The pope—and what a pope! Leo XIII, whom some call liberal, condemns the sacrosanct freedom of instruction! How then shall we defend our Catholic schools, our free schools? For the name of Catholic school has a musty smell of sectarianism, a flavor of religious war, a far too confessional color, which is not good to show at a time when everyone in our ranks is keeping his flag in his pocket.

I will have you wonder in passing at the soft and sweetish liberal virtues, which surpass one another in hypocrisy: foolishness, cowardice, and treachery join hands here to sing in chorus, as in June 1984, in the streets of Paris, the “Hymn of the Free School”:

“Liberty, liberty! Thou art the only truth.” Which clearly means: we ask you only for liberty, in short…just a little bit of liberty for our schools; by means of which we have nothing to criticize in secular and obligatory freedom of education, in the liberty of the quasi-monopoly of the Marxist and Freudian school. Keep on calmly tearing out Jesus Christ, running down your country, staining our past, in the minds and hearts of eighty percent of the children; and we, for our part, to the twenty percent who remain, we will extol the merits of tolerance and of pluralism, we will denounce the errors of fanaticism and of superstition, in short, we will make people taste the charms of the only liberty.

I now leave to the popes the care of showing us the falsity of this new liberty and the trap that it sets up for the true defense of Catholic instruction. So first, let us examine its falsity.

As regards what is called freedom of education, it does not have to be judged in any different way. It cannot be doubted that nothing but the truth must enter into souls, since it is in this that intelligent natures find their good, their end, their perfection: this is why education should have as its object only true things, and is meant for the ignorant and the learned, so that it can bring to the first the knowledge of truth, and to the second a strengthening of it. It is for this motive that the duty of whoever devotes himself to teaching is unquestionably to root out errors from the minds and to put up reliable protection against the encroachments of false opinions. It is thus obvious that the liberty which We are discussing, by arrogating to itself the right to teach everything according to its own fancy, is in flagrant contradiction with reason and that it was born to produce a complete upsetting of minds. The public power can grant such a license in society only by contempt for its duty. That is the more accurate as we consider what weight the professor’s authority has for his hearers, and how rare it is that a disciple can judge for himself the truth of the master’s teaching.

That is why this liberty, to remain honorable, also needs to be confined within determined limits; art and education must not with impunity have the power to become an instrument of corruption.1

Let us then remember the word of the pope: the civil power cannot grant, in the so-called public schools, the liberty to teach Marx and Freud, or, still worse, the license to teach that all opinions and all doctrines have value, that none of them can claim the truth for itself alone, that all must be mutually tolerated. This is the worst of the corruptions of the mind: relativism.

Now here is what concerns the pitfall of freedom of education. For the Catholic, it consists in saying to the State, “We ask of you only liberty.” Otherwise said, “the free school in the free State.” Or again, “You certainly allow Marx and Freud in your secular school; grant freedom also to Jesus Christ in our free schools!” Now, this is a snare; it is to leave to the good pleasure of the State the care of determining the minimum of your Christian educational project tolerable in a secular society, for you to fall in there with docility yourselves. That would be an argument ad hominem—strictly speaking, acceptable—faced with a brutally persecuting regime, but facing a liberal Masonic power such as exists in the West, particularly in France, and in a country where the resources of Christianity are not exhausted, it is a cowardice and a betrayal. Catholics! Boldly show your fortitude! Openly manifest the rights of Jesus Christ over the minds redeemed by His Blood! Defend courageously the full liberty which the Church has to teach, by virtue of its divine mission! Insist too on the complete freedom of parents to give a Catholic education and instruction to their children, by virtue of their role as educators of their children. Such is the teaching of Pius XI in his Encyclical Divini lllius, of December 31, 1929, on education.

The function of civil authority that resides in the State is thus twofold: to protect the family and the individualand let them progress, but without absorbing them or substituting for them.

In matters of education then, it is the right, or better said the duty, of the State to protect by its laws the previous right, defined above, that the family has of the Christian education of the child, and, as a consequence therefore to respect the supernatural right of the Church over this same education.

Furthermore, in his Encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno, of June 29, 1931, against Fascism, which was strangling Catholic youth organizations, Pius XI has these very beautiful lines which are applied to the full liberty of education to which the Church has the right, as well as the souls themselves:

…The sacred and inviolable rights of souls and of the Church. It is a question of the right that souls have to procure for themselves the greatest spiritual good under the Magisterium and the educational work of the Church, the divinely established unique agent of that Magisterium and of that soul, in that supernatural order founded in the blood of God the Redeemer, necessary and obligatory for all, in order to participate in the divine Redemption. It is a question of the right of souls thus formed to communicate the treasures of the Redemption to other souls, by collaborating with the activity of the hierarchical apostolate. [Pius XI has in view Catholic Action.]

It is in consideration of this double right of souls that we were saying recently that we are happy and proud to fight the good fight for the freedom of consciences, not (as some, perhaps by inadvertence, have had Us say) for freedom of conscience, a way of speaking that is equivocal and too often used to mean the absolute independence of the conscience; an absurd thing in a soul created and redeemed by God…

It is a question moreover of the right, not less inviolable, of the Church to fulfill the imperative mandate that its divine Founder assigned to it, to bring to souls, to all souls, all the treasures of truth and of goods, doctrinal and practical, that He had Himself prepared for the world. “Euntes docete omnes gentes…docentes eos servare omnia quaecumque mandavi vobis. Go and teach all nations, teaching them to observe all things that I have entrusted to you” (Mt. 28:19-20).2

This doctrine applies particularly to the teaching given by Catholic schools.

I think that now you understand better the difference, the diametrical opposition, between the liberal freedom of education3 I would call it, and the total freedom of instruction4 claimed by the Church, as one of its sacred rights.

What place does the doctrine of the Church leave to the State in teaching and education? The answer is simple: with the exception of certain schools preparatory to the public service, like the military schools for example, the State is neither teacher nor educator.5 Its role is, according to the principle of subsidiarity applied above by Pius XI, to promote the foundation of free schools by parents and by the Church, and not to substitute itself for them. The State school, the principle of a “great national educational service,” even if it is not secular and if the State does not claim a monopoly in education, is a principle contrary to the doctrine of the Church.

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1 Leo XIII, Libertas, PIN. 209-210. See also the Letter E giunto of Leo XIII, already quoted, PIN. 210.

2 D.C. 574 (1931) col. 82; Pontifical teachings; Education, Desclée, 1960, no. 316.

3 Freedom to teach anything.

4 Freedom to teach the truth!

5 Parents are by nature the first educators of their children, and the Church has received from Our Lord the mission “to teach all nations.” However, the State (the government) has not received such a mission, either from nature or from Christ! It has the duty to oversee and provide for the common good. It should not do by itself what can be done by others under it; it should not take over private enterprises (nationalizations) but rather be a just arbitrator between them. Similarly, it should not take over schools, but rather protect them and promote the good efforts of the parents and the Church.