The morning star and Catholic messenger. [volume] (New Orleans [La.]) 1868-1881, 1870-08-07
Compulsory Education.

Compulsory Edueation.-
In Catholic point of view. the principle
Of compulsory education on the part Of the
state is untenable, because repugnant to at
least two other principles, which are es-
eential ones In our religion. One Of these
10 the right OF the parent; the other the
right of the Church. The Pagan law-giver
and the socialist schemer make light of pa
renta! rights. They take the pulling infant
from it's mothers arms and bring it up in q
public institution, apart from all domestic
influence, to make it tough fighter or q
hard worker for the benefit of the commu-
nifty. The Catholic doctrine, however, has
always been that parental rights are sa-
cred and inviolable, except when they are
or more sacred duty. Therefore the State
cannot have the right to compel parents to
send their children to it's schools. It may
be said that the parental rights are delega-
ted by common consent to the State 1t
may be so as regards others, but we Ca
tholics could not possibly delegate our pa
rental rights to nom Catholic or to any
mere secular government; therefore, as
concerns ourselves, for this reason if for no
other, we can never give our adhesion to
compulsory education. The other principle
which it violates is the right of the Church
to educate. This right she has ever claimed
as hers exclusively by divine sanction, and
would allows This right of the Church, as
well as the right of the father of family,
will be ruthlessly violated in the case Of
Catholics If what now seems possible
should happen; namely, that in default of
Catholic schools the State should take in
hand to compel Catholic parents to educate
their children in those secular schools
which it will have established. And it is
to be observed that those schools are to be
established not only on the negatively false
principle of ignoring religious truth and
excluding religious instruction given III the
form and manner in which the Church
would have it given, but also on the
positively false and condemnable principle
of asserting, as was done in the recent de-
bates on the Government side, that educa-
ton of the poor is and ought to be q thing
aiming only at temporal objects and ends,
and those too not even of the highest kind
in their own order. So far from educating
them to attain the great end of their crea-
ton in another life, it is not even proposed
to train them SO as to become virtuous
citizens and to attain such happiness as
they may be supposed capable of in this
world. 1t is simply to carry into practice
a theory which, rightly or wrongly, has
come to prevail of late years, and which we
do not now propose to examine-nameiy,
that the acquisition of reading, writing,
arithmetic and the like, so far refines the
manners and cruel, brutal propensities,
that by their aid men give less trouble to
the police, furnish fewer inmates to the
prisons and the hulks, and so cease to swell
the annual averages of criminality and
Thus, it is argued, the rate
payer will find his account in paying the
school-supporting rates, which in the end
will come to be the only rates chargeable
for, with the extinction of crime, county
rates will cease, and with the diminution
of pauperism poors' rates will be reduced
to a minimum. Whether these bright an
ticipations are well grounded OF not, Ca
tholics, it will be admitted, have the
strongest motives for making the most
strenuous efforts to provide schools of
their own, SO that their poorer brethren
may not come to be subjected to the action
of the secular school system which is
about to be set up.
After spending twenty millions in the
last thirty years on grants to denomina-
tional schools in England, the Legislature
appears resolved on reversing it's former
policy at least, as far as regards grants
in aid of the erection of school houses.
And yet we are unwilling altogether to re-
linquish the hope that we may not, under
the final arrangements. be refused all aid
in the shape of building grants. The cir
cumstances of our case are most exception
al. We have to educate a vast population
of our own faith, but not otherwise belong
ihg-te-us. 1t has been thrown upon
British soil by the consequence of acts in
which we have had no share, and over
which we could exercise no control. Those
acts are now admitted by our present
rulers and by the English nation to have
been fragrant wrongs requiring reparation.
The great Irish immigration has been of
signal service to England, for it has sup
piled the physical strength and the manual
labor, without which the great works of
the nineteenth century could not have been
executed, nor the material resources of
the country developed to the extent they
have been. Without the Irish immigration
we might indeed have built new streets
and squares, and carried out many useful
public works; but we may say that but for
it we could not boast day of new cities
eclipsing in splendor all that our fathers
imagined of our docks, shipping and
manufactures; and, above all, of the vast
system of railways covering, like a net
work, this land of ours and raising every
where the value of property in tenfold
proportion. Shall it be said that England
would afford no aid to provide school
houses where the sons of these faithful and
stalwart workers might be educated in
their cherished faith, but threw the bur-
then on their own hard-earned pence,
aided only by us, their English co -religon-
lists, who are of themselves one of the least
wealthy of the religious bodies in the
country 7-LOndon Tablet.
LOUISIANA STATE UNIvERsITY.-The pros
pectus of this establishment will be found in
column. No similar institution, that aware OF,
n Tn he