The Churches' response
Schools of Reconciliation: Issues in Joint Roman Catholic-Anglican Education
by Priscilla Chadwick (Cassell, 1994)
It will be difficult for anyone who is sincerely concerned about growing understanding between our two communities not to wish the Minister well in an experiment, which demands of all participants the willingness to take a calculated risk for the possible greater good of the whole community.
The main Protestant churches had also developed effective ecumenical links with their colleagues through the British Council of Churches - of which the Roman Catholic Church was not a member - and therefore, it was argued [5], had a broader ecumenical perspective than either the Catholics or the Free Presbyterians [6]. It is not without weight that the Anglican Archbishops of Dublin, H. R. McAdoo, played a major part in the agreements of the Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission articulated in the `Final Report' of 1982. Therefore, when Lagan College was opened, offers of assistance with the pastoral and denominational support for the children were forthcoming. Although they would be hesitant about their status as official representatives of their respective Churches, the Protestant chaplains from the Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, Baptists and non-subscribing Presbyterians [7] gave willingly of their time to ensure the Lagan children received pastoral encouragement.
THE ROMAN CATHOLICS
Roman Catholic teachers working on the staff of Lagan College fervently wished that their own Church could more openly offer support to so courageous a venture, but it is not the way of the Irish hierarchy to yield ground. The inveterate hostility to mixed marriages remains (the RC Church in England and Wales eased its rules on 6 April 1990) and insistence on the Ne Temere decree enforcing the Roman Catholic upbringing of the children has only in recent years required no written undertaking. Protestant reservations were not lessened by the vehement opposition of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to the decision of the Dublin government led by Garret Fitzgerald that was politically necessary to make artificial means of birth control more freely available, partly on the ground that the exposure of unwanted children is far worse. (The Time, 18 and 22 February 1985). The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has not always been so hostile to the presuppositions of contemporary society. In the first half of the nineteenth century Gallicanism had more following than ultramontanism among members of the hierarchy, and there was less use of language that appears authoritarian. In 1826 the Roman Catholic Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, James Doyle OESA (bishop from 1819 until his death in 1834), declared:
I do not know any measure which would prepare the way for a better feeling in Ireland, than uniting children at an early age and bringing them up in the same school, leading them to commune with one another and to form those little intimacies and friendships which often subsist through life. (Select Committee, 1830, VII, pp. 426-7)
This surprising declaration belonged to a time when Catholic emancipation was being urgently pressed at Westminster and when the Roman Catholics in England were striving to reassure public opinion that Catholicism was not seditious or treasonable to the Crown [8]. But in the twentieth century it is hard to imagine that so optimistic and `progressive' an opinion could come from a member of the Irish hierarchy. The bishops had real grounds for apprehension that too great an enthusiasm for integrated education could result only in injury to Roman Catholic schools, to which Roman Catholic parents ought to be sending their children rather than to places like Lagan College. Roman Catholic parents who chose to send their children to Lagan were put under moral pressure. Their action looked like disloyalty to their Church, tantamount to surrendering the heart of their faith in favour of religious indifferentism. Back in 1976 the Catholic hierarchy had given unexpected prominence to education in the Directory of Ecumenism in Ireland (Catholic Hierarchy, 1970), acknowledging the challenge presented to their schools by the ecumenical movement and the tragic conflict in Northern Ireland. However, they argued that
the replacement of Catholic by interdenominational schools in Ireland would not contribute to overcoming the divisions in our midst... We must point out that in such schools the full Catholic witness is inevitably diluted.
Bishop Cahal Daly himself endorsed the official line in an article on `Ecumenism
in Ireland' in the Irish Theological Quarterly (1978) [9]. However, dissenting
Catholic voices were beginning to be raised to these utterances of the hierarchy.
Father John Brady, the Jesuit director of the College of Industrial Relations,
wrote in 1978: `There are no insuperable difficulties about educating Catholic
and Protestant children in the same school.' If the Catholic Church was
`prepared to pursue its legitimate interests in education through participative
structures, at least in some instances and on an experimental basis', it
would be saying `in deeds rather than words that they do not wish to perpetuate
the divisive social structures of Northern Ireland'. This concession that
integrated schools could be recognized as `experimental' was finally offered
in 1982 by Cardinal O'Fiaich, then Cahal Dalky's predecessor as Archbishop
of Armagh, [10] in the Irish Times (30 January 1982).
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