The Churches' response
Schools of Reconciliation: Issues in Joint Roman Catholic-Anglican Education
by Priscilla Chadwick (Cassell, 1994)
The official policy of theoretical detachment and practical discouragement created acute difficulties for Roman Catholic parents sending their children to Lagan College. During the first year or two of the school's life, these parents put their shoulder behind the success of the project, and for the time being tolerated their Church's position. As the Catholic parents became more vocal, their sense of frustration at lack of support from their parish clergy could increasingly be felt. At one meeting in November 1982 they formally expressed the hope that their Church would make appropriate arrangements for their children's catechesis.
It cannot be easy for Roman Catholic bishops anywhere to give their priests and people a strong lead that they do not wish to follow, and in Ireland the difficulties must be considerable for any sensitive pastor among the hierarchy. Bishop Daly did not feel able to speak in favour of integrated education, and indeed his response highlighted some practical disadvantages: it meant `bussing' children out of their communities, and artificial exercise; single-denominational schools were more representative of their neighbourhood community, and provided pupils with a stronger sense of identity and security, facilitating the natural partnership of parish, home and school, which a distant integrated school could hardly hope to do. That objection, however, was more obviously valid for particular areas like the Protestant Shankill or the Catholic Falls (where no one could seriously suggest the establishment of an ecumenical school) and loses much of its validity out in the more mixed residential areas in south Belfast where Lagan College is situated.
The Roman Catholic approach to ecumenical education was more than cautious. They seemed to feel that they had everything to lose, little to gain. Monsignor Colm McCaughan, later director of the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools but then secretary of a diocesan education committee, decisively commented to a reporter from the magazine Newsweek (21 May 1984): `Integrated education is a facile solution to an extremely complex problem. I cannot give encouragement or approve of it.' Bishop Daly himself formulated the same negative attitude in a radio phone-in programme after the New Ireland Forum in February 1984: `I do not see integrated educated as the way forward.' An institution such as Lagan College was tolerated with difficulty as a possible alternative for a few interested parents, but they were in effect tolerated only because they were so few. Thus Bishop Daly's response to Senator (later President) Mary Robinson during the Forum was reported in the following terms in the newsletter of the All Children Together movement:
The Bishop said the Church did nothing to oppose the efforts of people to promote inter-denomination schooling. But such a development affected very few people and left unaffected those who needed this kind of mixing most.
The newsletter commented with unconcealed regret:
We remained saddened that some priests and nuns who are willing to be involved in religious education and pastoral care for children not in attendance at Roman Catholic schools, do not feel free to do so.
The Catholic deputy principal of Lagan College felt disappointed that in 1984 Bishop Cahal Daly still held the negative view that integration was not the way forward. `If only he could be persuaded to go so far as to grant "experimental" status - like O'Fiaich - and the experiment is judged to have been successful, the implications would be important.'
It became evident that the official Roman Catholic policy locked the Church
into a circle from which there was no escape. One the one hand, the bishop's
reason for seeing no solution in ecumenical education was that it could
affect only a few. On the other hand, the quantity of ecumenical education
which did exist was tolerated only to the degree that the minimum number
of Catholic parents shared in it. In an age when support for a serious and
profound ecumenical engagement is the policy of an ecumenical council and
of successive popes, it is impossible for a Roman Catholic bishop to disapprove
of ecumenism without flying the face of his own authorities. But the division
in Ulster between Catholic and Protestant is a wound going so deep that
there is not much room for the principle that Christians should do together
what they are not absolutely required to do separately.
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