Will someone please tell Melancholicus, is this man a bishop or a politician? His enthusiasm for pluralism and multiculturalism in the schools of his diocese befits more a member of the Labour Party than it does a Catholic prelate.From RTÉ:
Dublin schools to end Catholic-first policy
The Archdiocese of Dublin has approved a new school enrolment policy, which will see schools for the first time setting aside a quota of places for non-Catholic pupils.
The new admissions system is being introduced on a pilot basis in two primary schools in west Dublin.
Until now all schools belonging to the Archdiocese were obliged to enrol Catholic applicants first.
This significant development is a break with a policy that last year proved highly controversial.
The two schools with the new policy, St Patrick's and St Mochta's, are located in an area that has seen massive population growth.
Last year, an emergency school had to be set up to take in the non-Catholic children they could not accommodate and most of these were the children of immigrants.
This new policy is an attempt to ensure such divisions do not happen again.
It keeps two thirds of junior infant places for Catholics, but makes the rest available to non-Catholics.
The schools say they want a mix and that they want to reflect the communities they serve.
Their patron, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, agrees and he has asked parents to support the schools' initiative.
The Irish Primary Principals network welcomed the decision, saying it was a positive response to the enrolment challenges that schools are encountering.
As much as Melancholicus would prefer to see foreigners integrating themselves into the rest of the Irish population rather than forming separate, closed-off ghetto-style communities (as the Mohammedans do in Britain), he cannot approve of this initiative by his local ordinary, which could see Catholic children denied a place at their local school in order that non-Catholics—or even non-Christians—might claim those places instead. It is at the very least distasteful to witness the shepherd of the flock in this diocese, to whose care the souls of all the faithful are entrusted, depriving his own lambs of their food and giving it instead to outsiders. Furthermore, Melancholicus can hardly imagine either St. Patrick or his disciple St. Mochta (in whose honour these schools are dedicated) approving of this policy; picture the absurdity of places in an Irish monastic school in the age of conversion being reserved—with no necessity of baptism—for the sons of pagans, and the reader will understand how foolish—and how pandering to the spirit of this age—is the new policy of the Dublin archdiocese.
Nor, of course, will admitting non-Christian children to Catholic schools involve any question of proselytism, so we won’t even have the compensatory benefit of recruiting any new catechumens; Dignitatis Humanae has long since seen to that. That nefarious document disowned the very idea of a Catholic state; now precisely the same principles are put to work towards ending Catholic education.
The presence of non-Catholic children in a Catholic school will immediately result in a watering-down of the school’s Catholic ethos, since in these politically-correct times it will be seen as chauvinistic to parade one’s culture in front of ‘minorities’, even if this is done in complete innocence and without any ‘triumphalistic’ intent. Political correctness has conditioned many otherwise well intentioned and intelligent people to fear exposing minorities to any expression of ‘majoritarian’ culture, as though there were something inherently ‘racist’ in, say, displaying a crucifix on the wall of a Catholic classroom in which there happens to be a half dozen Sikhs or Muslims. Once the minorities are admitted, the crucifixes will quietly vanish; classroom prayers will be quietly discontinued—or else replaced by some generic fluff completely devoid of any specifically Catholic content and which could be said in good conscience by the adherents of any other religion; statues, icons, etc. will be removed and replaced with non-religious images so as not to ‘offend’ the sensibilities of any non-Christian child that might happen to be enrolled there.
This erosion of the culture of the majority is of course a one-way street, for there will be no such curbs on the culture of the minorities. Pupils belonging to other faiths will be encouraged to celebrate their own traditions and to share their culture and beliefs with their Catholic classmates. Catholic schoolchildren will hear much in their Catholic school about Allah and Krishna and Mohammed and Guru Nanak and who knows what else; but they will be told nothing of Jesus Christ, or His blessed mother, or the Trinity, or the Holy Bible, or anything specifically and recognisably Christian.
But what is Melancholicus thinking? So-called Catholic schools in this post-conciliar age are hardly havens of the Catholic religion even now, are they? Religious education in Ireland, long since hobbled by the execrable and even heretical Alive-O series, has long since been reduced to vacuous, airy-fairy, anthropocentric pap devoid of recognisably Catholic content. It is the conciliar religion, rather than Catholicism, that currently holds sway in Irish Catholic schools. So on balance, once this policy is implemented, Catholic schoolchildren will not really be losing out on anything they didn’t have before, will they?
But now, before we finish, imagine a Catholic child enrolled in an Islamic school. Do you think, gentle reader, that allowances would be made to accommodate this child and her religious sensibilities? On the contrary, she would be required to pray the Muslim prayers with her Muslim classmates; she would be compelled to wear the hijab in school despite the fact that she is not a Muslim; she would be told, forcefully and repeatedly, that Allah has no son, that the Trinity is unclean, that Christians and Jews are deserving of hellfire, that there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet, and that the Qur’an and not the Bible is the word of God.
That’s a rather different picture, isn’t it?
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