Scottish Catholic Observer

Professor James Arthur of the University of Birmingham was speaking at Glasgow University on Catholic Education and identity. His talk came ahead of an announcement of a special conference next year on the centenary of Catholic education in Scotland.

The professor said he had been at ‘too many dinner parties among university academics’ to deny that ‘anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable bigotry in Britain.’

“I have listened to conversations about how the Church is cruel to women, to gays, how the Church is hopelessly sexist and hypocritical and much, much worse besides,” he said. “Protestant anti-Catholicism has long been superseded by secular anti-Catholicism. Indeed, I believe secular anti-Catholicism is far more dangerous.”

However the professor also warned that Catholics in Scotland needed to be honest about the fact that ‘Catholic Faith is being lost and rejected in many places, including Catholic families and schools.’

“The main threat to Catholic schools comes from within the Catholic community,” he said. “It’s strong enough to resist people who are hostile to Catholic schools from outside, but you need Catholics who have the formation               to articulate a convincing philosophy of Catholic education, and not remain silent.”

He warned that ‘many Catholics experience a tension between the desire to be strongly identified as Catholic and the desire to respond to modern culture and life’ which has ‘led many to de-emphasise their Catholic identity and to live in peaceful co-existence with secular modernity.’

“The less Catholic they are, the less useful they are to the mission of the Church,” he said. “The less Catholic they are the more secular public space becomes and the more regulation forces upon Catholic policies that are likely to repudiate their Faith.”

Professor Arthur said that in 1918 some of the Scottish bishops had resisted integrating Catholic schools into the state system, and had been overruled by the Vatican.

“If you go back the concerns in 1918 were the same as the concerns today,” he said. “They were worried about protecting the Catholicity of our schools, in the face of secular modernity—that’s something that Catholics should study and discuss.”

He stressed that within Catholic schools, ‘what is taught, how it is taught and by whom, matter—for each must be inspired by the life of Christ.’

“At every opportunity the distinctiveness of Catholicism should be encouraged,” he said. “We are members of a Church with a 2,000-year-old tradition, heirs of an enormous treasury which is moral, artistic, scientific and intellectual.”

The lecture was the forerunner of a series of events planned by the University of Glasgow’s St Andrew’s Foundation for Catholic Education, which will mark the centenary of Catholic schools being brought into the state system.

This week it was announced that the university will host the global ACISE (Association of Catholic Institutes of Education) 2018 conference on Catholic teacher education in April next year.

The conference will draw together experts to discuss Catholicism’s contribution to culture and education.