CHRISTIAN EDUCATION
THE Cardinal emphaehtee how the Pope has reiterated the teaching of his predecessor that "men must recognise both In private and in public life that Christ is King."
Then on the importance of Christian education the Cardinal writes: "You will have noticed also that our Holy Father rests his hope for the renewal of society, as Pius XI before him, on the Christian education of youth. We cannot suppose that the harm done to the children 'by the Nazi system, which scizee on the little ones and keeps hold of them from the cradle to the grave, will be counteracted all at once, nor that the youth of Russia and Mexico and Spain can forthwith be made immune to the poison with which they have been impregnated by Communist influence.
" Can we expect that our own national education will be immediately purged of the secularist leaven which, according to the recent articles and correspondence in The Times, is rearing too many of our citizens of the future to become pagans?
" We are grieved to have to say that the evacuation of children last September revealed to us the indifference of not a few Catholic parents regarding the religious training and practice of their children. We trust and we think that these indifferentists were the exception. They cannot have realleed the dread responsibility of allowing the charges God has entrusted to them to attend non-Catholic schools, and to grow up without a knowledge of their religious duties.
Parents and Public Schools
" The Church has again and again, under strict spiritual penalties, forbidden parents to send their children to schools where either no religion is taught or an inadequate instruction is given by teachers not accepted as qualified to impart Catholic doctrine in its full and complete character.
" There eire also parents who deliberately send their children to public schools which are not Catholic. Such parents have less excuse because they have the free choice of schools in which the spirit of faith and the love of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and of the frequentation of the Sacraments are instilled."
But it is difficult for schools to instil Christianity if the children must live within their homes among non-Christian surroundings. Thus the Cardinal stresses
that . ,true education depends on the h
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earnestly urge all parents to remember that true education depends first and foremost on the home. The family is prior to the education office and comes before the school. Be the programme of secular learning and the character of the school as good as could be desired, the home life can make or mar the soul of the child.
" Therefore, we beg and implore that mothers and fathers should Bet an example to their children by living good Catholic lives. Truth, honesty, sobriety, piety must reign in the home if the future of our country is to belong to upright men and women living in peace and happiness."
As to the relations between State and Church on the subject of education, the Cardinal says: "We Catholic people of Great Britain will never cease to proclaim our age-long princip/e that for Catholic children we must have Catholic schools with a Catholic atmosphere, taught by Catholic teachers under Catholic control. . . .
" Inheritance of Liberty"
"We pray that a striking lesson of this war may be learned by our leaders and by all who love the inheritance of British liberty, by all who have respect for the rights of conscience whether of minorities or of majorities. The youth do not belong to the State simply to be trained, as among the Nazis and Bolshevists, in order to serve the material and military glory of the government in power.
" Our traditional English education demands that the children of a Christian people have by Divine Law a right to full Christian education; that Christian parents have a twofold right and duty, both natural and supernatural, to preserve this priceless inheritance; that Christian children are in no sense the property of a State which has no religion or which is pagan and atheist; that secular instruction is not of such supreme mbment as the formation of citizens to be Christians; that parents have an inalienable right to decide on the selection of teachers to whom their children will be entrusted; that the poor as well as the rich in all justice must have this same right and liberty. So wrote Cardinal Manning fifty years ago."
The Pastoral ends in the way it begins, by an exhortation to the founding of an order based on obedience to God.