Pierce the confusion and see the child : a discussion of federal aid for education / F.A. Fink.


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Pierce The

Confusion And See

The Child

A Discussion Of Federal

Aid For Education

F. A. Fink

Printed in the U. S. A.

September 1 5, 1 949

OUR SUNDAY VISITOR PRESS
HUNTINGTON, INDIANA



NiKil Obstat:
REV. T. E. DILLON

Imprimatur:

Censor Librorum

•^<JOHN FRANCIS NOLL, D.D.
Bishop of Fort Wayne



Catholics Do Not Ask

Support For Schools

IT took a long time to convince editors, radio news

commentators, and, it seems, even members of
Congress, that Catholics are not asking for “support”

of their schools through any Federal Aid Bill. This is
probably due to the fact that organized enemies of the

Catholic Church had had their attention first.

Since the Catholic Press news agency serves
only the Catholic Press, its explanation did not reach

the 100,000,000 and more non-Catholics who, through
other media*, were told a different story, wholly un-
founded.

Those Who Underst^ond, Approve
George E. Sokolsky is one of the few columnists

who took the trouble to ascertain just what Catholics
of the United States v/ere asking for. Even such
widely circulated magazines as Time and Newsweek,
not to speak of releases sent out by the Associated
Press, misrepresented the Catholic position. Instead

of seeing danger of an encroachment on the field of
the State by the Church, Sokolsky sees danger in the
reverse, namely, that of the State supporting measures
discriminatory to its own citizens if they happen to
use their constitutional right to send their children to
schools of their choice.

Referring to traditions, Sokolsky notes:

The expansion of the power of the State
over the influence of religion first expresses itself
in the field of education. In many countries, the
only available education has been church schools,
of one kind or another, and that was true during
the first two centuries of the territory which is
now the United States.

Most of our best universities were founded



4 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

as church schools, Harvard by the Congregational-
ists, Columbia by the Episcopalians, Princeton by
the Presbyterians, and so on. And that goes as
well for the better preparatory schools. The best
schools and colleges in such a country as China
or Syria were founded by Christian missionaries.
Ail the great universities of Europe were estab-
lished by clerics. The secularization of educa-
tion is historically novel in our civilization and
has not yet proved itself, except functionally . . .

I have never heard of such schools requesting
State subventions either from the states or
Federal Government. What they have said is that
when social, extra-curricular benefits are given
to American children, like bus rides to school, or a
glass of milk or orange juice, or medical or dental
supervision, such should be given to all children.

So Does Dorothy Thompson
Mrs. Dorothy Thompson expressed her belief that

Cardinal Spellman’s argument is morally and consti-
tutionally correct. In her column “On the Record”
(August 3, 1949) Mrs. Thompson wrote:

In the opinion of this columnist, Mrs. Roose-
velt did confuse the issue, and Cardinal Spellman’s
argument is morally and constitutionally correct.

As a result of Mrs. Roosevelt’s interpreta-
tions, many think she is opposing a determined
effort to secure Federal funds for the support
of parochial schools. But public support of paro-
chial schools is not involved in the Barden Bill
at ail.

A school is an institution for the educa-
tion and guidance of children and youth. The
American Constitution has been interpreted as
prohibiting religious instruction or denomina-
tional control of public schools.

Thousands of Catholic parents wish their
children to have a religiously-guided education
and therefore send them to parochial schools,
which, as far as secular education is concerned,
conform to the standards set for all schools by
state boards of education.

Parochial schools—^their buildings and their



CATHOLICS DO NOT ASK SUPPORT FOR SCHOOLS 5

teaching staffs—are supported by the church.
They receive no State or Federal funds, nor are
they asking for any. That is the first thing every
reader must get clear. It is precisely this that
Mrs. Roosevelt confused by saying these and
other private schools “should receive no tax funds
whatsoever'' and that “the separation of . church
and state is extremely important to any of us
who hold to the original traditions of our nation."

The Federal aid involved which Mr. Barden
and Mrs. Roosevelt would prohibit to all except
public school children, has nothing to do with
education. It has to do with child welfare; free
bus transportation to secure safety and punc-
tuality; free non-religious text books; health
checkups; free lunches and milk.

A bus is neither Catholic, Protestant, Jew-
ish, nor atheist. Neither are geometry, nor in-
flamed tonsils, nor a glass of milk. The services
are given to school children and the parents
of school children. The schools, in which the
children are gathered, are merely used as a 'con-
venient means of distributing those services.

Furthermore, they are paid for by all parents
—whether they send their children to public,
parochial or private school. And if these services,
primarily concerned with safety and health, are
refused some children on the grounds of the
separation of church and state, then in all con-
science the parents of such children should be
exempt from taxation to pay for them.

Catholic parents already help pay for the
public schools, though many prefer religiously
guided education. That is an act of free choice.
But access to public schools is not denied to
them.

They naturally wish their children to receive
the material benefits afforded other children via
schools. The Barden Bill denies them. It says,
in effect : “You have a constitutional right to give
your child a religiously-guided education, but if
you exercise it, you'll get no free milk or health
check-ups." And in this sense it is anti-Catholic
in effect if not intention.



6 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

So Does The New York ^Times^
Commenting editorially on the dispute between

Cardinal Spellman and Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, the
New York Times (August 15, 1949) wrote:

The majority (of the Supreme Court, Ever-
son vs. Board of Education, February 10, 1947)
held that New Jersey did not breach the First
Amendment when it provided “a general program
to help parents get their children, regardless of
their religion, safely and expeditiously to and
from accredited schools’"—among which sectarian
schools meeting the ‘'secular educational require-
ments” were included ... A law appropriating
Federal funds to be used for the general pur-
poses of private schools would not, on the record,
be sustained by the Supreme Court. On the other
hand, a law allowing such funds to be used for
the direct benefit of school children’s health or
safety, no matter what kind of school each
attends, seems both reasonable and proper . . .
It is the child we must care for, protect and
cherish ... It is the child who must be treated
everywhere on a fair and equal basis with all
other children.

So Does The A. F. Of L.
The American Federation of Labor announced

that its “official policy” was the advocacy for children
attending all schools of “such services and such privi-
leges as will protect their very health and safety,” and
it released its official policy in these words:

It is an empty right to allow the existence
of parochial schools for the use of those children
whose parents, in good faith, believe they should
send their children to such schools, if our gov-
ernment, while recognizing this right, at the
same time denies the children who attend these
schools such services and such privileges as will
protect their very health and safety.

So Does A Southern Journalist
The editor of the Jackson (Miss.) Daily News

on August 4, 1949, expressed the belief that there is



CATHOLICS DO NOT ASK SUPPORT FOR SCHOOLS 7

no cause for alarm in the Catholic position relating to

Federal Aid, but that there is in the '‘activities of the

groups which have dubbed themselves as 'Protestants

and Other Americans United for the Separation of

Church and State/

The editor notes that schools in the United States
were all religious schools for a longer time than they

have not been, and observes that while other religious

bodies gave them up “Catholic schools still stand in
every state in the Union as a remarkable tribute to the

Catholics of the United States/’ He continues: “The
best citizen of the United States is a religious citizen.

Catholics believe that their schools are serving not

only their God but also their country. The results are
recognized by the fair-minded citizens of the United
States.^’

He believes that “Protestants and Other Amer-
icans United’’ are aiming at an objective under a cam-
ouflage, and asks them to define what they mean by
“separation of Church and State.” This point should
be well taken, because if the State may not cooperate
with the Church in any possible manner, then there
should be no chaplain in the Congress; then President

Truman last January should not have had any prayers
uttered at his Inauguration; then the Supreme Court
Justice, who was one of several who expressed the
belief that a “wall of separation should exist between
Church and State,” should have refused to use the
Bible in administering an oath to the President.

The exclusion of religion by law from education
is tantamount to a legal endorsement of atheism and
irreligion. If positive religion cannot be taught in
the public schools because the children are not all of
one faith, then the least the government could do
would be to actually encourage schools which do teach
it in addition to the curriculum prescribed by the
State.

The Supreme Court, back in 1925, did, by an
unanimous decision, give encouragement to such
schools by declaring that they held the same status as



8 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

the public schools, and that parents have a constitu-
tional right to send their children to them.

This Jackson, Miss, editor, along with many
others who have commented on the subject, believes
that Joseph Stalin and his Communists are delighted
to see an organized effort in the United States to
effect the very thing he is doing, namely, to eliminate
religion from education.

So Does Member Of
'Southern ChurchmenV Staff

Mrs. Evelyn Cummins, member of the staff of the
Southern Churchman, denounced the editorial pub-
lished in that periodical, date of August 13, 1949, in
these words:

Mrs. Roosevelt herself has said that Cardinal
Spellman's position on the bill is very fair. He
does not, nor does the Roman Catholic Church,
ask or want help for education, per se, in paro-
chial schools. He asks merely for assistance in
providing transportation, text books, and health
services, such as would be provided for other
children, to the end that all of us may help build
a stronger and better nation through all American
children of whatever race or creed.

There is no question of doctrine or of ‘‘sep-
aration of Church and State" involved here and
any such implication is misleading. On the con-
trary, it is for the separation of Church and
State that the Roman Catholic Church is fighting
its war against Communism all over the world.

Mrs. Cummins also denounces Bishop Gilbert, of
the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of New York, for
accusing Cardinal Spellman of ‘'bigotry and intoler-
ance," reminding him that in 1947 Cardinal Spellman
donated the use of the Gould Home for Children,
owned by the Archdiocese of New York, to house
children for whom the Episcopal Church could find
no other living quarters during the dismantling and
re-erecting of St. Barnabas House.



CATHOLICS DO NOT ASK SUPPORT FOR SCHOOLS 9

So Does A Senator From Barden's Stote
Senator Frank P. Graham, of North Carolina,

questioned on a radio program emanating from Wash-
ington, is reported to have said:

The people of America want all the children
to be healthy, regardless of whether they’re in
private or public schools. So the State, if it
chooses, can provide out of public money, includ-
ing the Federal money, for health services to
children as children and bus services to children
as children.

One of his interrogators objected that bus service
was really a service to the school. But Senator
Graham supported the idea that using a school bus is
almost the same as using a publicly-built sidewalk.

The child can go to school, using the public
facility of the sidewalk. The sidewalk is paid for
by the taxes of all the people. There is no police-
man there to say, as you use the sidewalk : ‘‘What
school are you going to?” That’s a child, using
a public facility to get to school.

The Senator was asked this question: ‘‘Where,
then, is the separation of Church and State if it’s per-
missible for the State to pay for textbooks, buses,
milk, health services? Where do you draw the line?”

He replied that no public money should be used
for the building or maintenance of a private or church
school, and was immediately asked: “Are textbooks
part of the maintenance?” His answer was: “Not of
the school. That’s service to the child.”

Unknowingly Upholds Catholic Position
Dr. Behnken, President of the Lutheran Church,

Missouri Synod, speaking in the name of his Synod,
released to the press a criticism of the Catholic plea,

but that he was commenting on something that he
did not quite understand is clear from this paragraph
in his statement, which actually upholds the Catholic
position:

The principle of separation of Church and
State, in the sense that one does not dominate



10 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

the other, can possibly be supported and even
strengthened by Federal aid to public and private
schools for certain specific welfare purposes

:

School lunches, health services, transportation.
In the event that the Federal Government offers
such assistance to parochial schools, there must
be a clear understanding that no government
assistance can be given to support the instruction-
al program of church schools.

A few days later (August 17, 1949) speaking at
St. Paul, Minnesota, Dr. Behnken declared that his
Synod “is not against public health services to paro-
chial school children, and has no objection to free
lunches for school children which the community
otherwise would serve.”

At the same meeting Dr. Carl S. Mundinger,
President of St. John Lutheran College, Winfield,
Kansas, observed;

1 see no religion in a glass of milk or a bus
ride for parochial school children. Free medical
examinations and dental care for parochial school
children are other areas in which the Church and
State may well cooperate for the public welfare.

The Unpotsoned Favor Justice
A Gallup Poll of Public Opinion was taken among

voters throughout the nation on the subject of the
grant of Federal funds even for parochial school
maintenance. Voters were asked this question: “If
the Bill in Congress is passed which would give
$300,000,000.00 in aid to schools in the poorer states,
should this money go entirely to public schools—or
should part of it go to parochial schools?” The result
was that 41% of all voters favored the distribution of
the $300,000,000.00 proportionately among public and
parochial schools despite the fact that 10% of the
voters had no opinion. Had they been equally divided
it would have disclosed that nearly half the population
believes in the government support of both schools
that do the same work for the State.

Young voters, between 21 and 29 years of age,



CATHOLICS DO NOT ASK SUPPORT FOR SCHOOLS 11

who are less prejudiced, voted 49% in favor of assis-
tance to both systems of schools, and only 42% in
favor of assistance to public schools only. Had the
9%, which had ‘‘no opinion’’ been equally divided it
would have meant that 54% of the voters favored
assistance to all schools.

In the Gallup Poll voters were not asked about the
few auxiliary services only asked by Catholics.

The result of this poll shows that more non-Cath-
olics than Catholics favor justice to all schools meet-
ing the State requirements for a good secular educa-
tion on the elementary and high school levels.

An Un-Americon Bill
Most Rev. Michael J. Ready, Bishop of Columbus,

points out the injustice contained in the Barden Bill
in these words

:

The Cardinal decried the effort to pass legis-
lation which would count in citizens of religious
schools for purposes of taxation while counting
them out in the services and benefits provided by
tax funds. Every citizen will recognize the in-
justice of that scheme and will hold such a policy
as indefensible according to our Constitution and
national tradition.

The question of Federal aid for religious or
parochial schools is not involved. The only
question involved is whether citizens, pupils in
religious schools, are to share in Federal funds
appropriated for services to children. The con-
stitutionality of including pupils in religious
schools among those benefiting from services
provided by public funds has been well estab-
lished.

Pupils in religious schools are already
sharing such funds by an Act of Congress in the
Federal school luncheon program. The Federal
Government has consistently maintained a non-
discrimination policy in the field of education
as well as in other social services. It is well to
recall that fair policy as maintained by Congress
in the G.L Bill of Rights, the R.O.T.C., the



12 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

N.Y.A., and the School Lunch Act. Congress has
not only refused to discriminate among citizens,
but it has guarded against imposing a discrimina-
tory policy in the use of Federal funds.

I am certain that the citizens of our nation
would not wish Congress to change such a just
and fair policy to one of discrimination against
certain Citizens because of religion.

Congress consistently has treated all stu-
dents in all schools as citizens of the United States
and has not allowed States to discriminate against
them in benefits appropriated by Federal funds.
Certainly if health, safety-transportation, and
welfare funds are made available to children by
Congress they should be made accessible to all
children. There should be no religious test
against children sharing in health and welfare
funds. We pray that Congress will forever main-
tain such a just policy towards all the citizens of
our country.

Secondly, the constitutionality of including
pupils in religious schools among those benefiting
from services provided by public funds has been
well established. The Louisiana textbook case
was upheld by the United States Supreme Court.
The New Jersey bus transportation aid to children
in religious schools was sustained by the same
Supreme Court. In these decisions the court re-
viewed every conceivable objection from the view-
point of Church and State relations. It ruled that
a state may lawfully expend public funds for wel-
fare services in behalf of all children who attend
schools which meet the standard of public educa-
tion.

The separation of Church and State is not a
valid issue in the present question.

We simply propose that the Congress follow
the wise and just course which it has set in pro-
viding benefits to ail citizens without discrimina-
tion. The Constitution is just as strong and the
tradition of separation of Church and State is
just as hallowed now as they were before the
G.I. Bill of Rights, and R.O.T.C., the Lunch Act,
etc., became part of our national policy.



CATHOLICS DO NOT ASK SUPPORT FOR SCHOOLS 13

Are They 'Private' Schools?
A system of schools that covers the entire country

and educates about twelve per cent of the entire ele-

mentary and high school enrollment in the nation,
which teaches the public school curriculum as effi-
ciently and thoroughly as do the public schools them-

selves, which is only carrying on the tradition which

obtained in this country from the time of its birth
until the year 1840, which was given the same status
as the public school system by an unanimous Su-
preme Court decision in 1925, hardly deserves to be
called ‘‘private/'

In the President's Report on “Higher Education
for American Democracy" we read:

The responsibility for providing a strong
system of public education does not, however,
deny in any way to any individual or group of
individuals the right to attend, or to establish
and support in addition to public schools, a pri-
vate or denominational institution for the purpose
of providing, within limits prescribed by lav/, a
kind of education which such individuals or
groups deem more suitable to their particular
needs and beliefs. It is just as undemocratic for
the government to restrict in any way this funda-
mental right, as it is for government to fail to
meet its prime responsibility for a strong system
of public education. Nevertheless, any diversion
by government of public funds to the general
support of nonpublicly controlled educational in-
stitutions tends to deny the acceptance of the
fundamental responsibility and to weaken the
program of public education.

If the above language means anything it means
that the Catholic school system of the United States
enjoys a status equal to that of the public schools.

About the “diversion by the government of public
funds" the last sentence does not militate against
what Catholics have asked from the Congress through
a Federal Aid Bill, because it refers to “the diversion
by the government of public funds to the general



14 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

support of nonpublicly controlled educational institu-
tions.”

This viewpoint was sustained by the National
Education Association in a statement issued in the
year 1924 which reads as follows:

The National Education ^Association, while
recognizing the American public school as the
great nursery of broad and tolerant citizenship
and of a democratic brotherhood, acknowledges
also the contributions made to education by pri-
vate institutions and enterprises, and recognizes
that citizens have the right to educate their chil-
dren in either public or private schools when the
educational standards of both are approved by
the State educational authorities.

'Support' From Public Funds?
Catholics have never asked for the ‘"support” of

their schools from public funds, even though justice
would dictate that support. Justice would not dictate
that the State allow $1.00 for religious instruction in

the schools, but it does dictate that if other schools,

whether Catholic or Lutheran or Seventh Day Adven-
tist, meet the requirements of the State in relation
to the efficient teaching of its school curriculum, they

be paid for that service. Such schools are paid for that
service in Canada, and long received similar state sup-
port in nearly every nation in Europe. In most coun-
tries the policy obtained of allowing parents to deter-

mine whether they would have their school tax allo-
cated to a Catholic, or an Episcopalian, or Methodist,
or Lutheran, or other denominational school, or to the

State school.

If Catholics have never asked for that support
here in the United States it does not mean that a
Federal Education Bill, or even a State Bill, is not
discriminatory when it disallows such support.

It may not be known to you, the reader, that be-
sides using all school tax money for the support of the
public schools, most States impose special taxes on all
children attending parochial schools, and use that



CATHOLICS DO NOT ASK SUPPORT FOR SCHOOLS 15

revenue also for the public schools only, just as the

Barden Bill would add all parochial school children to

the public school enrollment for the purpose of getting

a bigger grant from the Federal Government, and then
immediately deduct these children when it comes to the
distribution.

In California the State goes farther and taxes all

non-public schools, even if some of its cities would go
bankrupt should these schools be closed.

Last March the Archbishop of Los Angeles con-
ducted a drive for $3,500,000.00 with which to erect
hfteen more Catholic schools, and obtained it. This
will bring a great deal of relief to the School City of

Los Angeles, for it needs a great many more schools
to take care of its growing population. Yet instead of
allowing anything towards the support of these
schools it even taxes them.

Efforts have been made in the past to make
attendance at the public school compulsory, but only

by anti-Catholic and irreligious organizations. For
instance, the New Age, official organ of the Southern
Jurisdiction, Scottish Rite Freemasonry, 33^, takes
credit for having tried this thing in the States of
Oregon, California and Michigan. It has also admitted
that it was supported in this action by the Ku Klux
Klan and other anti-Catholic organizations, just as it
was forced to admit that it sponsored the Fellowship
Forum, a Klan paper in Washington, D. C., some
years ago. That paper carried this sub-head : “Free-
masonry’s Representative at the National Capital,”
and removed it only after some of Masonry’s promi-
nent members objected.

No religious-minded American could be adverse to
religion in education, because when religion is officially
banned from the curriculum atheism is automatically
encouraged.

Many years ago Daniel Webster, speaking on the
Girard Will case, made this pronouncement:

It is a mockery and an insult to common
sense to maintain that a school for the instruction



16 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

of youth, from which Christian instruction by
Christian teachers is sedulously and rigorously
shut out, is not deistic and infidel both in its
purpose and in its tendency.

Religion In The Public Schools
Do we advocate that religion be added to the

curriculum of the public schools? No, we do not, be-
cause it would not be possible under the conditions
which obtain in this country. In nearly every com-
munity a dozen religions are represented in every
classroom and no textbook nor teacher could satisfy the
parents of all the children.

But that does not mean that God Himself should
be barred from the classroom; it does not mean that
His moral law, accepted by both Jews and Christians,
should not be interpreted; it does not mean that the
parents have no rights in relation to what their own
children should be taught. The decision of the present
Supreme Court forbidding even indirect cooperation
between the State and religion v/ent counter to an
unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in 1925,
which held that the children belong not to the State,
but to their parents, and that these have the right to
have their children educated in schools of their choice.
By inference parents would also have the right to
demand that the school authorities permit their chil-
dren to go out from school once or twice a week for
religious instruction to be conducted under the aus-
pices of the religion in which they hold affiliation. We
are only commenting on a principle here, because Pro-
testants have more to lose than Catholics through the
discontinuance of released time instruction, since the
children of very few of the former receive any relig-
ious instruction whatsoever, while one-half of the
entire Catholic body is enrolled in religious schools.

Compare Efficiency Of The Schools
Are you one of those who antecedently assumes

that no independent system could successfully compete
with the State system? If you are, we would only



CATHOLICS DO NOT ASK SUPPORT FOR SCHOOLS 17

ask you to visit a Catholic school and then to visit the

same grade or grades in the public schools to ascer-
tain which school is doing the better job. Public

school teachers come and go, change occupations when-
ever they believe that it pays them financially to do
so; and few of them ever dream of remaining school
teachers for life.

In the Catholic school system the reverse situation

obtains. Every Catholic religious teacher is conse-
crated for life to do that work; and since he (she) is
home every night he (she) is able better to prepare
lessons, to examine school papers, etc.

Right Understanding Of
Backgrounds Is Necessary

The controversy over Federal Aid “for certain
services to all children” was first precipitated by ene-
mies of all religion.

For instance, Mrs. McCollum, the professed
atheist of Urbana, Illinois, was used as a tool by the
organization known as the American Society of Free-
thinkers, of which her father is President.

A short time previously a Mr. Everson, of New
Jersey, was used as a tool to appeal to the Supreme
Court of New Jersey to determine the constitutionality
of a “Bus Transportation” law enacted by the New
Jersey Legislature, which permitted the picking up of
non-public school children on the highway. After the
New Jersey Supreme Court found against Everson,
his sponsors carried his case to the Supreme Court of
the United States.

You need not be told that the employment of
lawyers to prepare Briefs to be submitted to the
Supreme Court, and to be argued and defended by
these attorneys before the Court, costs a great deal of
money, the burden of which no individual is likely to
assume himself. It was discovered that several ve-
hemently anti-Catholic organizations prepared Briefs
to support Everson's appeal, as they later did to sup-
port Mrs. McCollum's appeal.



18 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

How POAU Influenced Congressmen
When the POAU (Protestants and Other Amer-

icans United) was formed in January, 1948, it an-
nounced that it would press every member of Congress
and every member of State Legislatures, as they con-
vened, to keep out of any Federal Aid Bill a provision
which would permit bus transportation to non-public
school children. It was thinking, of course, only of
children attending Catholic parochial schools.

Every member of Congress received a copy of a
pamphlet from that organization entitled ‘"Shadov/s
over Our Schools,'’ in which the Catholic Hierarchy
of the United States was libeled.

This same .organization admitted that it had in-
duced 100,000 people over the nation to write to their
members of Congress to support the Barden Bill. It
was this anti-Catholic animosity which led to the
flood of letters from Catholics to the same Congress-
men—something unusual for Catholics to do.

Why?
But why should ‘‘Protestants and Other Amer-

icans United’’ join hands with professed Freethinkers
and Atheists? The reason is that the churchmen who
formed this organization have all had anti-Catholic,
and some of them extremely left-wing records. But
there are backgrounds behind this latest offensive.
We refer to the anti-Catholic and anti-American or-
ganizations which prevailed in this country twenty-
five years ago. There was a tie-up, for instance, be-
tween the New Age, the official organ of the 33^
Scottish Rite Freemasonry, Southern Jurisdiction, and
the Ku Klux Klan, in a campaign to make attendance
at public schools compulsory in the States of Oregon,
California and Michigan.

If you were to go over the files of the New Age
from the latest number through these twenty-five
years and longer, you would find unfounded criticism
of the Catholic schools in practically every issue.



CATHOLICS DO NOT ASK SUPPORT FOR SCHOOLS 19

Besides this organization has been sending out a News
Bulletin and Slip Sheet to editors of the daily and
sectarian press every two weeks for the past twenty-
six years—and most of ‘these releases are anti-
Catholic.

The cause of Protestantism has been greatly in-
jured by the anti-Catholic campaign waged by some
of its leading churchmen.

Our Hon-Catho!ic Friends Know Better
The 70,000,000 of our countrymen who are not

affiliated with any of the churches live chiefly in the
large cities, where Catholics constitute from thirty-
one to more than seventy per cent of the entire popu-
lation. They are driven farther away from religion
by these anti-Catholic crusades, because they know
Catholics by personal contacts, and they observe that
the only clerical political activity, of which they are
aware, is conducted by non-Catholic clergymen.

They observe that the only ones who seem not to
know of any plan inaugurated by the Catholic Hier-
archy to get hold of public funds for Catholic schools,
or even to get some control of the public schools them-
selves, are Catholics—^which makes it clear to them
that there is no such plan.

Older non-Catholics know that even when A1
Smith ran for President of the United States neither
the Catholic Hierarchy, nor a single Bishop within
the Hierarchy, raised his voice in espousal of Smith’s
candidacy, despite the fact that Protestant clergymen
by the thousands, and some of their Bishops, openly
opposed his election.

Most non-Catholics know that the Catholic schools
are rendering a greater service to our nation than the
public schools in which subversive textbooks have been
used, in which Communist-minded teachers have
taught, and from whose classrooms Christ and even
God Himself are barred. According to a statement
issued in a report of an Illinois Legislative Investi-
gating Committee in August, 1949, ‘'schools provide a



20 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

most fertile field for effective activities for Commu-
nists and other subversive factors.”

They know that the Catholic Church has done
more than all other organizations in this country taken
together, more than all other organizations in the
world combined to stem the tide of Communism; that
there are no subversive textbooks used in parochial
schools; no Comm^unist-minded teachers employed.
They know that religion in education is not harmful,
but immensely helpful to our nation’s well-being.
They know that the double taxation which Catholics
willingly assum.e saves others from excessive taxation
for the support of public schools.

Closing Our Schools
Could Bankrupt Cities

If in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and
other large cities. Catholics were to use their consti-
tutional right to send their children to the public
schools, local taxation would jump sky high.

They know that their cities would be thrown into
bankruptcy if they had to provide the new school room
needed for the admission of all Catholics. In the city
of Chicago there are 76 Catholic high schools and 315
elementary schools, attended by 215,000 children. If
the parochial schools were closed the school city would
have to erect 215 more schools, each with the capacity
of 1,000 children, and .then take on the burden of
their support. Similar crises would be precipitated if
Catholics in other large cities were ‘‘disposed to get
even.”

Campaign Hurts Protestantism
Verily anti-Catholicism is only helping the Catho-

lic Church, while it is dealing a death blow to Protes-
tantism. Presently there are only 7,000,000 affiliated

Protestants in the fifty largest cities in the United

States where 20,000,000 Catholics live, and, according
to a survey reported in the latest Yearbook of the
Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America,



CATHOLICS DO NOT ASK SUPPORT FOR SCHOOLS 21

less than one-third of the Protestant affiliation

attends services with any regularity. The figures

report that ‘‘only 30% of those on church rolls attend
a service on any Sunday except Easter.''

That is the reason why many Protestant clergy-
men are more bitter towards the promoters of the
POAU than Catholics are. They believe that more
should be done, to preserve Protestantism than to de-

stroy Catholicism, and to that end forty-two denomi-

nations have pledged support of ''a united Evangelistic

Advance" beginning on October 2, this year, and con-

tinuing throughout the year 1950."

Among the “other Americans" cooperating with
the POAU are the Atheistic and Freethinker Organi-
zations, and other bodies opposed to all religion, and,

strangely, the “American Civil Liberties Union,"
whose national head, for a long time, was a professed
atheist, and which belies its name by opposing the
“civil liberties" of Catholics, Lutherans and a few
other sects, who operate their own schools.

Settle It The American Way
His Eminence, Edward Cardinal Mooney, Arch-

bishop of Detroit, was questioned in Rome about the
controversy over the proposed Federal Aid Bill, and
his reply was as follows:

I think that no religious body in the United
States wants to dominate education for itself and
to the disadvantage of others. But we do not
want to make religion handicapped. Nobody
wants anybody else to pay for the religious in-
struction of his children, but everybody ought to
want all American children to get a square deal.
That principle would dictate a sane and sound
solution of the question as we look at it.

We do not want a solution which is definitely
contrary to the principles of American fairness
and solidarity, therefore, we ask only that which
the federal government can do in accordance with
explicit decisions of the Supreme Court and we
want that for all children of the United States.

Traditionally, religion has been recognized



22 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

in America as a help to citizenship. Every great
American has appealed to religion in support of
good citizenship and in the U.S.A. the ideal has
always been co-operation in the face of real dif-
ferences.

The American way is not to let these differ-
ences divide us in our devotion to our country
and in the prosecution of the common good. In
concrete situations which tempt people to indulge
in bitterness the American sense of fairness and
solidarity should come to the fore.

The entire problem is epitomized, the Car-
dinal declared, in a cartoon he would like to see
posted on every bill-board in the U. S. for two
weeks. The cartoon shows two little friends
standing by a roadside about five miles from town
on a winter day with the snow a couple of feet
high. A school bus paid for by the fathers of
both comes along and takes one of the little
chums but refuses to take the other because he
is going to St. Matthew’s instead of the public
school.

That is not America, he concluded.

Summary Of What Catholics Ask
(1) Catholics have never sought and do not now

seek Federal Aid for the ‘‘support” of their schools.

(2) It is very true that Catholics have written
about the “injustice” of double taxation, of unfair
discrimination contained in the American policy of
requiring their schools to follow the same curriculum
imposed on State schools without offering to pay any-
thing for the efficient teaching of that curriculum.
The defense of a theory is not tantamount to action
for a contrary practice.

If State aid were actually granted it would be
granted not to the school, but to the child. Education
taxes are computed on the basis of the cost per child
in the kindergarten, elementary and high school.
Since that is true, even “support” of a private school
would actually be an allotment to the child.

(3) In nearly all other countries the State per-



CATHOLICS DO NOT ASK SUPPORT FOR SCHOOLS 23

mits Episcopalians, Catholics, Presbyterians, Luther-

ans, to erect their own schools, and if they do a good
job in teaching the State curriculum, the schools are

maintained by the State. In many of these countries
the parent is permitted to declare to which school he
would have his school tax money applied. Over here,
of course, that practice which seems to be eminently
just, does not obtain. Yet Catholics are not trying,
“according to a plan,’’ as charged by the POAU, to
have the American policy altered.

(4) While, under the Barden Bill, Catholics, who
would pay $60,000,000 of the $300,000,000, would not
be entitled to any services whatsoever, even if all their
children, attending non-public schools, would be
counted in order to procure a large Federal grant,

and then immediately deducted in order that the per
capita allowance per 'public school child might be
greater.

In practically every State a similar injustice ob-

tains, since the local public schools receive a per
capita allowance from the State for every child en-
rolled in both the public and parochial schools.

In the State of California the parochial schools

themselves are taxed, even though they bring great
relief to the public in every city of that State. Isn’t

that unjustly penalizing a school to which the Su-
preme Court of the United States gave official
status?

(5) The government owes health services to
every child, no matter what school he may attend.
Wasn’t an effort made by our President even this year
to have enacted into law a Bill which would provide
health services, such as free medicine and a physician’ll
care, to every one in the land, rich or poor, and re-
gardless, of course, of the religion or race to which
he (she) might belong?

Bus transportation for all school children has
been made legal by the legislatures of sixteen states.
But whether allowed by a special law or not every



24 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

child is entitled to it from the viewpoint of safety on
the highway.

If the State would have children attending Catho-
lic, Lutheran and other schools, use certain textbooks,
then evidently, if it supplies these books to the chil-
dren in public schools, it should furnish them to the
others as well. This is again a service to the child, and
not to the school.

Hence any opposition to the minimum demands
of Catholics through a Federal Aid Bill is unfair, and
must be motivated either by religious prejudice or
by a misunderstanding of the situation.

Every child in the nation has civil rights, among
them the right to attend any school which meets the
requirements of the State, to health services, to pro-
tection on the highway, and to textbooks prescribed
by the State itself.



What They Thought

A Generation Ago
A FTER the Public School system had functioned for^ exactly a half century, the press was filled with
observations on its non-success, as reported, in part,

in this pamphlet. You will note that all the criticisms
were written by Protestant churchmen and editors of
or contributors to the daily press.

The Age of Steel, October, 1896:

A boy may be kept at school for several years,
. . . but if his heart is not educated with his
head, his conscience with his memory, a know-
ledge of the date of the battle of Bunker Hill and
the number of gallons of water in Lake Michigan
are no guarantee that he will not use his acquired
knowledge in putting the finishing touches to as
consummate a scoundrel as ever entered a prison
cell. So far as education goes, there are rascals
who understand geometry, and can give you the
distance of the sun, moon and stars as easily as
a railway conductor can punch a mileage book.

Fred Woodrow.

President Hyde of Bowdoin College, before the
Massachusetts Teachers’ Association of Boston, Nov-
ember, 1896:

The public school must do more than it has
been doing if it is to be a real conductor of youth
and an effective supporter of the State. It puts the
key of knowledge in the child’s hand, but fails
to open the treasure of wisdom to his heart and
mind. Of what use is it to teach a child how to read
if he cares to read nothing but the sensational
accounts of crime? These people who know how
to read and write and cipher and know little else

—

these are the people who furnish fuel for A. P. A.
fanaticism—^who substitute theosophy for relig-
ion, passion for morality, impulse for reason,
crazes and caprice for conscience and the Con-
stitution.



26 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

From The Educational Review, February, 1898:
A little less than 50 per cent of all the chil-

dren of our country frequent any Sunday school.
The meaning of these figures is simply overwhelm-
ing. More than one-half of the children of this land
now receive no religious education . . . Even
this feature does not show all the truth. It
seems to admit that those who attend Sunday
school are receiving proper religious instruction;
but everj^one knows this cannot be granted.

Dr. Levi Seeley,
Of the State Normal School, Trenton, N. J.

Shod We 'Disunite God?
Rev. Henry C. Minton, of California (Presby-

terian), Moderator of the General Assembly:

Is our educational machinery subsidiary to
its only worthy end—viz., the fashioning of char-
acter? Have we, so morbidly afraid of uniting
Church and State, gone so far as to disunite God
from the State? This is a most serious question.
The faith of our sons and daughters is involved,
and the Kingdom of God in this country is in-
volved. Our school system is not an organized
skepticism, but a God-forgotten secularism.

—

Philadelphia, May 19, 1901.

Rev. Dr. David H. Greer (Episcopal), before the
General Episcopal Convention:

Education needs something more than men-
tal training and culture to make men pure and
keep them so. It needs that culture and training
inspired by religion. The Episcopal Church is
not satisfied with the present system of public
schools, because religion is not taught in them.
These schools should not only turn out well-
equipped young men and women, but Christians
as well.—Washington D. C., Oct. 22, 1898.
The same Episcopal convention decreed:
That the bishops and clergy remind the

people of their duty to support and build up our
own schools and colleges, and to make education



WHAT THEY THOUGHT A GENERATION AGO 27

under the auspices of the Protestant Episcopal
Church superior in all respects to that afforded
in other institutions.

Bishop Johnston (Episcopal), of Western Texas:
Gladstone said that a man educated intellect-

ually but not morally may become more dangerous
than before; and that is precisely the case with
the colored people. In the public schools they
receive no moral instruction, and while their
wits are being sharpened there is scarcely any
moral strengthening. This inability of the public
schools of our land to teach any system of
morals is going to lead, within a few years, to a
struggle the like of which this country has never
seen, and it will be with a generation that be-
lieves nothing at all.—Sermon preached in New
York, June 10, 1901.

Dr. Wallace Radcliffe (Presbyterian)

:

In our church life we recognize the trinity
—home, school and church—a triple cord not
easily broken. The home is a school, the school is
a home. It is an unintelligible Christianity which
loses sight of this important factor (the school)
in our church. * * * It is something that your chil-
dren go to school; it is more that they go to a
school of your own religious belief. Therefore,
we summon you to bring up your children in your
own faith. Let us establish schools * * * and teach
our religious convictions.—Washington, D. C.,
Oct. 7, 1900.

Moral Training Cast Out
Eev. Dr. E. T. Wolf, professor at Gettysburg

Theological Seminary, before the Evangelical Alli-
ance;

Moral training has for the most part been
cast out of our public schools. Every faculty,
except the highest and noblest, is exercised and
invigorated; but the crowning faculty—that
which is designed to animate and govern all
others—is contemptuously ignored

; and, unless
its education can be secured, our young men and
women will be graduated from our schools as
moral imbeciles. This country is facing a grave



28 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

social problem.—The Philadelphia Press, Dec. 4,
1901.

Rev. Dr. Washington Gladden, Columbus, Ohio,
in an address at Yale University, April, 1902:

All that saves the public school from ruin in
many cities is the self-sacrificing work of the
teachers. There is a marked tendency in these
schools to lower the standard of education by
eliminating God and making us a sordid, money-
making race.

Morals Must Be Taught
Brooklyn (N. Y.) Eagle, June 1, 1902:

Right and wrong in the affairs of conduct
are not matters of instinct : they have to be
learned, just as really in fact, as history or
handicrafts. Is this knowledge being imparted
to our children in any efficient v/ay and by any
efficient teachers? Is the public school doing it?
Is the Church doing it? Are fathers and
mothers doing it? We are compelled to say ‘‘No’^
to all these queries. * * * The truth is we are
taking for granted a moral intelligence which does
not exist. We are leaning upon it, depending upon
it, trusting to it, and it is not there.

Our v/hole machinery of education, from the
kindergarten up to the university, is perilously
weak at this point. We have multitudes of
youths and grown men and women who have no
more intelligent sense of what is right and wrong
than had so many Greeks of the time of Alci-
biades. * The great Roman Catholic Church
* is unquestionably right in the contention
that the whole system as it now exists is morally
a negation.

The great company of educators and the
whole American community need to be sternly
warned that if morality cannot be specifically
taught in the public schools v/ithout admitting
religious dogma, then religious dogma may have
to be taught in them. For righteousness is
essential to a people’s very existence. And right-
eousness does not come by nature any more than



WHAT THEY THOUGHT A GENERATION AGO 29

reading or writing does. * * We are within meas-
ureable distance of the time when society may
for its own sake go on its knees to any factor
which can be warranted to make education com-
patible with and inseparable from morality, let-
ting that factor do it on its own terms and teach
therewith whatsoever it lists.

This argument is often heard in favor of sec-
ularized schools. '‘Let religion be taught in the home
and in the Sunday school.'' Archbishop Ryan's an-
swer to this specious plea is worth remembering:

If you subtract from the great mass of Chris-
tian parents the number who have not the neces-
sary time to teach their children at home, and
also a second class who have not the necessary
knowledge, and still a third class without the
necessary disposition, you will probably sweep
away two-thirds of the teachers of the home
school. And when you reflect on how little can
be done in an hour's Sunday school work, and
how this little is half dissipated before the next
school day, you will understand how essential is
the daily education in religious truth.—(Quoted
by Sacred Heart Review.)

Prof. Gates
Prof. Gates, of the Chicago Theological Seminary,

writes in the Biblical World, September, 1902, as fol-
lows:

The great problem of life is education. The
mind of the race is growing all the while, and it
is for the educator to see that these mental
powers are developed in the right direction. But
no man's education is complete if religious in-
struction be omitted. One may know all the
mysteries of science and literature

;
he may sweep

the heavens with the telescope, or peer into the
secrets of nature with the microscope; but if
in all this he see not God he is but poorly edu-
cated, after all. Now where do we find ourselves,
as we confront this phase of the national prob-
lem? We have a system of public education to
be proud of. Never have the various questions
that meet the teacher been so well understood



30 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

as today. But what is this great system doing
for the religious instruction of our children?
Practically nothing.
Answering the proposition that religion should

be taught at the Sunday school alone or in the family,
the Biblical World, in an editorial, October, 1902,
says

:

It has been so assumed, but each passing
year shows more clearly that this is not the case,
(that religion can be taught in the Sunday school
and in the family). The home feels no longer the
necessary responsibility, and the Sunday school
has neither the time nor the instrumentalities
for adequate instruction. And, in addition, the
divorcement of religious from secular education
destroys the vital relation between the two.
Therefore, it seems certain that the ideal of edu-
cation, as well as the only adequate method of
education, is to establish religious and moral
instruction in the common schools. And we shall
then find ourselves once more in accord with the
status of instruction in England and Germany.

Amaso Thornton
On this same question Mr. Amasa Thornton, in

the North American Review of January, 1898, says:

The questions which we have to solve then
are these: How can the present decline in relig-
ious teaching and influence be checked; and how '

can such teaching and influence be increased
to such a point as will preserve the great cities
of the next century from depravity, degradation
and destruction? What can be expected of the
family? If the adults of the present age are not
as religious as the needs of the hour and of the
future require, will the children receive the
proper religious training if they receive none
except in the home circle?

After pointing out that thousands of children do
not even learn a short prayer at home, the writer
then declares that one of the greatest blunders that

has been made in this country is the failure of teach-
ing religion in the public schools. He then pays the
following tribute to the Catholic Church:



WHAT THEY THOUGHT A GENERATION AGO 31

The Catholic Church has insisted that it is
the duty to educate the children of parents of the
Catholic faith in such a way as to fix religious
truths in the youthful mind. For this it has been
assailed by the non-Catholic population, and
Catholics have been charged with being enemies
of the liberties of the people and the flag. Any
careful observer in the city of New York can see
that the only people, as a class, who are teaching
the children in the way that will secure the
future for the best civilization, are the Catholics;
and although a Protestant of the firmest kind, I
believe the time has come to recognize this fact,
and for all to lay aside religious prejudices and
patriotically meet this question .—(North Amer-
lean Review, January, 1898, pp. 126-128.—See
also the Biblical WoiM, November, 1902, p. 323.)

Prof. Coe
Prof. Coe, of the Northwestern University, re-

cently said in a lecture delivered at Chicago, repro-
duced in the New York Freeman’s Journal of Jan-
uary 24, 1903, as follows:

The position of Roman Catholics in regard to
religion and education, and their policy in the
establishment of parochial schools, are absolutely
correct. For corroboration of this opinion I refer
you to the work ‘‘Philosophy of Education,'' by
Dr. Arnold Tompkins, principal of the Chicago
Normal School, in which he says religious char-
acter is the proper end of all education.

Points Out Weok Points
In Public Schools

Back in October, 1903 the Rev. W. Montague Geer,
vicar of St. Paul's Chapel, Trinity Cathedral, New
York, wrote to the New York Sun a striking
letter in which he reiterates and reinforces the argu-
ments for religious education which in a former let-
ter produced such a storm of discussion. “This ques-
tion," he says, “has ceased to be a point at issue be-
tween Protestantism and Homan Catholicism, and has
become one between Agnosticism, established and en-



32 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

dowed, and Christianity, disestablished and disen-
dowed/'

Dr. Geer goes on to say that there can be but one
point of view for the Church and all Christians in this
matter of religious education, the point of view of the
children of the poor.

My opinions on this subject were at one
time strenuously opposed by a man now high in
the counsels of the nation. Today he sends two of
his sons to a Church school of the highest order,
and his daughter to another, both schools well
known for aggressive Christian nurture. And I
have acted, as far as I could, on the same principle.
Yet neither he nor I thinks, for a moment, that
our children are one whit better in the sight of
God than those of the poorest hodcarrier; or one
whit better entitled to daily Christian nurture.
We send our children to Christian schools because
we rightly value Christian education and can af-
ford to pay for it. The hodcarrier sends his chil-
dren to the public school, since he has not the
money to do better for them; because the state
has made it impossible for him to secure Christian
education for his children. That condition of af-
fairs is most repugnant to my sense of justice,
as I do not doubt it is, on reflection, to his. There
can be no Christian propriety or American fair
play in such cruel discrimination against the poor,
in essentials.

Dr. Geer makes a very good and apt exposition
of the reasons why irreligious education is bad for
the state and helpless in the solution of national prob-
lems. He groups them under nine heads:

I. State ^education touches the negro prob-
lem for harm.

* ^ No nation was ever guilty of wilder
folly than we are now guilty of in attacking this
discouraging problem with an almost completely
secularized and Godless education. Burke argued
against total abolition, and said: ‘T confess I trust
infinitely more (according to the sound principles
of those who ever have at any time ameliorated
the state of mankind) to the effect and influence
of religion than to all the rest of the regulations
put together/'



WHAT THEY THOUGHT A GENERATION AGO 33

II. State education touches the divorce prob-

lem for harm. It does little in itself to strengthen
the moral fibre of our children, and it deprives the
Church of one of her best opportunities to do that
kind of work so effectively as to reduce the di-
vorce evil to the lowest possible point. The public
school system comes between the Church and her
children for harm. The Gospel, as a result, has
not free course in this country; and until it has,
the divorce evil will increase, and Church life and
home life will continue to deteriorate, and inno-
cent children will continue to suffer (Oh, the pity
of it!), and in increasing numbers; all, admit-
tedly, to the peril of our existence as a nation.

III. State education touches the industrial
problem for harm.

The less religion a people have the more
quarrelsome, unreasonable, discontented and sus-
picious of each other they become ; more and more
watchful for self-interest, without regard to the
public good. Religion binds the classes and the
masses together, and makes them more consider-
ate of each other’s feelings. No seeming excep-
tions to this rule can disprove it. * * * When
labor threatens a general strike in all departments
of work throughout the entire land, and when
capital threatens to reduce labor to subjection by
a process of slow starvation, verily the splendid
dimensions of our great country shrink to those
of a small and quarrelsome Verona.

IV. State education touches on political prob-
lems for harm, by multiplying the number of those
whose votes go to the highest bidder, because
they have not had principles of honesty instilled
into their hearts and consciences in any effective
way.

V. State education over-educates and over-
stimulates countless numbers of people whose
after lives give no adequate play for their en-
lightenment and unhappily acquired ambition.
Hence, deserted farms, over-crowded cities, wide-
spread and ever increasing discontent.

Attention is called a second time to this
over-education indictment, because, in common
with nearly all the other specific indictments in



34 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

my first letter, it has received no notice in the
discussion which has followed, although in your
editorial you speak especially of this question as
being ‘‘well worth debate/’

VI. State education touches for harm the
problem involved in the marked falling off in the
number of candidates for the Christian ministry.

VII. State education touches for harm, the
problem involved in the falling off in church
attendance, largely for the same reason. I do not
find that the Roman Catholic Church, which
provides parochial schools for its children as far
as it can, has complained of any falling off,
either in the number of candidates for the priest-
hood or in the attendance of people in divine
worship. That Church is, therefore, surely wise,
yes, and patriotic, in putting her children under
the highest spiritual obligations to her as their
Divine Mother.

IX. State education is going to touch for
harm our problems in Porto Rico and the Philip-
pines, for the same reason that it has been a
source of injury to us in the home country.

Nor is there a single ethical or spiritual
problem that we have in common with other
countries which state education does not touch for
harm.

Can there be any surprise, that one burdened
with this belief is not to be silenced by fear lest
the Roman Catholic Church should profit by a
modification of our system of education?

There can be no effective teaching of moral-
ity without personality. We cannot teach patriot-
ism without George Washington and Abraham
Lincoln. No more can Christian ethics be effect-
ively taught independently of Christ and His
Church.

Nor is it enough to say that the Church and
the home must attend to the religious instruction
of the young; because, in their influence over
children, both Church and home are being
weakened and slowly undermined by our “madly-
perverted” system of secularized education.



WHAT THEY THOUGHT A GENERATION AGO 35

Sir Joshu Fitch

Sir Joshua Fitch tells us (Fitch, Thomas and
Matthew Arnold, pp. 95-96) that he dreaded any
theory which would tend to view the life of the
scholar as a thing apart from the life of a Christian;
he protested most earnestly against any attempt to
divorce religious from secular instruction, or to treat
them as distinct parts of an educational scheme. In

the last named work Sir Joshua Fitch says:
The device sometimes advocated in later

times for solving the religious difficulty in our
common and municipal schools by confining the
functions of the school teacher to secular instruc-
tion, and calling in the aid of the clergy or other
specialists to give lessons on religion at separate
hours, would have seemed to him wholly inde-
fensible, and, indeed, fatal to any true concep-
tion of the relation of religious knowledge to
other knowledge.^’

In one of his sermons he said

:

It is clear that neither is the Bible alone
sufficient to give a complete religious education,
nor is it possible to teach history, and moral and
political philosophy, with no reference to the
Bible, without giving an education that shall be
anti-religious. For, in the one case, the rule is
given without the application, and in the other
the application derived from a wrong rule.

Prof. Harper
The Literary Digest of December 27, 1902, ex-

pressed the same views, said to have been inspired
by the then editor, the late President Harper, of the
University of Chicago, taken from the Chicago Biblical
World of November, 1902. In this article we find the
following most appropriate statements

:

It is a serious phase of the present situa-
tion that the religious and moral instruction of
the young is isolated from their instruction in
other departments of knowledge. The correlation
of the different elements of education is incom-
plete, because the religious and moral instruction
is received in entire separation from the general



86 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

instruction of the public schools. The facts and
truths of religion are the foundation and the im-
perative of morality. Present civilization rests
upon the religious and ethical ideas of the past,
and the civilization of the future depends upon a
due recognition of religion and morality as
essential factors in the growing welfare of hu-
manity. The knowledge and experience of re-
ligious and moral truth must underlie and pene-
trate all knowledge and experience. The events
and the ideas of the past, as of the present, must
be viewed in the light of a divine hand as the
creator of the universe, a divine power sustain-
ing it, a divine wisdom guiding it, and a divine
purpose accomplished in it. The physical world
about us, our fellov/-men, and our own selves
must all be interpreted by religion truly con-
ceived and morality properly understood. It is,
therefore, impossible to accomplish the ideal edu-
cation of the individual when the religious and
moral element is isolated from the other elements;
still worse, when it is not received at all by the
majority of the children. All the elements of
education must be woven together into an organic
unity to produce a perfect result.

No Religious Training
A remarkable address was delivered at a public

school commencement in Toronto, Ohio, on Aug. 7,
1902. It was by Judge John M. Cook, a non-Catholic,
in a Methodist church.

Mr. Cook said:
In one study your curriculum has been de-

ficient. Your diploma is no guaranty of your re-
ligious training. Man, a fighting animal that he
is, has a three-fold nature, physical, mental and
moral. The two first have been trained ; the third,
I am sorry to say, entirely neglected, so far as
your schools are concerned. Such condition is
supposed to be necessary in republics. You may
succeed; you may accomplish all that you have
pictured to yourself you will accomplish, and all
that your friends hope for you, and yet, without
religion, your life will be a failure. Your moral
nature should recognize that there is a great con-



WHAT THEY THOUGHT A GENERATION AGO 37

trolling influence in the world that man cannot
escape. A great first cause, which we call God, to
whom we are responsible and whose teachings,
come in what manner they may, we must observe
and obey. A controlling power to whom we can
look for assistance and against whom we can lean.
Away with agnosticism that knows nothing; with-
out faith, without hope, I would sooner have the
belief of a heathen savage, carrying in my vest
pocket a little idol, looking to it as God, than have
a faith or rather no faith, whose only teaching
is that you cannot tell whether there is a God or
not. There will come a time when you will need a
God, a real God, an actual God. Succeed as you
3^^ay, you will meet with many reverses and de-
feats. There will come a time—many of us have
reached it already—when the broken fragments
of your ambitions will lie all around you as so
many skeletons, haunting and taunting you. Day
by day you will inquire, is this all? No, not all.
If, in this life only we have hope, then we are of
all created things most pitiable.

When a mere youth I went to a parish
school that required, whenever the clock struck
the hour, the whole school should rise and repeat
in concert the Apostle's Greed. Blessed is the
memory of that school. I still hear the striking
of that clock and the words of that creed still
linger with me, conveying my mind and satisfying
my soul. believe in God, the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ,
His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the
Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered
under Pontius Pilate, was dead and buried. He
descended in hell. The third day he again arose
from the dead and ascended into heaven and sit-
teth on the right hand of God, the Father Al-
mighty, from thence he shall come to judge the
quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost,
the Holy Catholic Church

;
the forgiveness of

sins; the Communion of Saints; the resurrection
of the body and life everlasting."

My young friends, may you ever remember
that in all your getting you get wisdom and un-
derstanding, which is a firm belief in, and the
practice of the Christian virtues.



The People’s Wish vs.

Organized Opposition

The Voice Of America

Judges, financiers, doctors, psychologists,
editors, farmers, laborers, teachers, lawyers,
penitentiary officials, detectives, traveling men,
government officials, politicians, plain folks—
Catholic, Jewish and Protestant fathers and
mothers—their letters lie in huge envelopes in
Collier's editorial rooms. Nearly ail say they
are deeply interested. It would seem as if each
had been waiting for someone to say what they
all knew . . .

It seems as if it had been on the tip of Amer-
ica’s tongue to say what Collier's has printed
about the lack of moral training for our chil-
dren.

Suppose an enemy had secretly turned
poison-gas streams into the school houses of
America and were slowly, day by day, wearing
down the health of our children. Suppose a
scientist analyzed the air in the school rooms and
gave warning of the danger. The people would
hardly respond more energetically than they
have responded to Collier's disclosure of the
danger that confronts the country because of
the lack of moral training in the public schools.

The letters received sound like the voice of
America.

Several granite-like facts stand out from
this mass of opinion:

1

—

Americans of all creeds or no creeds can
talk religion outside of the church.

2

—

America is going to do something, in a
national way, about training its children spirit-
ually as well as mentally and physically. The
facts are convincing. We are shocked at the



THE PEOPLE^S WISH VS. OPPOSITION 89

crimes of our own grade school and high school
boys, who are criminals because they don’t know
how to be anything else. That ghastly

^

line of

10,000 human beings who die by homicide in
America every year is a parade that must be
stopped. We are getting tired of having our
young daughters live mental and physical lives
that we cannot comprehend—and no spiritual
lives at all. Business men are getting tired of
having over a billion dollars a year stolen by
fraud. America is on the point of doing some-
thing that will serve to set our children straight.

3—Children do have souls, and their souls
must be trained in schools as well as in homes;
if they are not trained in homes, then school
training is all the more necessary. America,
these letters indicate, is coming to recognize
that fact; it is getting ready to act on it.

It is not common for the daily press to editorial-
ize and sermonize on articles which appear in current
magazines, but Collier's received praise, congratu-
lations, and encouragement from editors in every
state. We reproduce a few herewith:

'‘This piece of news (the Collier's announce-
ment of an effort to prepare a school-room code
of right living) should be heralded with satis-
faction,” says the Passaic (N. J,) News.

“It exactly expresses a growing feeling . . .
There is no reason why good men and women of
all religious faiths cannot agree upon a simple
course of such instruction,” says the Savannah
News.

“Moral philosophy is taught in the univer-
sities,” points out the Indianapolis Star—“why not
in our grade schools? Almost any good work on
moral philosophy could be reduced to a simple
code that could be taught in the public schools,
without advantage either to or against any re-
ligion,” it comments.

The El Paso Times says : “The necessity for
the teaching of either morals or ethics to the
rising generation has become decidedly felt within
the last few years. A moral man with little edu-
cation is apt to be regarded as a better citizen
than an unmoral man with a good deal.”



40 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

“It is to be hoped that the movement will
be successful in solving one of the greatest if
not the greatest problem confronting the nation
today, says the Winston-Salemn (N. CJ Journal.

“The fallacy of training children mentally
and not morally is everywhere becoming alarm-
ingly apparent,^' says the Glendale News, of Cali^
fornia.

“Where are our children trained and brought
up?’’ asks the News Reporter, of Whiteville, N.
C. “If in the home and school, then it is incum-
ment upon the school to carry out the injunction.”

“Mother’s knee”—and the schoolroom—^the
Santa Ana (Cal.) Reporter sees them both as
sources of power. “The schools should help the
mother by following the proposal of Collier's
that ‘natural religion’ should be taught in the
public schools by means of a moral code.”

“Read what Collier's says about the lack of
moral training in our public schools,” advises
the Wichita (Kansas) Beacon. “Isn’t it about
time for the church to accept this layman’s chal-
lenge, for a long time inarticulate and half-
formed and now given direct expression by Col-
lier's?

The White Plains (N. Y.) Reporter: “It is
apparent that the people of the United States
are in favor, or at least a great mass of them
are, regardless of their religious beliefs, of train-
ing the mind morally as well as intellectually.

‘^Suggestions for a code divide themselves
into two classes. Some writers want religion in-
troduced into the public schools. Others say that
morals or ethics is enough.

“What is to be done with the Ten Command-
ments? Scores of writers suggest that nothing
could be better for our schoolrooms.”

The editor of Collier's explained his reason for the
polling of public opinion in these words:

Because of our differing beliefs, religious
teaching has been barred from many of our
public schools.

This has resulted—quite unwisely and un-
necessarily, as it seems to us—in there being



THE PEOPLE^S WISH VS. OPPOSITION 41

little or no training for our children in those
schools.

Concerning supernatural religion, men differ
and divide; but natural religion lives in every
human being. It is evidenced in that moral
guide which we call conscience—which may be
crude or cultivated, but which is the essence of
every system of morals because it is a part of the
mind of every man.

No sane person will deny the necessity for
all—regardless of creed—to aid in the develop-
ment of that fundamental force. An education
solely in the material things of life is surely
incomplete. The young mind must be impressed
at the same time with the fundamentals of what
constitutes right and wrong.

This general approval of a change of policy in the
public school system of the United States was not
surprising in the light of a report issued about that
time by the International Sunday School Council of
Religious Education, which revealed the astounding
and shocking fact that

:

There are 27,000,000 Americans below the
age of 25 years, normally Protestants, who re-
ceive absolutely no systematic religious instruc-
tion. Two out of every three Protestant children
under 25 years of age are not being touched in
any way by the educational program of any
church.

In 1941 the number of American children "with
no religious background or instruction” had reached
30,000,000, according to George Wieland, religious
statistician.

Dr. L. W. Irwin, writing in the Christian Ob-
server (Presbyterian) in April, 1926, noted that:

The United States stands before the world
as a Christian nation. If there be any truth in
the claim that the nation is Christian its sys-
tem^ of education should be placed on a Christian
basis, and that teaching should be done from a
Christian point of view, not atheistic or agnos-
tic.



The Voice Of Britain

\^HEN the editor of the London Times on February
17, 1940, wrote a lengthy article condemnatory

of the English policy of excluding religious instruc-
tion from the schools, and noted that ‘‘religion must
form the very basis of any education worth the name,
and that education with religion omitted is not really
education at all,"' he was flooded with congratulatory
replies from all sides.

On that occasion the Times editor made these ob-
servations :

The common argument that while the provi-
sions and supervision of “education" must be the
business of the State, “religious instruction"
must be considered as altogether the affair of
the churches, is not only worthless but mischiev-
ous. It is mischievous because it encourages the
fallacy that essential education can be completed
by secular instruction alone, and that the teaching
of religion is merely a kind of optional supple-
ment.

The truth is, of course, that religion must
form the very basis of any education worth the
name, and that education with religion omitted
is not really education at all.

Yet in some of the schools provided by the
State there is no religious teaching. In some of
the secondary schools it is provided for the junior
pupils only, and dropped, as a subject compara-
tively unimportant, when they reach the upper
forms. Under the system governing the elemen-
tary schools it is treated as a subsidiary subject,
to be disposed of in a preliminary half-hour before
the real work of the day begins.

In every other subject the educational author-
ity rightly demands a high standard of compe-
tence from its teachers. But if those who give
religious instruction have had no training for the
work, or if a head teacher is openly antagonistic
to Christianity, the State regards such matters
as outside its purview, and does not interfere.



THE PEOPLE’S WISH VS. OPPOSITION 43

While it maintains that the teaching of re-
ligion should be left mainly to churches, it will
only admit representatives of the churches excep-
tionally and under severe restrictions to teach re-
ligion in its schools. Again and again the odious
fallacy recurs that education is one thing, and
religious instruction quite another. It is a right
purpose of national education to produce men and
women with healthy bodies and intelligent minds,
and the immense sums devoted to this purpose are
well spent. Yet the highest educational aim is to
produce good citizens. The basis of good citizen-
ship is character, and a man’s character depends
upon his beliefs. How, then, can the State afford
to ignore these simple truths, and to view the
teaching of religion as a task with which it has
no direct concern? . . .

The Times wrote of the work done by religious
bodies in evacuation areas and continues:

If the war has emphasized the deficiencies
of our present educational system, something more
than war-time expedients will be needed to remedy
them. More than before it has become clear that
the healthy life of a nation must be based on
spiritual principles. For many years we have
been living on spiritual capital, on traditions in-
herited from the past, instead of providing for
the future. Christianity cannot be imbibed from
the air . . .

It is upon such lines, with a bold disregard
of obsolete controversies, that our State system
of education needs to be recast. The highest of
all knowledge must be given frankly the highest
of all places in the training of young citizens.

It will be of little use to fight, as we are
fighting today, for the preservation of Christian
principles if Christianity itself is to have no
future, or at immense cost to safeguard religion
against attack from without if we allow it to be
starved by neglect from within.

The Times in a later issue carried this very apt
observation

:

If the Christian doctrine of personal immor-
tality be true, the theory of any educational sys-
tem which cares for mental and physical culture



44 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

but neglects the culture of the soul, is demon-
strably false.

Brought Wide Approval

On February 21, 1940—only four days after this
article appeared—the Times reprinted a great many
letters received endorsing the attitude of the editor.

We have space to reprint only a few of these:
The Anglican Bishop of St. Albans wrote:

It is a grim fact, as you. Sir, remind us
‘‘that in a country professedly Christian and a
country which at the moment is staking its all
in defense of Christian principles, there is a sys-
tem of national education which allows the citi-
zens of the future to have a purely heathen up-
bringing.’’ The present system of national educa-
tion . . . is . . . indefensible, both on educational
and religious grounds.
Lord Hambleden wrote on Feb. 21, 1940:
There is much talk of the need for a Chris-

tian spirit in education, of a new outlook which
will challenge the muddled thought of today, but
very few writers have been bold enough to at-
tack the grave lack of religious teaching in our
schools, or to insist that active Christianity can-
not become an established fact unless religious
teaching is a definite part of any new educational
programme.”

Lord Shaftesbury, St. Giles House, Wimborne,
had this to say:

Your admirable article of February 17 on
“Religion and National Life,” which has rightly
been described as “most timely,” must have been
appreciated by vast numbers of the community
who have read it ... To millions of God fearing
people in this country the system of religious in-
struction, as provided in our State schools, must
stand condemned . . . Then again, I need hardly
stress the value and importance of our “non-
provided” schools, which have a definite relig-
ious atmosphere, schools that must be maintained
at all cost.

E. W. Davies, of King’s School, Lamberhurst,
Kent, wrote

:



THE PEOPLE’S WISH VS. OPPOSITION 45

The emphasis on the secular in education
at the expense, and sometimes to the exclusion, of
the relig’ious is largely the outcome of this tend-
ency today. In so far as we in our generation
omit to emphasize what is vital in education and
to regard Godliness as an indispensable part of
good learning, we shall fail to hand on to our
children that legacy to v/hich we owe a debt, in-
calculable but only too easily forgotten.

Charles Exon, Anglican Bishop of Exeter, re-
sponded :

Is it impossible that a brief period for open-
ing worship should be enjoined by statute for
every school?

School worship fosters in the child the corpor-
ate loyalty to the school for which the teachers
are rightly jealous. The constant repetition of
psalm, hymn, collect, versicle, and response can
hardly fail to leave in the memory of the child
seeds of truth which will develop later. When
the child leaves school he will more easily feel at
home in the worshipping community of church or
chapel.

A letter from Lilian M. Faithfull contained this
passage

:

If a united front had been presented to the
undenominational movement of sixty years ago
and a determined corporate effort on the part of
the various religious bodies to retain their hold
over the school children, if not over the schools,
much might have been done ... It is almost in-
credible, but it is a fact, that there are children of
school age who do not know what happened on
Good Friday.

Athelstan Riley, of Jersey, wrote:
Churches and denominations should be en-

couraged by the State to give religious instruc-
tion in all schools, and all that pay rates (taxes)
should share in them equally. At present the
scales are heavily weighted against definite re-
ligious teaching, and the Roman Catholics in
particular, who take the greatest interest in the
education of their children, and will not entrust
them to unknown teachers in provided schools, are
cruelly treated.



46 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

J. Scott Lidgett, Bermondsey Settlement, Parn-
combe-street, Jamaica Road, sent this comment:

I write to urge that those—a rapidly growing
number—who are concerned with the gravity of
the situation should exert their influence upon all
education authorities, national or local, to take
wisely considered but vigorous action in regard
to this momentous subject. If the Christian
values of our civilization are to be maintained
we cannot afford to live on the capital of the
past, but must take all available means for
strengthening the convictions of faith by ade-
quate instruction in its Christian foundations.

Action followed quickly in England. Representa-
tives of the Established Church, of the Catholic and
‘Tree^’ Churches (which includes all other denomina-
tions) drafted a five-point post-war Peace Program,
the first point of which called for ‘"compulsory relig-
ious instruction in every school of the nation.’’

In August, 1941, the proposal was submitted to
Winston Churchill and to the President of the Board
of Education by 224 members of the British Parlia-
ment. The government was asked to have text-books
prepared for religious instruction, to require a relig-
ious service to be held each day in every school and to
authorize state inspectors to see that religion would
be taught in accordance with the wishes of parents.

At the end of December, 1941 (See TimCy Jan.
5, 1942) it was reported in the press that “Parlia-
ment will soon make religious instruction and daily
worship a statutory requirement for every school in
the United Kingdom. The churches and Britain’s
Board of Education are now collaborating to draft an
act making worship and religious instruction compul-
sory.”

Britain has, for many years, permitted religious
organizations to erect their own schools and then to
receive public funds for their support, provided only
that the secular branches of the curriculum be prop-
erly taught. The benefit of religious instruction as a
part of every school curriculum has not only been



THE PEOPLE’S WISH VS. OPPOSITION 47

recognized, but defended by the leading statesmen and
newspapers of England.

Mr. Balfour, leader of the Conservative Party in
England, declared:

I have always cherished the hope that our
elementary State schools eventually would be so
conducted as to secure to every child the kind of
religious instruction his parents desire him to
receive. This is the sole solution that appeals
to me as strictly compatible with our ideals of
religious liberty, of parental responsibility, and
of the primordial necessity of religious training
in children’s education. I hold it to be an evil,
aye, the greatest of all evils, to permit children
to be brought up in schools in which no pro-
vision is made for religious formation. And I
solemnly express today my hope that England will
never accept the responsibility of public instruc-
tion without religion.

The same Mr. Balfour, in his book entitled Theism
and Humanism, in which he defends the need of relig-
ious education, wrote:

That debt will not long be paid if morality
comes to be generally regarded as the casual
effect of petty causes

;
comparable in its lowest

manifestations with the appetites and terrors
which rule, for their good, the animal creation;
in its highest phases no more than a personal
accomplishment, to be acquired or neglected at
the bidding of individual caprice. More than this
is needful if the noblest ideals are not to lose all
power of appeal. Ethics must have its roots in
the divine; and in the divine it must find its con-
summation.

Commenting on this, the editor of the Tablet
(February 24, 1940), wrote:

Religious illiteracy is the worst of all forms
of illiteracy, and the greatest injury which can
be done to the young. Yet we have been rearing
in our great towns this godless proletariat.
Those who know the practical difficulties, in an
atmosphere in which authority is not valued as a
source of life, but resented as an affront to demo-
cratic dignity and the pretense that the major-



48 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

ity impression, however ignorant and handi-
capped by its environment that majority may
be, must be allowed to set the tone, will not
hastily blame the Church of England for this
ignorance, as so many Church of England
spokesmen have been fond of blaming the Church
of Spain, a body with not half the resources or
income, for unbelief in Spain.

But they will look rather to the whole de-
velopment of the English educational system, and
particularly to the capture of Oxford and Cam-
bridge in the last century by the forces of un-
belief, largely led by German idealist philos-
ophy, which formed the mind of Whitehall
through two critical generations.

Today a very high proportion of the teachers
whom the State schools entrust with the next
generation are aggressively anti-Christian, and
their own religion is not the Christian faith, but
a humanitarianism which, even when it professes
agnosticism, treats all the great questions of the
purpose and meaning of human life as if the
Christian revelation was certainly untrue. The
Times' leading article, since reprinted, on ‘Re-
ligion and the National Life’ brought out very
clearly how the doctrinal bases upon which our
national life and institutions claim to repose,
have been eaten away.

If comment were needed on the above thesis, we
would let it be made by John Ruskin, the noted Eng-
lish author, who writes (see Precious Thoughts) in
part

:

Anything which makes religion the second
object, makes religion no object. God will put up
with a great many things in the human heart,
but there is one thing He will not put up with in
it—a second place. He who offers God a second
place, offers Him no place ...

All human government is nothing else than
the executive expression of Divine authority. The
moment government ceases to be the practical
enforcement of Divine Law, it is tyranny; and
the meaning I attach to the words ‘paternal gov-
ernment’ is, in more extended terms, simply this

—

‘the existence fulfillment, by formal methods, of



THE PEOPLE^S WISH m OPPOSITION 49
the will of the Father of Mankind respecting His
children/

On July 15, 1941, declaring that actual ignorance
of what the Christian religion teaches is wide-spread,
the then Anglican Archbishop of York, Dr. Temple,
now the Archbishop of Canterbury, moved the fol-
lowing important resolution on education at the final
meeting of the summer session of the Church As-
sembly :

That this Assembly, convinced of the need
of a true Christian education in all the schools
of the country

y

and gratefully recognizing the
work of teachers in all classes of schools, gives
general approval to the statement recently issued
by the Archbishop of Canterbury, York and
Wales, and earnestly hopes that with the co-
operation of the various Christian communions,
of education authorities, of the teachers, and of
Christian citizens generally, speedy effect may
be given to the following five point resolution

:

(1) In ail schools a Christian education
should be given (except where parents wish to
withdraw their children from it) by teachers
willing and competent to give it.

(2) Religious knowledge and the imparting
of it should be an ‘optional subject,’ not merely
an ‘additional option.’

(3) Where only one or few of the teachers
are qualified to give Christian teaching it should
be made permissible to give this teaching at any
period within school hours so that the same
teacher may teach several classes at different
periods.

(4) Religious teaching should be inspected
with regard to its methods by His Majesty’s in-
spectors or some other duly authorized person.

(5) In all schools there should be an act of
worship at the beginning of the school day.

Ccsnado

In the two Provinces of Ontario and Quebec,
Canada, religion is taught in the schools and the State
supports Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian and Ang-



50 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

lican schools. The policy was stated in May, 1898, by
the editor of the Canadian Churchman (Prot.)

:

Wherever any religious denomination shall
set up a school in which its children are taught
in a satisfactory manner the ordinary parts of
a secular education, the government grants in
support of the school shall be allowed.

The government of Ontario made the following
concessions to Catholics, a minority group:

(1) The right of Roman Catholics to establish
separate schools for their children;

(2) The right to appoint teachers of their own
faith

;

' (3) The right to public monies for the mainten-
ance of their own schools;

(4) The right of members of a Religious Order
to be recognized as teachers without examination.

Holland

In this country the law recognizes private schools
and grants them subsidies. As in Sweden, Norway and
Denmark, Holland had a State Protestant Church for
years, and only ‘‘Members of the Protestant Church in
good standing'^ were permitted to teach. But under a
new law, inacted in 1920, private schools were given
the same status as public schools and, today, are
patronized by three times as many students.

Germany

The traditional policy of the German Government
was based on the parental right to educate his child,
although education, for many years, was compulsory
under a curriculum in which religion was taught. But
after World War I changes were made even in the
Provinces where Catholics constituted a majority, be-
cause Socialism, which had grown to great proportions,
demanded the secularization of education. Socialism
had millions of followers in Germany after World
War I and it was as anti-Christian as is Communism
today.



THE PEOPLE'S WISH VS. OPPOSITION 51

In 1920 the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth
handed down a decision to the effect that the Rev-
olutionary School Law of Saxony, which prohibited
religious instruction in schools, was un-Constitutional.

Austria

Religion was taught in all the schools in Austria
until its invasion by Hitler. In 1924 when Socialists
had control of the government there was an effort
to have religious instruction discontinued, but with-

out success.

Dr. Hans Karl Zessner, a member of the Depart-
ment of Constitutional Law of the Office of the Aus-
trian Chancellor, held it to be:

A great mistake to rely upon the State com-
pletely for elementary teaching. It is true that it
develves upon the state to see that elementary
education be general and free and that a minimum
of educational standards be generally accepted.
Complete control, however, of education is not
a function of the state. Schools must be main-
tained in keeping with the intention and the
spirit of the parents and of the religion of the
children who attend the same. The rights of par-
ents and the rights of children must be considered
first of ail in education. It is an unjustifiable act
of violence to suppress them.

Australia

Samuel Pearson, a Protestant New Zealander,
sent a letter to one thousand Protestant Ministers’
Associations and Protestant Church Courts in the
United States, urging that they unite for the intro-
duction of some religious instruction into the public
schools if it covered no more than the Ten Command-
ments and the main precepts of the Bible. He noted
that

:

In democratic Australia, which has no State
Church, Catholic priests, Jewish rabbis, and Pro-
testant ministers have, for sixty years, been
allowed to enter the public schools for half an
hour once a week to give special religious in-



52 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

struction to the children of their own faith in a
separate room.

In Pagan Lands
When Protestant missionaries enter China, Japan,

India, the first thing they do is found schools to

impart religious instruction to pagans. They follow
the same practice when they establish themselves in
Latin America, whether it be Mexico, Central or
South America. These institutions are directed and
supported by mission funds collected here in the
United States. The Protestant clergy are well aware
that evangelistic work will not succeed if there be no
foundation on which to rear the structure of Chris-
tianity. Religious knowledge evidently must be the
basis of religious practice.

Why Not In The United States?
For those who wonder why Protestants in the

United States do not found their own religious schools,
the probable answer was given in its April 25, 1925
issue by The Nation. This magazine is Socialist, un-
friendly to Christianity and especially to Catholicism.
In substance the article to which we refer declared
that the public schools of the United States are already
in the hands of Protestants.

The answer is given by the Nation (April 29,
1925) a Socialist Magazine very unfriendly to Chris-
tianity and especially to the Catholic Church. In sub-
stance the article reports that the public schools of

the United States are already in the hands of Prot-
estants. The reader will, we are sure, be interested
in this reproduction of the result of the survey taken
by the Nation 24 years ago, under the caption “Many
Catholics Teach Schools,'' by David Henry Pierce.

Are the public schools of the United States a
Protestant and Caucasian institution supported by
public funds? There is considerable evidence to per-
mit of an affirmative response. In connection with a
proposed book, the writer inquired of leading teach-
ers' agencies, the extent of discrimination by school



THE PEOPLE^S WISH VS. OPPOSITION 53
officials against Catholics, Jews, atheists, and mem-
bers of other than the white race.

In so far as the answers dealt with religious dis-

crimination they prove that the alleged non-sectarian-

ism of the American public school is a fiction. Dis-
crimination against Catholics and Jews is high in
nearly every section of the country. The dean of
the department of education of the Toledo Municipal
University frankly urges Jewish students to refrain

from specializing in education because of the difficulty
in securing positions. The most brilliant Jewish
students in Ohio State University, who have majored
in education, cannot secure places in the public schools.

In an Ohio village the woman in charge of a school
house refused to deliver the keys of the building to a
young principal, recently appointed, because he was
a Catholic.

Negroes are employed in colored schools and also
in some Northern and Western cities where a liberal
policy was begun early and has been steadfastly
maintained. Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago have
found no horrible evils resulting from permitting col-
ored girls to instruct white children. Foreigners are
not wanted in the American public schools, nor are
Asiatics permitted to prove to receptive white chil-
dren that the ‘'inferior^’ races possess hum_an traits.

With reference to Jews and Catholics conditions
vary slightly in different sections of the country, but
discrimination is the rule rather than the exception.
One California agency writes that ‘‘Jews are con-
sidered individually, by personality largely.’’ In an-
swer to a request for his opinion concerning present
tendencies, the manager declares that discrimination
in his section is decreasing. He adds : “It is a curious
and interesting item that in this section the denomina-
tion most aggressive in insisting that its adherents be
hired is the Methodist.” He concludes that the Klan
has increased anti-Catholicism and that where a Cath-
olic community is vigorously pressing a parochial
school program there is less opportunity for teachers
of that faith to secure public-school appointments.



54 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

The Middle West shows a high degree of intol-
erance in regard to teachers of other than convention-
al, well-known Protestant faiths. ‘‘Ninety-six to 98
per cent of our calls are for Protestants,’’ writes a
Missouri agency. “Anything ‘queer’ is objected to.”
“At least 95 per cent of our calls ask or require Prot-
estants” is a response from Iowa. “I consider,” writes
an agency manager from the home State of James
Whitcomb Riley, “that the religious line is more em-
phatically drawn now than at any time in my expe-
rience . . .

The correspondent’s assumption that public and
Protestant schools are identical is the view of others.
A Pennsylvanian, for example, in endeavoring to ac-
count for discrimination, asserts : “In the case of the

Jews the discrimination arises partly from the fact
that they have many holidays, and these different
from ours. Of course the main reason is the feeling
that American institutions should be kept unsullied.
In the case of Catholics there seems to be a feeling
that they are not so well fitted by training and for-
ward progressive outlook. However, religious prej-
udice probably is at the root of the discrimination.”
He adds that in the district he serves. Western Penn-
sylvania, discrimination against Jews and Catholics is
almost universal.

A New York agency manager declares that dis-
crimination is usually due to social conditions. “Many
Catholics and Jews have not had equal opportunity,
socially with Protestants and would not therefore be
happy in many Protestant communities.” Replies from
the South did not indicate that this popularly con-
demned section of the country was subject to any
greater degree of intolerance, except for the color
line, “which is as fixed as Gibralter.” However, the
Klan has made itself felt in the type of teachers de-
sired. A Georgia agency writes : “Religious tests
in our opinion are less common within Protestant
ranks, but more common by far in this section as
between Catholics and Protestants. The discrimina-
tion is mainly outside the larger cities ; in other words.



THE PEOPLE^S WISH VS. OPPOSITION 55

in localities having a very small percentage of Jews

and Catholics.” The writer adds that Jews suffer a
degree less discrimination because the Jewish relig-

ious organization in no way opposes the institution of
the public school.

It is the Middle West, however, which seems to
be particularly smitten with an intense prejudice

against the non-Protestants. It seems to permeate

men who would be expected to possess a reasonable
amount of cosmopolitanism. A few years ago an
official in the educational department of Western Re-
serve University, in writing a letter of recommenda-
tion for an honor graduate, a Jewess, included the fol-
lowing: '‘Although she is of the Jewish faith, I am
sure she will be a successful teacher.” Every metro-
politan suburb of Cleveland inquires openly into a
teacher’s faith, a condition that would hardly be
tolerated in the vicinity of New York or Boston. Not
only do the non-Protestant elements seem more alert in
preventing discrimination in the East, but Ohio dif-
fers from New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts
in that there is no specific legislation against the open
and undisguised use of the religious test. Incidental-
ly, few State departments of education place any ob-
stacle in the way of executives who care to ask a
teacher: “What is your religion?” or “What church
are you a member of? If not a member, which do
you prefer?” An Idaho official wrote that Article IX,
Section 6 of the State School Law declared against
discrimination, that school executives did not sub-
ject their applicants to any religious “test,” but they
were permitted to print upon application blanks a
request for an applicant’s statement of religious pref-
erence. When asked if such a request did not con-
stitute a religious test the Assistant State Superin-
tendent v/rote : “I do not think that a printed form re-
questing church preference is a religious test, as the
teachers are under no obligation whatever to answer
the question. Very few of them do fill in the blank.
We have no law forbidding the use of this question on
printed form.”



56 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

The foregoing is quoted, not because Idaho is
particularly flagrant in the matter of the religious in-
quisition, but because it represents the attitude of the
majority of State educational officials. Regardless of
State constitutional provisions that there must be
no religious or political discrimination for public of-
fice, it seems tacitly assumed that this rule does not
extend to teachers. The position of the United States
Department of Education in regard to religious tests
for teachers in public schools may be gathered from
the following letter:

The Bureau of Education exercises no control
or supervision over the public-school systems of
the several States. It is only a clearing-house
of educational information, advice, and assistance,
and makes no attempt to interfere with the ad-
ministration of any State's system of schools. In
view of this fact I can make no authoritative
ruling on the use of the religious tests in filling
teaching positions. Anything that I might have
to say on this subject would be of the nature of
mere opinion, and I hesitate to give that. It is
conceivable that the use of such tests may lead
to abuses particularly under some circumstances.
On the other hand, there are doubtless those who
hold that a school board in employing a teacher
should be possessed of information as to v/hether
he or she is religious or non-religious. Those hold-
ing this view would doubtless contend that a teach-
er having no religion whatever could hardly be
trusted to develop the highest moral character.

May 6, 1924. L. A. Kalbach.
Acting Commissioner of Education.

Pennsylvania officials declare the practice of de-
manding a teacher's declaration of religion is con-
trary to the Constitution of the United States and
also a violation of an express statute of their Com-
monwealth. Says Albert Lindsay Rowland, director of
the Teachers Bureau, Department of Public Instruc-
tion:

With regard to the question which you raise,
both the Constitution of the United States and the
constitution of this State forbid a religious test



THE PEOPLE^S WISH VS. OPPOSITION 57

for public office, and here is a further provision
in the School Code, Section 2891, which reads as
follows: ‘‘No religious or political test or qualifi-

cation shall be required of any director, visitor,
superintendent, teacher, or other officer, appointee,

or employee in the public schools of this common-
wealth/' Under these circumstances, any teacher
who can prove that there was a violation of this
statute in connection with her employment could
recover damages therefor.

This makes interesting reading, particularly
when compared with the assertion of the agency which
declared western Pennsylvania demanded “Protestants
only."

Chapter 71 of the General Lav/s, Section 39, of
Massachusetts provides that discrimination shall be

punished by a fine of not more than e$50. It also
makes excellent reading until we include the assertion
of a Massachusetts agency manager: “This law is
understood to have been mainly promulgated by a
combination of Catholics and Jews and in my opinion
has worked rather to their own disadvantage." New
Jersey has a positive bit of legislation, and a Septem-
ber issue of America, the Catholic Weekly, reported
a grand-jury investigation of alleged discrimination
against Catholic and Jewish teachers. New York
will refuse state aid if discrimination is proved. Dis-

crimination nevertheless exists, and opinions vary
regarding the effectiveness of the law.

The Catholic Church is making rapid strides in
its efforts to educate all children of the faith in pa-
rochial institutions ... On the other hand, the public
school is assuming the character of a Protestant pa-
rochial institution, destined to be controlled by Meth-
odists, Presbyterians, and Baptists. Although public
school children secure valuable contacts they are not
permitted to discover that Catholics, Jews, foreign-
ers, and other “queer" folks might be as capable in-
structors as their Sunday-school teachers.

Such a condition cannot exist indefinitely. The
immediate trend of American public education seems
to be toward further discrimination. But a whole-



58 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

some civilization cannot be predicted upon the basis
of Catholic parochialism and Protestant hypocrisy.
To develop tolerance, sympathy and understanding,
children must be impressed with the unity of man-
kind. An educational system, devoted conscientious-
ly to furthering social progress, will have no room for
sectarianism either in teaching body or student per-
sonnel. Standards that will determine a teacher’s
worth will be far removed from such requirements as
church affiliations, facial contour, or color of the skin.
The social force will require an intense effort, with
decidedly radical changes. But until these changes
occur, public education will act merely to preserve the
seeds of discord.



Advice From Dur Past

Presidents And Others

George Woshingfon
I ET us with caution indulge the supposition that
^ morality can be maintained without relig-
ion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence
of refined education on minds of peculiar struc-
ture, reason and experience both forbid us to ex-
pect that national morality can prevail in exclu-
sion of religious principle.—George Washington’s
‘'Farewell Address.”

Theodore Roosevelt
On January 29, 1905, the late President Theo-

dore Roosevelt spoke in part as follows at the dedica-
tion of a Lutheran edifice in the city of Washington:

In the last analysis the work of statesmen
and soldiers, the work of public men, shall go for
nothing if it is not based on the spirit of Chris-
tianity, working in the millions of homes through-
out the country; so that there may be that social,
spiritual, that moral foundation, without which
no country can ever rise to permanent greatness.
For material well-being, material prosperity, suc-
cess in arts, in letters, great industrial triumphs

—

all of them, and all of the structure raised thereon,
will be as evanescent as a dream, if it does not
rest on the “righteousness that exalteth a na-
tion.”

Calvm Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge, in October, 1925, made this

statement in a talk delivered in the city of Wash-
ington :

I have tried to indicate what I think the coun-
try needs in the way of help under present con-
ditions. It needs more religion. If there are any



60 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

general failures in the enforcement of law, it is
because there have been first general failures in
the disposition to observe the law. I can conceive
of no adequate remedy for the evils v/hich beset
society except through the influences of religion.
There is no form of education which will not fail,
there is no form of government which will not fail,
there is no form of reward which will not fail.
Redemption must come through sacrifice, and sac-
rifice is the essence of religion.

It will be of untold benefit if there is a broad-
er comprehension of this principle by the public
and a continued preaching of this crusade by
the clergy. It is only through these avenues, by
a constant renewal and extension of our faith,
that we can expect to enlarge and improve the
moral and spiritual life of the nation. Without
that faith, all that we have of an enlightened civil-
ization cannot endure.

But there is another and more basic reason
why the government cannot supply the source and
motive for the complete reformation of society.
In the progress of the human race, beliefs were
developed from the formation of governments. It
is my understanding that government rests on
religion. While in our own country we have wise-
ly separated the Church and State in order to
emancipate faith from all political interference,
nevertheless the forms and theories of our gov-
ernment were laid in accordance with the prevail-
ing religious convictions of the people.

On another occasion the same President, speab
ing at Phillips Academy (May, 1928) observed:

Unless our people are thoroughly instructed
in its great truth, they are not fitted to under-
stand our institutions, or to provide them with
adequate support.

For our independent colleges and secondary
schools to be neglectful of their responsibilities
in this direction is to turn their graduates loose
with simply an increased capacity to prey upon
one another. Such a dereliction of duty would
put in jeopardy the whole fabric of society. For
our chartered institutions of learning to turn back



ADVICE FROM OUR PAST PRESIDENTS 61

to the material and neglect the spiritual, would
be treason not only to the cause for which they
were founded but to man and God.

You will note the late President Coolidge’s inter-
pretation of the ‘‘why'' for the separation of Church
and State, namely to “emancipate the former from
ail political influences," and not to discourage its func-
tions.

Thomas Marshall

Speaking at the cornerstone laying of a new
Catholic school for St. Mary's Parish, Indianapolis,
the Honorable Thomas Marshall, then Governor of
Indiana, and later Vice-President of the United States,
said:

I stand here today believing that religious
training is absolutely necessary to rear boys and
girls to be good citizens and useful members of
the community. Good citizenship does not depend
entirely on legislative action, nor ^ on court de-
cisions, which may or may not make things right,
but good citizenship depends on the training of

the individual. It is necessary to have the stat-
utes and the laws, of course, but the most impor-
tant thing for the welfare of this commonwealth
of Indiana is the respectful and loyal obedience
of her citizenship, by that, I mean, the reverence
that is due to the decrees and orders of Almighty
God.

I congratulate this church or any other on
erecting such an institution as this of which I
speak. I want to congratulate this church on its
effort to start its children in the right path, and
train them toward loyalty to God, loyalty to the
State and loyalty to the family, for I am more
and more impressed with the necessity of begin-
ning the training of man when he is a boy. I feel
that this school will prove a blessing to the com-
munity. When it begins to dawn on a child that
here's a great world and—as I believe—a great
hereafter, then is his liberal education begin-
ning.



62 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

Rev. James A. Pike
In his inaugural sermon as Chaplain of Columbia

University, the Rev. James A. Pike (Protestant Epis-
copal) declared on August 7, 1949:

In discussion of Federal aid to education I
worry about the general naivete which assumes
that the neutrality of public schools is not a dog-
ma. Actually schools are teaching that this is all
there is—a humanistic ethical-culture basis of
life ... If you teach no religion, you teach a kind
of religion, which is secularism.

The Duke Of Wellington
Another great military and political leader has

spoken even more strongly on this subject. Lord
Mahon writes of the conversation which he had with
the great Duke of Wellington, as follows:

I shall never forget the earnestness and
energy of manner with which he (the Duke of
Wellington) deprecated mere secular education,
adding, '7 doubt if the Devil himself could
advise a worse scheme of social destruction^’

Take care what you are about, he exclaimed
on December 23, 1840, when speaking of the new
Education Act; “for unless you base all this edu-
cation on religion, you are only bringing up so
many clever devils.’^
The above is taken from Lord Stanhope’s “Con-

versations with the Duke of Wellington,” London,
1888, page 180.

U. S. Chamber Of Commerce
In July, 1941, the Chamber of Commerce of the

United States set up a Committee to cooperate with
a similar committee of the American Association of
School Administrators designed to bring more religion
into the education of the child. This joint committee
made this declaration

:

There has been too little appreciation that
an intelligent belief in God is the greatest ob-
stacle the dictatorship has to overcome. Yet it



ADVICE FROM OUR PAST PRESIDENTS 63

is a sad commentary that in the United States
som.e sixty-five million people have no religious
church affiliation. This is a definite challenge to
the community. We must return to early funda-
mentals, i.e., each God-fearing family must see
that its members clearly understand the tenets of
their particular faith. While the responsibility
is that of the family and the church, the schools
must facilitate their work. A truly God-fearing
nation is a strong nation.

In order that the schools may play an increas-
ingly effective part in our complex life, and that
work may be brought home to the community it
is proposed that local committees of business men
and superintendents of schools adopt programs
which are in keeping with the present-day prob-
lems and needs of their respective communities.
It is also proposed that a creed should be prepared
in suitable language which will state what children
might with propriety receive from their school
training. This creed should be built around a
belief in God and America and founded on a
knowledge of the necessity for observance of the
fundamentals of the Constitution, the Bill of
Rights and our form of government and econom.y.

Here is a corporate expression of belief that re-
ligious schools should be encouraged.

Nicholas Murray Butler
On November 28, 1940, at the rededication cere-

monies of Earl Hall, Columbia University, the late
President Nicholas Murray Butler deplored the effect
of the exclusion of religious education from the public
school in these words:

This generation is beginning to forget the
place which religious instruction must occupy if
education is to be truly sound and liberal. We
seem to forget that until some 200 years ago re-
ligious instruction everywhere dominated educa-
tion; religion guided education, shaped education,
and selected the material for education in every
part of the world: in the Orient, Europe and the
Americas. Then began, as a result of the rise of
Protestantism and the spread of democracy, those
sharp differences of religious opinion and of re-



64 PIERCE THE CONFUSION AND SEE THE CHILD

ligious worship, which unfortunately exhibited
themselves in highly controversial form. One con-
sequence was to lead men to turn aside from re-
ligious study and religious teaching in the attempt
to avoid those contentious differences which had
become so common. Then particularly in this
democracy of ours, a serious tendency grew up to
exclude religious teaching altogether from edu-
cation on the ground that such teaching was in
conflict with our fundamental doctrine as to the
separation of Church and State. In other words,
religious teaching was narrowed down to some-
thing which might be called denominationaiism,
and therefore because of differences of faith and
practice it must be excluded from education. The
result was to give paganism new importance and
new influence.

The same President of Columbia had the fol-
lowing to say in his annual report to the Trustees of
his institution on January 11, 1935:

One need not himself be religious, or indeed
have any great concern for religion, to grasp the
fact that religion has had a very large, often a
preponderant, influence in shaping our contem-
porary civilization and in laying the foundations
of our present-day social, economic and political
institutions. Until within a reasonably short
time, the process of education itself was domi-
nated by religion . . . During the half century
just past, this condition has changed entirely,
and religious knowledge, together with religious
interest, is passing, all too rapidly, out of the edu-
cational process . . .

The school child, however, is entitled to re-
ceive, and should receive that particular form of
religious instruction and training which his par-
ents and natural guardians hold dear. This can-
not be done if the program of the tax-supported
schools is arranged on the theory that religion
is to be excluded from the educational process or
treated merely incidentally as an element in home
life. The government's indifference to religion
must not be allowed to become opposition to re-
ligion.



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