Apparently our President doesn't approve of Catholic education. Well, American public schools produced the Lightworker. What have Catholic schools ever produced to compare with that? Naught but a few saints.
Really, these remarks are incredibly offensive. They are not, however, surprising. The drive to push religion our of the public space, and force it to hide itself inside churches and private homes, has been going on for about fifty years. Nobody much over thirty approves of it, most of them in the Northeast; in the South the ban on prayer in school is about as popular as the IRS (but still more popular than Congress!).
Religious toleration is a great good, but not anti-religious sentiment. The public space needs more saints, not fewer.
19 comments:
Didn't Obama go to an expensive private school? Punahoe or something like that?
The public space needs more saints, not fewer.
Well, only of a certain type.
Eric Hines
Atheist, secular humanist saints. That's what we need :p
He's confusing Catholic schools in the United States with madrassas overseas.
Not a deep thinker, our preezy.
Sorry. That anonymous was me.
valerie
PS. Who are our saints?
I nominate Mark Twain, Bob Hope, AW Greeley and George Washington.
It's the sort of shallow thinking Obama and many of his supporters engage in reflexively. "There's Catholic-Protestant strife in Ireland. That must be caused by people having separate institutions. No further examination of the facts is needed. Therefore they should stop that, and everything would get better. (And secretly, we're uncomfortable with the views of religious people about a lot of other stuff anyway, so anything that undermines that is a good thing.)" It is stupidity and ignorance before it even rises to the level of prejudice.
The trouble is, enforcing rules for stupid reasons rather than evil ones amounts to the same thing.
Valerie,
He was a great writer, but I don't know if Twain would even want to be called a saint. :) Now the poet Sidney Lanier, on the other hand, might be good -- Joyce Kilmer, too.
Walker Percy, perhaps, and Flannery O'Connor....
I have a fleeting sympathy for what he might have been trying to express: it's not a good sign if the divisions in society are leading people to think "I'll go to Red School. There won't be any of those nasty Blues there," and vice versa. It's too bad he has such juvenile notions about what you might do to improve a situation like that.
I didn't not get offended about it, once I read the actual quote. He did not single out Catholics, he mentioned Protestants, too. He was in Northern Ireland. How many decades (or should I say centuries?) were Catholics and Protestants killing each other there because of their different interpretations of Christianity? Those were (and still are) the dominant religious groups in Northern Ireland. I'm thankful the killing has stopped.
didn't or did not, not "didn't not" :-P
From the comments section, it was pointed out that there aren't any "Protestant" schools in Ireland. The schools are formed based upon the religious make-up of the local government councils. Therefore, if the council is Catholic, that township (district?) school is Catholic. The so-called Protestant schools are actually integrated schools, and according to the facts presented account for about 5% of the total schools within the country.
In other words, even though I read his whole speech and found that the *offending quote* was cherry-picked for effect, he is still sticking his nose into a place it doesn't belong.
Kinda his modis operandi, though, isn't it? Anything to avoid actually doing the job he said he wanted to do.
It should not need to be pointed out that religion was one of the primary reasons for the violence and repression in Ireland for over 700 years, and that it was the basis for the system of apartheid that was set up in Northern Ireland. (The parallel with racial apartheid in this country was so direct that, in the 1970's, Catholics marched under the banner "Civil Rights For Ireland," modeled their movement after the work of Doctor King, and were shot to death by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday in Derry while peaceably engaging in civil disobedience. After which came the revived Provisional IRA -- Imagine what would have happened in this country had the Alabama troopers opened up with machine guns from their side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge -- and so on, and so on, and so on.)
The president simply was telling the schoolchildren that the place where they live is a model to follow for other nations engaged in sectarian violence. You may have noticed that there are more than a couple of those in the world today.
It should not need to be pointed out that the United Irishmen movement that led the 1798 was made up of both devout Catholics and Protestants. It was a movement inspired by the same ideal of religious toleration as the United States' Founders. If you're a fan of Irish rebel songs, you probably know "Kelly, the Boy from Killane." The song mentions his commander: "...brave Harvey to lead in the van." That was Beauchamp Bagenal Harvey, a Protestant educated at Trinity College. Somehow his religious school education didn't make him blind to the problems afflicting mostly Catholics; in fact, a great number of the United Irishmen were Protestants.
Funny, given that the Anglican church was formed to suit the King's preferences, I always saw the struggle as one of Loyalist vs. Nationalist, the alignment of religious persuasion being merely coincidental. Clearly, from Grim's comment, also non-binding.
Also funny how when people's political or economic interests coincide, they find that it's not at all difficult to reconcile their sectarian differences, which are more often a matter of tribal bonding or a restless desire for independence than of deeply felt religion.
I'm not knocking religion, mind you. It's just that Christ gave us absolutely no excuse to quarrel over issues like transubstantiation or the exact nature of the Trinity. For that matter, I'm not knocking a restless desire for independence, though I'd prefer not to see it dressed up in religious excuses.
douglas
Funny, given that the Anglican church was formed to suit the King's preferences, I always saw the struggle as one of Loyalist vs. Nationalist.
The Protestants in Northern Ireland tended to be Presbyterian, as the English had brought many over from Scotland to colonize northern Ireland- thinking to secure the border, one might say. We know them as the Scots-Irish.The Scots-Irish had little love for the English. Those feisty Scots-Irish immigrated in large quantities to America- including many of my ancestors.
It is not that the Ulster Protestants had any great love for the English. It is rather that they didn't want to be governed by Catholics.
Well then it's a pick your poison loyalty, to be sure, but still, they're loyalists, whether they liked the idea or not. My point being that it's about political power, not the religious differences, really.
I suppose that makes them akin to the Christians in Syria who aligned with Assad, not for any love of him, but as he wouldn't persecute them as the other side would. Still, they chose, and they'll reap the 'rewards' of that decision, like it or not.
The left wishes to convince the rest of the country that religion has brought nothing but evil to the world, and thus it's influence needs to be negated as much as possible. "What good has religion ever done?" I am asked. I suggest that they open their Yellow Pages (or do a Google/Bing search) for their community's healthcare facilities and note how many of them begin with the words "Saint", "Catholic", "Lutheran", etc. Not to mention the ones that did originate that way and then get bought up.
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