In April the Irish government published the results of an extensive national survey of 200,000 households that included children in denominational primary schools, asking parents what kind of education system they wanted. The results do not neatly fit a narrative of an unstoppable secularism in Ireland.

Headlines reported “large numbers” wanted a change, or what the Irish State calls “divestment,” a process that allows the transition of a local school to a different “patron” for its administration.

Forty percent of Irish parents say they want to see divestment—a point emphasized by proponents of efforts to extract education from the church’s administration. Less noted among the commentariat is simple math that suggests a significant majority of parents want their children to continue to go to Catholic schools.

Bishop Tom Deenihan, the chair of the Council for Education at the Irish Bishop’s Conference, spoke to the matter in an address celebrating the 50th anniversary of the St. Oliver Plunkett Primary School, in Navan, County Meath. He emphasized that church authorities “accept the result” of the survey, but he lamented that too often the “genuinely inclusive” reality of Catholic schools is overshadowed by an “ill-informed and false” assumption that they are “grim places of indoctrination.”

Distortions that succeed so well, he suggested, “One could be forgiven for thinking that the Catholic school is the reason for every current ill in the world of Irish education.”

Saving Catholic school ‘ethos’?

In the United States, Catholic schools are private entities. In Ireland, while the operating costs of schools are paid by central government, the local school itself is delegated to a “patronage” body—traditionally the local Catholic or Protestant church—that seeks to imbue the school with its “ethos.”

Why might a society that has so consistently sought to distance itself from Catholic influence at the polling booth remain hesitant about abandoning ecclesial patronage over the classroom? The answer lies in a combination of political inertia, domestic resistance to change and a fundamental sense that the Irish education system at present is delivering good results.

Tom Carroll is a primary school teacher who serves as a teaching fellow in religious education at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick. He tells America that he “was not surprised at all by the numbers.” For Dr. Carroll, the image of a defensive church hierarchy clinging to its hold over education is largely a myth.

He explains that “the bishops, to their credit, are committed to divestment.” They recognize that they oversee a disproportionate number of schools in Ireland, he says.

According to Dr. Carroll, as Ireland navigates an increasingly diverse population, Catholic leaders perceive that the common good would be best served by having a range of school patrons that more closely represents the society that is emerging. Since there are more Muslims, more Orthodox Christians (refugees from Ukraine) and more people who approach life without religious traditions, schools should reflect that.

The American Cardinal James Hickey once famously explained the Catholic ethos in relation to education: “We don’t educate them because they are Catholic but because we are.”

Though that commitment remains prominent in Irish education, the church has been willing to adapt to Ireland’s evolving cultural and social realities. Religious observance is generally declining. Immigration from other European nations, the Middle East and Africa is changing the Irish religious and demographic landscape, and the church does not wish to appear an obstacle to a more varied ethos in education.

Alan Hynes-Cendrzak is the chief executive of the Catholic Education Partnership, the umbrella body for Catholic education across Ireland. “We are aware now [that] we are in a situation where we’ve an increasing number of parents sending their children to Catholic schools, who actually wouldn’t choose that education for the children if they wanted,” he explains. “We have no interest in having people feeling trapped within our schools.”

While 69 percent of Irish people identified as Catholic in the most recent census, the church still controls almost 90 percent of the schools. Dr. Carroll notes that this number “would have reflected the population through the 1970s, 1980s, even into the early 1990s.” The over-representation of Catholic school administration now is a side effect of how quickly Ireland has secularized.

But it also reflects the fact that when communities are presented with the possibility of an ethos shift at their child’s school, say from Catholic to a multidenominational school, they often have reservations. Only 32 schools have shifted since the national education divestment program began in 2011.

While activists for education removed from a specific ethos present divestment as a necessary step toward a more inclusive society, that tiny movement on school divestment suggests that many Irish parents do not agree. Mr. Hynes-Cendrzak notes that in school-change processes, “the parents who actively want change are often the most vocal and often the most engaged.” But as the process moves along, the perspectives of more parents have to be accounted for. Granting that there are “lots of different motivations for it,” he thinks most people are simply comfortable with the status quo.

Dr. Carroll explains, “Academically, Irish schools are very strong. We have some of the highest figures in the world in terms of literacy and numeracy.”

That quality of education has been consistent across generations. When contemporary Irish parents choose to send their children to a Catholic school, their decision is not typically because of “faith formation or some kind of sacramental reasons,” Dr. Carroll says, but because of tradition, in the richer sense of the word. They have experienced Catholic education and know it has good outcomes, so a multidenominational approach to education “doesn’t feature highly on their radar.”

State funded, religiously run

Understanding how ecclesial influence could play such a big role in Irish education requires some historical background. When the British authorities first envisioned an education system on the island, they proposed what they described as a nondenominational approach. But as Mr. Hynes-Cendrzak points out, “there was still a certain amount of religious worship and Scripture reading” intended to promote the established religion of Anglicanism.

“This was [not] to the taste of [Ireland’s] Catholics nor Methodists and Presbyterians,” who also suffered under Ireland’s infamous Penal Laws. The denominational school system thus arose as an expression of religious freedom and as a form of resistance against an educational system that many feared was focused on “turning Irish boys and girls into loyal British subjects.”

The resulting compromise—a state-funded system under private religious management—became a bedrock commitment of the newly independent Irish Free State in 1922. In the decades that followed, the state did not have the resources to run an education system without the support of the churches, which provided the land, the local management and often the labor at Irish schools.

This deep entanglement has created a tension in contemporary Ireland. The church may see schools as a site for faith formation, but the state, which pays the bills, sees them as a community resource dedicated to the acquisition of learning and skills among Irish schoolchildren. The old relationship has shown signs of wear in recent years. Since 2018, for example, Catholic schools can no longer prioritize the enrollment of new students who have been baptized Catholic.

Dr. Carroll says it is ironic that the activists who want to remove the “oppressive” force of the church from Irish education were formed by that very same education.

This is, he feels, “a damning indictment on our system from a Catholic perspective.” Even after “14 years of Catholic education,” he points out that many people in Ireland “have very little religious literacy” and low rates of sacramental participation.

This erosion of religious literacy highlights a central paradox in this discussion. As Sean McGraw and Jonathan Tiernan argue in their recent book The Politics of Irish Primary Education, the slow pace of education reform in Ireland is not due to resistance from the bishops but a lack of what they call political “tipping points.”

Mr. Hynes-Cendrzak suspects that many activists and indeed politicians would be pleased if the Catholic hierarchy would “just get on with forcing schools to divest.” But aside from the fact that an ecclesial edict for divestment would fall far short of their own synodal standards, it would not work.

According to the Irish Constitution, parents are the primary educators of their children. Their opinion on divestment is the decisive one, not that of the bishops. A large-scale change in school affiliation will remain only a theoretical possibility as long as parents remain wedded to the status quo.

The results of the government’s survey of parents suggest that different parts of Ireland hold different positions. In the wealthier suburbs of Dublin and Wicklow, support for multi-denominational schooling is high. But along the rugged coastline in Donegal on the north of the island or in the farmland of Longford in the midlands, support for religious ethos in schools remains rock-solid, often exceeding 70 percent. In these communities, the Catholic school is not just a place to learn to read and write and do some sums, it is a hub for the community more important than the library, local pub or Gaelic Athletic Association club.

Mr. Hynes-Cendrzak, representing the bishops, wants to see the divestment process accelerate, but he believes that will require a much stronger political commitment from the Irish government. The state wants every divestment process to be “cost neutral,” he explains, but few communities can independently fund a process that should be guided by skilled mediators, who are likely to deliver the best outcomes.

“We need to start looking at clusters of schools,” he says—that is, considering schools regionally as well as individually so that you don’t end up in a situation where ethos change is forced through or denied because of a slim majority.

Additionally, there needs to be a reckoning with the fact that there will be considerable costs. The churches own the buildings and the land they are on and are restricted under Irish civil law—the Charity Act—from disposing of properties below its commercial value. Such implications are not sufficiently appreciated by the wider population, Mr. Hynes-Cendrzak says.

Still, the vision that motivates the church to pursue divestment is constructive. Leaving behind a situation where the church serves as the default provider of education for a population that is largely Catholic in name only opens up the possibility of parents being able to choose a Catholic education. As Dr. Carroll sees it, “you can have quality or quantity.”

If the future of Irish education means fewer church schools, there is the hope that those which persist will be “even more intentionally Catholic.”

Kevin Hargaden is a theologian with the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice in Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age, published by Wipf and Stock.