A slogan which features prominently on the current Church’s recruitment posters and marketing collateral!
My daughter attends a private Catholic school. She’s a sophomore. Each quarter she is assigned a project for her religion class. The second quarter’s project was a research paper that compared Intelligent Design from three different perspectives (religious, scientific and philosophical? (forget the third)).
So yes, she’s being exposed to Intelligent Design as a concept. But she’s being asked to explore the idea, not embrace it.
There are very few public schools that I know of that embrace religion as a field of study, undoubtedly because it’s such a hotbed. But when my daughter finishes school, she will have a much clearer understanding of not only her own religion, but other religions as well. In my opinion, that’s a good thing.
The Catholic Church - refreshingly thumb-screw free since the seventeenth century!
The Catholic Church - Ask us about our “no more forced confessions” policy.
The Catholic Church - “Inquisition? What inquisition?”
I recently learned that Chuck Norris is an ardent Huckabee supporter. He doesn’t seem so tough anymore. I think that maybe the older these guys get and the closer to their own mortality they start to think they may need to do something to secure their afterlife. Sometimes that something is going batshit crazy.
I’m happy to see the comments about Catholic schools teaching evolution. I was starting to think the schools I went to were unique because I was talking with a co-worker yesterday and she said she wasn’t taught evolution in Catholic school. Not only were we taught evolution but I remember a comparative religion class where we learned about other religions.
By the way this was many, many years ago when I was in grade school/high school.
“Not your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s Catholic Church!”
“88,695 days without a burnt heretic.”
They don’t teach Creationism. When I went to Catholic High School, the introductory lecture on the unit on evolution started with, “Many Christians feel that the Theory of Evolution contradicts the Bible. The Church believes that evolution was the method God used to create man in His own image.”
Theistic evolution is not exactly the same as ID. ID is a belief in specific instances of divine intervention in the process. Theist evloutionary models like that taught by the RCC only say that God is behind evolution but only in the sense of getting the ball rolling. It still accepts Natural Selection, which ID proponents do not. The RCC also insists on a doctrine that the human soul is specially created and unevolved, but that’s an unfalsifiable statement of faith which contradicts nothing about biology.
The Nuns where myself and the bros studied and where The Nephew(s) will go has students from half a dozen different religions. So do the public schools.
On art trips, the students from the Nuns go into the Cathedral and see the parts of it that used to be the Sinagogue and the Mosque (so tradition says, some archaeologists are saying those were “just meeting rooms for Jews and Muslims” whatever that means). The students from the public schools aren’t; apparently someone has decided that pointing out Catholic, Jewish and Muslim art may offend the Hindus, Orthodox and Buddhist. When Mom was told this she asked the teacher who told her “ok, what about the Atheist kids?” The teacher said “uh? Why would a 6 year old be an Atheist?” Mom doesn’t know, but then, she doesn’t think a Spanish 6yo born of Chinese parents will be offended by the vision of Catholic saints, their dollar stores are full of them 
Trying to teach Art and History of Europe without any mention to the religious background, as the public schools here in Spain are trying to do, doesn’t seem to work very well. Maybe it’s possible to do it in the country of “In God We Trust.”
As my ex explained it to me (she has a 14-year-old neice in Dover, PA), all of the arguments boiled down the principle that it was a reasonable theory that evolution must have been guided by God.
I’m a strong personal advocate of the separation of church and state, but even I think it’s neither possible nor desirable to do that. Western art and literature is so incredibly intertwined with Christian religious themes that it would basically gut any study of either discipline to try to forbid the teaching of those themes as they relate to the art or literature in question. You’d have to cut Shakespeare and Milton from the curriculum. You’d have to cut medieval and Renaissance art almost entirely. The art history of the western world would be a skeleton, with parts cut out left and right.
As long as the teaching of the religious background is done as history to contextualize what the students are seeing and reading, rather than being taught as religious instruction, everything’s fine as far as I’m concerned.
This whole thing is stupid, yes, and a little insulting, but is it your position that Christian persecution does not exist?
Well, I have documented Christian persecution on thses board, before.
There is the nice Christian lady and her family in Tennessee who have been publicly maligned and subjected to harrassment and vandalism for asking that the public schools stop reciting prayers in the classroom. So I certainly see signs that Christians are persecuting people in this country, today. Christians being persecuted–other than by other Christians–not so much.
I suggest it exists in the same sense as the persecution faced by the guy trying to get 15 items through the “Ten Items or less” aisle.
Anyway, isn’t “mandatory” like “pregnant” ?
Shit. Well, based on some of the responses in this thread, I wouldn’t downplay that level of persecution. 
Certainly not in the US. Is it your position that it DOES exist? Who’s doing the pesrecuting? The US is something like 80% Christian. The vast majority of people in both political and economic power are Christians. Who’s doing all this oppressing?
You don’t think that universities requiring science professors to teach science is “persecution,” do you?
Are you talking about Christian persecution in the US, or Christian persecution worldwide? Because, no, Christian persecution in the US does not exist in any meaningful way. There may be an individual family here or there who may be getting harrassed by neighbors, but the neighbors are more than likely to be Christian themselves, of a different denomination which considers the harrassed family’s denomination to be wrong or evil. And of course, you’d actually have to consider the Phelpses to be Christian in the first place to consider any actions against them, either official or unofficial, to be Christian persecution.
But when 90% of all elected politicians are Christian, and a like proportion of the population at large, I can’t seriously consider the existence of some sort of institutional or widespread persecution against Christians in this country to be a serious possibility.
Now in other parts of the world, yes. I can’t deny that places like China and Saudi Arabia Christians are persecute and harrassed. But that’s not what we’re talking about here, is it?
Granted (and I never thought they did). I know nothing about private Catholic schools and I do have less of a problem with them if they aren’t being funded by the government. My best friend teaches at a Catholic school and he’s a very smart man. I know that his school is one of the top schools in the area but I can’t honestly believe that religion influences absolutely nothing that goes on in the classroom.
Definitely and we should thank them for their contribution to education. You have to remember that I’m from a province where the catholic schools aren’t private, they’re public. That’s really more what I have a problem with.
If the catholic church wants to use their own money to provide a top quality education, more power to them as long as it’s their money, what they teach is reasonably standard, and they leave their beliefs outside of the classroom.
I haven’t seen Expelled but I imagine that it does it’s best to show that Intelligent Design has some legitimacy. That is a religious idea and I guess I just think that if you’ve sent your kid to a school run by a religious group, you haven’t any right to complain if they send your kid to see this movie. If no Catholic schools take students to see this movie, great, and I’ll have great respect for them for not doing so.
I don’t want to deviate too far from the original topic, but philosophically I have a problem with private schools. Everyone should have the right to a top quality education no matter what their economically background is and vouchers shouldn’t be a part of it.
With that said, i won’t lie to you. When I have kids, I’ll make sure they have the best education money can buy but I’ll always wish that it would be public education. I know it’s hypocritical, but I won’t take my own beliefs out on my kids.
And then there’s Canada’s Constitution, which does have such a clause but has another specifically overriding that clause to permit(or is it mandate – I can’t remember) the establishment of public Catholic schools.
As a data point, I went to an Episcopal school. We were taught about evolution, no question. My nieces are attending the same school right now. The older is in 5th grade. I have no reason to believe things have changed in the less than ten years since I’ve graduated.