Catholic Arena

As Catholic Schools Week begins, George Galloway was given a surprisingly positive response for the following tweet:

For George and for countless others around the world, Catholic education represents freedom from the current madness of gender theory, Globalism and postmodernism.

But in Ireland, this has become the opposite, Irish Catholic schools are now perhaps more toxic for the presence of these than their non Catholic counterparts. We are generally not allowed to talk about this because many in the church are trying to maintain possession of Catholic schools as a lazy way of keeping a public presence in Irish society, but ultimately some of them are being permitted to doing incredible harm to the Catholic faith in Ireland by promoting (not just tolerating) gender ideology, LGBT activism and even abortion.

Paradoxically, it is very uncommon to see Rainbow Flags outside of schools run by the Multi Denominational Education Training Board schools, even less common to see them outside Non Denominational Educate Together schools. Yet is is becoming unusual at this point to NOT see them outside Catholic schools in Ireland.

In one school, a member of the ruling Fine Gael party, the party who introduced abortion to Ireland and even shut down the Vatican Embassy at one point, arrived and lowered the Irish flag, replacing it with a Rainbow one. She was then photographed close to a statue of the Virgin Mary as she told the Catholic schoolchildren of her sexuality (she is a lesbian) on behalf of the ruling Fine Gael party’s plan for the deCatholicisation of Ireland.

Walsh also visited a more famous school, Belvedere College in Dublin. During their ‘Stand Up Week’, the students at the Jesuit School not only had the government representative arrive to raise its Rainbow Flag, but they were treated to a talk via Skype by Fr. James Martin SJ on his support for the LGBT ideology. Fr. Martin has recently supported anti Catholic LGBT activists in Poland after they faced trial for defacing Our Lady and orchestrating attacks on churches.

Who is in charge here, the state and their sexual policies, or the church and her teachings? The Catholic schools will argue that this is about avoiding bullying, but that is not how the NGOs pushing these events see it.

Another Catholic school recently invited Hollywood star Saoirse Ronan to speak at their school, where she was asked by the children ‘What are the issues facing Irish women and girls now?’ to which her answer was ‘‘One thing that has helped me as a woman has been the Repeal of the Eighth. I feel like it opened the door. A lot of the things we felt and talked about in private, we are able to do in the open now.” Like what, aborting a baby?

More absurdly, one Catholic school in Cork decided that their children needed to spend some time observing an exhibition on Drag Queens for some reason. It’s an insult to our intelligence to try to pass this off as Catholic education, you could get this sort of learning in any alley way in a big city.

Many of the schools touting these Rainbow Flags come under the the patronage of the Le Cheile Trust, who have amalgamated the trusteeship of many religious orders such as Loreto and Dominicans amongst others.

A few months ago, we asked Le Cheile for an explanation as to why alternative sexual lifestyles seemed to have a more prominent public part of their schools than Catholicism did. We quoted Pope Pius XII’s quote that the purpose of Catholic education is ‘The object of Catholic education is the formation of the perfect Christian’. Our motivation was not to taunt them, but to draw attention to the fact that they were promoting an overtly state promoted symbol (the rainbow flag) on the same week that it was announced that Catholic symbols were being phased out from State schools. Instead of responding to us initially, Le Cheile ‘liked’ a tweet that was mocking us in reply to our sincere question, ‘You obviously need glasses. There are countless Catholic schools in Ireland that have rainbow flags AND Irish flags’. When we pointed out that this was a childish reaction, Le Cheile did respond, pointing us to the 1986 Document on Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons.

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