Prior Park College recently took the difficult decision to change its faith designation. We were a Catholic school for nearly 200 years and are now a Christian School in the Catholic Tradition. Part of the rationale for this move was that it was increasingly hard for our school to reconcile the Catholic Church’s teaching on social issues with our need to be an inclusive, welcoming, and, most of all, a safe place for all our young people.
UK schools now have a far greater emphasis on safeguarding than ever before. Every person working with children and young people has to read the government’s statutory guidance on keeping children safe in education. Safeguarding is not an optional extra. It is integral to how all schools should function. Schools today must support the needs of their young people, protecting them from maltreatment, and ensuring that their mental health does not suffer.
One area which was certainly a consideration in our altering our faith designation was the Catholic Church’s teaching on the issues of homosexuality. The position of the Church here is undoubtedly conflicted. On the one hand, the Church’s Catechism is clear that homosexuals live “contrary to the natural law’, are “intrinsically disordered” and engage in “acts of grave depravity’.
On the other, sits the language and attitudes of Pope Francis, who famously asked the question ‘Who am I to judge?’ in relation to homosexuality, and made it clear that laws which criminalise homosexuality are ‘unjust’. These contradictions and conflicts at the upper echelons of Church teaching and Church hierarchy are reflected in the lived experience of young people in Catholic schools today.
At Prior Park, we have benefitted from the pastoral care and support of some outstanding members of the clergy. Priests who have focused their teachings and homilies on the centrality of love to the Catholic Church. People of towering faith who met all our young people where they are and who never judged them. Taking the words of Pope Francis and putting them into practice. Showing young people the care and mercy that exist at the very centre of Christ’s life and his teachings. These priests have done so much to help young people to faith and to bring Christ into their lives.
Equally, in the history of this school we have suffered from those whom have not acted with openness and love. I have heard from many gay alumni who have been scarred by their time at this school. People who have fallen away from their faith because they were not made to feel welcome by people at this school and in our Church. That makes me incredibly sad and not a little angry.
Two years ago, we held a Day of Reconciliation for members of our community who suffered at the hands of those who should have been keeping them safe. Not all the accounts of suffering on that day were from fifty years ago, some were more recent.
Schools today are safer places than they were, and all schools should now understand that the most important role they have is in safeguarding young people. It can be easy then to think that the points of view of some working in Catholic education which have alienated and hurt young people are a long time in the past. They are not.
In the past year, at Prior Park, we have been told that young people discussing the Pride Movement should not be allowed in our school. We have been told that to allow young people to talk and write about such movements should be banned in our school. We have been told to censor them. Pope Francis has referred to an expression from St Ambrose’s De Abraham, “When it comes to bestowing grace, Christ is present; when it comes to exercising rigour, only the ministers of the Church are present, but Christ is absent.” This approach has characterised much of our experience.
At the more extreme end, such “rigour” has included accusations of our “capitulation on all principles”, “tolerance of sin” and “promoting the sodomy agenda”. There are those within the Church today who take issue with how our modern school tries to meet its young people where they are.
Pope Francis has made it clear that he believes that being homosexual is not a crime and should not be treated as such. However, it is a sin, and nothing he has decreed has altered this “truth” in Church teaching. Catholic schools can and do address the concept of sin. Original sin is a part of Church teaching, and something which every student studying Catholicism will understand. That everyone is redeemed from original sin by Christ’s death and resurrection is equally well understood.
What is harder for young people to understand is the idea that the sexual identity of some is more sinful than that of others. The Church teaches that homosexuals must be accepted with “respect, compassion and sensitivity”, but that they are “called to chastity” in a way no straight person is because their “inclination” is a “trial”. To have different expectations of people’s behaviour because of their sexual identity is not inclusive, it is not fair, and it is not a safe message for schools to espouse. Such a position does not serve the safety of the young people that today’s schools have a statutory duty to protect.
Sexuality for today’s young people is not seen as a trial. Sexuality for today’s young people is something to be proudly celebrated and not merely tolerated. There will be some who decry this shift as a sign of a loss of innocence. I sympathise with this point of view and certainly wish young people stayed younger for longer.
However, an exploration of sexual identity has, in truth, always been part of the teenage experience. Young people today need support and love. It is hard for UK Catholic schools to show that love when the Church’s Catechism is discriminatory, whilst simultaneously and hypocritically calling for “unjust discrimination” to be avoided.
To keep young people safe, schools may occasionally have to judge and then sanction a young person for something they have done. To keep all young people safe though, no school should ever sanction or judge any young person for who they are. The demands of the secular, governmental, approach to keeping young people safe are now more inclusive, and so arguably, more Christian, than the current approach of the Catholic Church.
Ben Horan is Headmaster of Prior Park College
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User comments (2)
The letters of Mrs Oakley and Mr Hartley are surprisingly narrow-minded and intolerant.
The vast majority of parishes in Britain cater for the modern Roman rite and not the old Roman rite. That is a simple, statistical fact.
To think that a couple of parishes, here and there, taking on an old rite mass - not as the main Sunday mass but at odd hours or in the evening - is somehow a conspiratorial "Tridentinist takeover", is bordering upon the paranoid.
But to liken this to where "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" and undermines the parish as a "home" and evidences an incumbent who will not "travel together" with his people and "share the same set of values", begins to savour of the pathological.
It reeks of intolerance. It also overlooks the possibility that the priest might actually be seeking to include in his group of Christians "who travel together and share the same set of values", those with differing, but perfectly permissible, liturgical tastes.
Do the new intolerant Catholics think the other 21 rites of the Catholic Church, from Byzantine to Ge'ez, should also be banished simply because they don't like them?
Do they think the liturgically "different" should be treated as blacks were treated in Apartheid South Africa?
Perhaps they think they should be treated like unwanted immigrants and refused entry into the new, narrow-minded little country of liturgical Apartheid?
For goodness' sake, grow up!
It sad that this sort of thing is happening all over the place. We are the body of the Church. A priest who lords it over his parish,alienates his congregation and sets the clock back is not a good shepherd but a closed-minded tyrant.