Posted on 06/20/2013 7:57:47 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Barack Obama actually made this claim at a speech in Belfast on Monday, but it seems to be gaining traction overnight. His claim, aimed at both Catholic and Protestant “schools and buildings,” came in prepared remarks rather than an extemporaneous response to a question. The Scottish Catholic Observer quotes the argument accurately:
The US President has made an alarming call for an end to Catholic education in Northern Ireland in spite of the fact that Archbishop Gerhard Müller told Scots that Catholic education was ‘a critical component of the Church.’
President Barack Obama (above), repeated the oft disproved claim that Catholic education increases division in front of an audience of 2000 young people, including many Catholics, at Belfast’s Waterfront hall when he arrived in the country this morning.
“If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden—that too encourages division and discourages cooperation,” the US president said.
The US politician made the unfounded claim despite a top Vatican official spelling out the undeniable good done by Catholic education in a speech in Glasgow on Saturday and in his homily at Mass on Friday.
I’ll quote the passage in its full context:
We need you to get this right. And what’s more, you set an example for those who seek a peace of their own. Because beyond these shores, right now, in scattered corners of the world, there are people living in the grip of conflict — ethnic conflict, religious conflict, tribal conflicts — and they know something better is out there. And they’re groping to find a way to discover how to move beyond the heavy hand of history, to put aside the violence. They’re studying what you’re doing. And they’re wondering, perhaps if Northern Ireland can achieve peace, we can, too. You’re their blueprint to follow. You’re their proof of what is possible — because hope is contagious. They’re watching to see what you do next.
Now, some of that is up to your leaders. As someone who knows firsthand how politics can encourage division and discourage cooperation, I admire the Northern Ireland Executive and the Northern Ireland Assembly all the more for making power-sharing work. That’s not easy to do. It requires compromise, and it requires absorbing some pain from your own side. I applaud them for taking responsibility for law enforcement and for justice, and I commend their effort to “Building a United Community” — important next steps along your transformational journey.
Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity — symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others — these are not tangential to peace; they’re essential to it. If towns remain divided — if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs — if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.
Ultimately, peace is just not about politics. It’s about attitudes; about a sense of empathy; about breaking down the divisions that we create for ourselves in our own minds and our own hearts that don’t exist in any objective reality, but that we carry with us generation after generation.
Does that make the context any better? Er … not really. He’s speaking in terms of Northern Ireland, but pretty explicitly calling for that to be a model for the rest of the world. His argument makes two very large assumptions, which is that the conflict in Northern Ireland was about religion, and that parochial schools make people inclined to violence. The first is a gross oversimplification; the conflict in recent times was political, dealing with ethnic conflict and sovereignty issues, with religion used more for tribal identification than a core of the conflict.
The second is just absurd. Catholics and Protestants have thousands of schools in the US, and we don’t have warfare in the streets in the US between the sects. The issue wasn’t the schools, nor the belief systems of Catholics and Protestants that such schools teach. However, this makes a handy mechanism to call for the displacement of private education and religious instruction from education, with nothing left except state-controlled schools that indoctrinate children into whatever norms the governing/ruling class deem acceptable.
My friend Father Z wonders whether Obama will make this call truly consistent:
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a foreign visit to a Islamic nation where he told people on his arrival that they shouldn’t have madrasas. Can you?
Did he when visiting, say, Israel, say “You Jews shouldn’t have synagogue schools and you muslims shouldn’t have mosque schools.” I can’t remember. Did he?
I’d guess … no.
Update: The comments came in a speech on Monday, not on Friday. I’ve fixed it above; thanks to Joel Pollak at Breitbart for the heads-up.
Spoken by the most divisive person in US history. Next it will be homeschooling.
From ages six to ten, Obama attended local Indonesian-language schools: St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School for two years and Besuki Public School for one and a half years, supplemented by English-language Calvert School homeschooling by his mother.
Barack Obama is just nuts.
RE: Next it will be homeschooling.
Actually homeschooling is being attacked NOW even as we speak.
A German family who applied for asylum successfully initially, in order to escape their country’s secular educational system ( which PROHIBITS homeschooling ) is being targetted for DEPORTATION by the Justice Department.
This family who lives in Tennessee ARE SELF-SUFFICIENT, and DO NOT RECEIVE ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE. All they want is to be able to LIVE FREE to home school their children.
Yet, Obama’s DOJ wants to deport them back to Germany.
See here:
The more that any patriotic American’s hear that RAT bastard commie muzlim pig 0bama, the more despicable he becomes. He is a personifcation of pure evil, and is of his father, the Devil & father of all lies!
Historically, that has been true in Northern Ireland - Catholics/republicans and Protestants/loyalists have been deeply, deeply segregated (in schools, neighborhoods, etc.), and have both "stay[ed] all cloistered in their schools" without integrating with others.
Obama has no business sticking his nose into this issue, but a lot of people who are commenting on this story seem to be looking at it from an American perspective, and don't realize the context and role of schools and other institutions in Northern Ireland.
Obviously a bunch of “extremists”.
The only ones that encourage “division” are the Muslim schools.
Catholics from Catholic schools were a mainstay of the US armed forces for generations, and were certainly not into separatism. There’s only one group that does that.
A true story with about a dozen witnesses was told to me this past week at a funeral. A class trip was taken to the White House a year ago and Obama was meeting with kids 11 and 12 years old. Apparently with teachers and parents out of the room...Obama was doing nothing but faith bashing and literally telling the kids that following an organized religion or faith is going to vanish in this country and that he needed their help in changing the future and the landscape forever without religion involved at all in this nation.
Let me tell you...the people who shared this story with me are teachers at a Blue Ribbon Catholic school...known them my entire life...had no reason to tell this story to me out of the blue other than the fact that we hadn’t physically seen each other in quite some time and the topic had switched to politics.
Obama is a lunatic who walks in the steps of Marx, Mao, and Hitler. THAT IS A FACT.
Typical. Just like he went after the Church with the HHS mandate.
Marxists always understand that their only real global enemy is the Catholic Church. The Church is the only institution that can refute and resist their anti-gospel. So Marxists always go after the Catholics.
http://catholicschoolstandards.org/common-core-catholic-identity-initiative
Because democrats do what republicans haven’t got the guts to do.
Infiltrate and take over a government, an agency, a committee, a school, a church.
Didn’t little Barry Soetoro attend some kind of Muzzie school in Indonesia?
The President goes to another country and lectures them on their ways of educating their children...what a jerk!
Hey Barky...keep your yap shut.
Don’t his kids go to a Quaker school?
He attended a Christian school that required Muslim-born kids to take lessons on Islam.
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