School Aid: Catholic Views

If federal school aid does not go to Roman Catholic schools it should not go to any schools at all, the U.S. Catholic hierarchy maintains. Last week a leading Catholic weekly magazine found this view dangerously obstructionist--and a Catholic-college president blandly foresaw that the problem will settle itself when Catholics outnumber other religious groups in the U.S.

> It is "unfortunate," said the lay weekly Commonweal, "that Catholic churchmen should insist this year on casting themselves in the same unhappy role they took in 1961. Emotional descriptions of the President's bill as a threat, a crime,* an attack which means the end of the parochial school system are misleading and exaggerated, and likely to do much harm. Instead of allaying religious antagonisms and misunderstandings, such violent pronouncements will reinforce the image of the church as nothing more than another power bloc [and] delay by years the development of interreligious understanding which would permit the amicable solution of our present problems."

> Jesuit Father John P. Leary, president of Spokane's Gonzaga University, told the American Association of School Administrators that the parochial school problem will be settled "through the strange accident of time and numbers." Though Catholics now constitute only one-sixth of the population, said Leary, "in the last five years, one-third of all the children born in the country were Catholic." As Leary figures it, "in 20 years, when this one-third have grown up, they probably will have half of all the children born. Within half a century, the Catholics will be a majority in this country." Then, says Leary, the Constitution can be amended to permit federal aid to Catholic schools.

*New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman recently called omission of parochial schools from President Kennedy's aid bill "a terrible crime."

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