As a Buddhist, I Demand my Right to a Catholic Education!

Tony Blair, recently succeeded by Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and Theos as Religious Crackpot of the Month, thinks that religion is important even if you subscribe to one of the wrong (i.e., not his) ones. This, to me, seems perverse, but apparently there are others who share this slightly obtuse idea. I read about this case earlier today. It’s from the Scarborough Evening News, which fairly obviously I don’t read myself. I saw it via. the National Secular Society’s press feed.

A former nun, whose son was turned away from Scarborough's only faith secondary school, will appeal against the ruling next month.

 

Caroline Brookes... applied for her 10-year-old son Soony, who is a Buddhist, to attend St Augustine's Roman Catholic School... However the local authority told her he will be starting at Raincliffe School..., instead.

... St Augustine's School was heavily oversubscribed this year, with 155 children applying for the 86 places available. Mrs Brookes will appeal against the decision on June 13. She will have to convince an independent panel that St Augustine's School is the right school for her son. Soony currently attends St martin's Church of England School... Mrs Brookes said: "St Augustine's School is the only faith secondary school in this area so it would provide the right environment for Soony. What is the point in having a local faith school if only catholics can attend?"

I’ve stripped out a lot of the pointless paragraph breaks that all news websites seem to insert between every sentence regardless of whether or not they make any sense (presumably to create the illusion of impact and length). I’ve left in the dodgy punctuation and apparently random capitalisation, though. I presume the Scarborough Evening News isn’t a very impressive publication. I also stripped out all the addresses, since I figured you probably don’t know the area. Anyway. I guess the part I can’t get my head around is this quote:

What is the point in having a local faith school if only Catholics can attend?

It’s a Catholic school! Why do you want your non-Catholic son going to a Catholic school? Soony says

At Raincliffe there is nowhere I can sit and pray. At St Augustine's there is a special prayer room, which is really nice. Also all my friends are going to St Augustine's. No-one I know is going to Raincliffe so it would be really hard for me there.

And that’s fair enough, but you know what? Schools aren’t actually shit. If you want to go aside somewhere and pray for a bit I’m sure they’ll find you somewhere – I’m sure there’ll be someone marking somewhere who won’t mind you sitting quietly for a few minutes – and you just can’t avoid making friends at secondary school, unless you spend all your breaks holed up praying, anyway. I can see that it’s better to go where your friends go, and I can see that it’d be ideal to go somewhere with dedicated facilities for prayer (if that’s important to you – which frankly I doubt it is in this case considering the kid would rather drop his religion and become a Catholic than go to the non-faith school). That’s unfortunate, but it’s not news, even locally.

There’s also a clear case to be made that the rule allowing oversubscribed faith-schools to select students based on religion is discriminating against this child unfairly. (Although it seems to have let in the entire output of the local CofE school, which is also not Catholic.) But that’s not what this story is about, at least from the mother’s point of view, because we also have this quote:

This is becoming a nightmare for us. If the appeal does not work then I don't know what we will do. I have thought about home tuition but it is expensive and it will mean he will not be with his friends. We are just praying the appeal will be successful.

What?! So let me get this straight, so I’m not misunderstanding anything: the prospect of your child attending what passes in this country for a secular school is “a nightmare”, for some unspecified reason that either you or the newspaper thought unimportant or self-evident enough to omit, and are theoretically willing to home-school him as an alternative, but what would be okay is for him to go to a school run by a mad cult who think that they can turn wine into blood (which they then drink), run by a bigot in a frock who is held to be automatically right whatever he might choose to say because they have some old paper which says so. And you think this would be okay because they, like you, have faith – albeit in something which flatly contradicts the thing that you have faith in.

How the hell am I supposed to respect religious people when I can’t understand them? And how am I supposed to understand them when they don’t make any sense?