A representative of the catholic church being anti-education? What a shock...
Coming from a long-lapsed, non-church -going fellow who was brought up as a Roman Catholic, and knows the rank-and-file of The Church and its vast mainstream of adherents to be good and decent and loving people...
Re: the Catholic Church being 'anti-education'...
Horseshit...
Most of the knowledge of Antiquity (Rome, Greece, early successor states) - medicine, law, philosophy, religion and morality comes to you courtesy of the Roman Catholic Church in Western Europe...
Most of the law of The West (secularized Christendom) has its roots in the Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church - a hybrid of Roman Law and Salic Law and then evolved beyond those earliest roots to incorporate Church teachings and ethics and morality... even if it's two or three 'hops' from Canon Law to English Common Law to American Law, etc...
All of the religious philosophy and belief-structure and ceremonial utilized by the large number of branches of Protestantism have their basis in (1) Scripture and philosophy preserved by the Roman Catholic Church during the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, or (2) are cloned and tweaked versions of Roman Catholic doctrine and dogma and ceremonial; usually simplified, and sometimes altered almost beyond recognition, unless one knows where to look for such analogies...
The Roman Catholic Church has a far, FAR higher and greater and more ancient commitment to Education than do most other branches of Christianity or other sects or belief-systems.
We see this stretching far back into the mists of time with Monastic Schools which preserved the basics of Learning during Dark Times for European civilization, and which "held the line" or prevented a complete collapse into Illiteracy and a loss of what could be preserved of Antiquity in Western Europe.
We see this blossoming as Monastic Schools began opening their doors to Lay (Secular) Pupils and as the Church helped to found most of the oldest Universities in Western Europe (and a great many right here in the United States and elsewhere outside of Europe).
Hell, the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, is one of the most famous schools in the world, reknowned for its scientists and engineers and architects and lawyers and business graduates. Perhaps you can explain your Education Brickbats to the folks in South Bend.
We see this exploding here in the US and elsewhere over the past couple of centuries with the advent of Catholic elementary schools and Catholic high schools in vast numbers from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific, and from the Canadian border to the Mexican, and well beyond, to the North and the South.
According to a variety of sources, listed in the obligatory Wiki article...
List of Christian denominations by number of members - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
...and related, there are 2.18 billion Christians on the face of the planet, and 1.16 billion of those (53%) are Catholic; most of that Roman, with a few outrider-branches here and there, in close communion, and...
Catholic Church in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
...one out of four people you see on the streets in the US are Roman Catholic; 78.2 million in the US alone; or 1/4 (25%) of the total population.
That is one helluva lot of good, hardworking, tax-paying, honest and patriotic Americans.
There is no escaping the fact that the Roman Catholic Church became a bully and pretty much lost its way as the Dark Ages and Middle Ages unfolded, and, in trying to preserve the knowledge of Antiquity, and trying to hold Europe together for centuries until it could govern itself again, the Roman Catholic Church became more political than religious, and some of its practices and governance, based upon hypocritical and convoluted logic and hunger for power and loss of a sense of original mission...
All those served to cause many of our ancestors to rebel against it - and to break away - even as the Church stupidly dug-in its heels and refused to concede Reality for many generations after those 'revolts'... and even after they insisted upon clinging to outdated and contrived ceremonial and dogma that had little to do with true Fundamental Christianity (and by that, I mean back-to-its-roots, not the political context that the term has taken-on in recent times).
There is also no escaping the fact that there have been a significant number of problems with that organization in recent times - turning a blind eye to the Holocaust in Europe - the Pedo-Problem and cover-ups of recent decades, etc. all of which have damaged the image and trustworthiness and leadership and influence and popularity and membership and confidence in the Catholic Church.
For every dishonest or untrustworthy priest, there are a hundred good ones, and the Church will sort things out once again, I expect, given a few more years.
Not to mention the untold millions of good Christians who subscribe to the Catholic Church as the apostolically-annointed conduit for relaying the message and teachings of The Founders from one generation to the next, across the millennia.
I'm not 'technically' one of them any longer - too much rote ceremonial and not enough true depth-of-soul sometimes, to suit me, but I started out that way, and I 'hail' from those parts (metaphorically speaking), and so do you, quite probably, if you go back a few generations... the difference being that they still hold, for me, far more value and positives than they do negatives - rightly or wrongly.
Meanwhile, next time you start bashing Catholics for holding a position against Education, do a little background reading first...
To avoid getting laughed at...
Again...
