Every Christian child has a right to a Christian education. The Popes for the past two centuries have reiterated this truth countless times. Why particularly since about 1820? Because it is only since about then that the State, first in Europe, a little later in America, has arrogated to itself the task of schooling – non-Christian schooling, of course.

A Christian education, as described by the modern Popes, does not resemble the education that the vast majority of Christian children in North Dakota receive. And for Catholic children, an hour of CCD each week is not even a faint wisp of what the Church means by a Christian education.

Moreover, over the past few decades, the public schools have gradually taken control of every evening of the week. If you suggest that children might be present at Stations of the Cross on a Friday in Lent, or at Benediction on a Thursday, or a choir practice on a Tuesday, people laugh out loud. And the schools do not reliably respect even Wednesday evening – so-called "Church night."

The fact is that, without doing anything so dramatic as marching the children off to concentration camps, government (with the collaboration of their parents) has succeeded in separating Catholic children from the Church's heritage of chant and other sacred music, from parish-based entertainment and sports, from the time and opportunity necessary for really learning and pondering Catholic dogma, from possible charitable activity in the parish, and the Church's tradition of devotions.

For all but the small minority of children attending Catholic school, Catholic culture has become an anemic shadow of itself. Catholic culture for the majority is Mass on Sunday – period.

My own Parish Council has recommended having Mass at seven a.m. (seven a.m.!) on Holy Days of Obligation because it is taken for granted that no child would dare to be tardy for school. It is also taken for granted that children simply are not free to attend Mass on any weeknight. And indeed it is true: Even children who are reliably present at Sunday Mass are a rare sight at Mass even on Holydays of Obligation.

Considering that a Christian child has a right to a Christian education, it is a grave injustice that the State forces Christians to pay for something different, something useless to them. If a grocery store obtained the power to tax, and was forcing all citizens to pay for food they could not eat, food that was ruinous to their health or merely not to their taste, everyone would recognize that as an injustice. Yet in hundreds of towns in North Dakota, a business does exist that is coercively financed through taxes. And this business offers only one product, a product that is less than useless to Christians – a non-Christian education.

This system of injustice – coercively-financed godless schooling – is mandated in the North Dakota Constitution and in the Century Code. Therefore, ending this injustice will take some effort and some years.

In the meantime, parents have the duty to take some steps immediately. Most urgently, Catholic parents have the obligation to make sure that their children are not taught information about sex in a secular situation. Sex education that is not Christian can never be anything but pornography. And below a certain age, when a child is in the Latency Period, sex information can never be anything but mental rape, virtual child molestation. This is not an optional matter for Christian parents. They are strictly obliged to keep their children away from non-Christian sex information imparted in government sex programs.

Another duty that parents can fulfill without waiting for changes in the law is to be vigilant regarding the State's takeover of their children's time. Have you allowed your child to become an inmate of a State institution six nights a week as well as five days a week? Is your child in sports to have fun and to make him strong and healthy, or is he being exploited and even injured as an unpaid worker so that other citizens can have budget-priced spectator sports?

And even though ending government's entanglement with schooling will take years, Catholics should, in the meantime, vote again and again against any taxes destined for government schools, and against any spending or borrowing on behalf of government schools. In this way, the tax burden might at least be lightened, and at least some parents will be enabled for the first time to afford a Christian education for their children.

Catholics here in North Dakota are very far from taking their children's right to a Catholic education seriously. But an injustice does not cease to be an injustice merely because the victims do not care.

It is time for Catholics to perceive this situation of injustice for what it is, to perceive it as a mortal threat to the survival of the Church in North Dakota and, infinitely more important, their children's eternal life. It is time to tell government to let the children go.

August 25, 2001

Fr. Vincent Fitzpatrick is a priest of the Diocese of Fargo, in North Dakota.