Enough Intelligence?

In the present Congress, all concrete proposals for federal aid to education have run aground on the muddy side issue of parochial schools. Last week's convention of the American Council on Education heard a formula for clearing the channel. Said Dean Harold Benjamin of the University of Maryland, a backer of federal aid:

"We will have to develop enough intelligence as Catholics to recognize that the United States is a great Protestant country, not only in formal church membership but in some of the basic traditions of more than one hundred millions of its people. A clerical-religious approach to the question of public education which may be suitable to a fine little green and very Catholic country of three million people, to which many of our greatest clerics are tied by kinship, is not always appropriate in the United States.

"We will have to develop enough intelligence as Protestants to recognize that the United States is a great Catholic country, the greatest Roman Catholic country in the world, both in terms of numbers of the church's communicants and in the political and economic power it wields. A blindness to the great liberal resources of Catholicism and a rigid and uncompromising adherence to doctrinaire notions of the 'separation' of church and state, which may have been suitable to American conditions in the days of Horace Mann, are not always appropriate to the United States in 1950."

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