Education for Citizenship leads to totalitarianism, says Spanish Cardinal

Madrid, Spain, Apr 24, 2007 / 09:35 am

The Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Antonio Cañizares, warned this week the government sponsored educational course “Education for Citizenship” “is leading us to totalitarianism” and is “incompatible with the identity of Catholic schools.”

“The course Education for Citizenship is incompatible with the identity of Catholic schools.  A Catholic school would cease to be such if it offered this course,” in the same way that if a public school, if it did the same, “would lose its obligatory ideological neutrality,” the Cardinal said.

He stressed that the purpose of the course material “is not that we be good, but that we behave well,” since “when there is no freedom of conscience, freedom of education, we head towards totalitarianism.  Education for Citizenship is leading us to totalitarianism.”

Regarding religious freedom, Cardinal Cañizares said this right has been “truly been curtailed,” as “at best faith is tolerated only in the private sphere,” and he underscored that Spain is following the same path as the eastern European countries during the era of the Berlin Wall.

In a reference to Spanish President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s initiative called “The Alliance of Civilizations,” which calls for the West to negotiate a truce with Islamic terrorists, Cardinal Cañizares said it was easier to establish “a relationship between Christianity and Islam.”

Both religions, he explained, “acknowledge God as their starting point, while in the Alliance of Civilizations there is complete distrust for religion and God is seen as a source of division and confrontation.”  “The best response to the Alliance of Civilizations is the path laid out by Benedict XVI at Regensburg: the affirmation of the unity between faith and reason.”