Lay Trusteeship and a vision of the future of Irish Catholic Education:
A Response to David Tuohy, SJ

Peter Archer and Teresa McCormack

Issue 361, vol.91, Spring 2002

The other prong (dealt with in The Trusteeship of Catholic Voluntary Schools: A Handbook... [CORI, l996], and in The Future Of Trusteeship: A Review Of Some Options For the Way Forward [CORI, 1997]) should not be over-looked: this lays the emphasis on Gospel values - as being a “significant source of influence”, and as being encapsulated in the religious and educational philosophy of each Congregation. (These sources were not unreferenced in the CORI reflection paper on which Fr. Tuohy bases so many of his observations).

Always coming first in the genesis of a Congregation’s schools was the founding intention, based on a particular religious and educational philosophy, and embodied in a school ethos. There followed the effort to formulate the ethos in objectives and goals. Recognising that they may shortly be unable to supply full trusteeship, Congregations have now moved to proactively promoting those objectives and goals with their partners in the school venture (staff, parents, students, wider community). In this dialogue, practical mechanisms are being sought which will give concrete expression to the schools’ values (mechanisms for planning and development, for support and training, for communication and evaluation). Far from side-stepping such a process, CORI has gone on record as saying that the present mode of trusteeship must be exercised by Congregations in such a way that its operation succeeds in modelling what trusteeship will look like when actually transferred to others.

And the issuing of the Handbook has not proved ineffectual. Several Congregations have made us of it in trying to balance legal/financial issues with ethos issues. Documentation emanating from the Department of Education and Science appears to draw heavily on the Handbook’s guidelines for “school development planning”.

The CORI documents have certainly shown some lack of “analysis of the faith dimension of schools , or a sense of evangelisation and relationship with a personal God”. But such analysis, as the Handbook foreword acknowledged, required further consultation - and CORI members meanwhile have funded a substantial research project on the role of religious education and school catechesis in forming attitudes, beliefs and values.

With regard to the charge that the Congregations played a complicit role “in the subversion of the ideals the founders embraced”, CORI itself has not tried to evade this issue; indeed, CORI’s documentation records an admission that the schools had soon become “some of the principal agents of socialisation into the values and outlook of a new establishment”. But CORI’s focus now is the future.

The CORI respondents can find no perceived difference between their theology of the-Spirit-in-the-world, and Fr. Tuohy’s. And at the level of giving “practical expression in the educational experience” of Irish people to their alternative Gospel vision, the CORI Congregations have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the search for “specific proposals for moving from reality to vision”.

Peter Archer is a Research Fellow at the Educational Research Centre, St. Patrick’s College, Dublin, 9. He previously worked with the Education Office of CORI.

Sr. Teresa McCormack is the Director of the CORI Education Office.

The two authors express their personal views in this article.