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“Today, now that changes in educational science are particularly rapid, it is indispensable periodically to review the original vocation of Catholic teaching in the country and its modes of response”, declares the archbishop of Marseilles, Cardinal Bernard Panafieu, proposing, ten years after the approval of the statutes currently in force for Catholic teaching in France, a fundamental reflection on the nature and goals of “an ever more complex educational system”. The review called for by the cardinal should be conducted “in a climate of trust and cooperation”, avoiding any cultivation of suspicion, in the conviction that “Catholic schools should not be rivals of state education, but complementary to it, contributing their own original character founded on the Word of God and on the Christian experience”. In this sense, said the cardinal, the presence of Catholic schools is “an opportunity both for the country and for the Catholic Church”. Cardinal Panafieu does not disguise the imperfections and shortcomings of Catholic schooling, whose “specific character is at times trivialized”, whose social climate is “poisoned” and spiritual climate “obscured”. But what must never be lost is “what constitutes the originality of the formation that it offers and that justifies its existence and its support by numerous families”. “We cannot accept insists the archbishop of Marseilles that Catholic schools should lose their soul; but how can they be called faithful to their origins and their history if they are not a genuine teaching community, if they fail to honour the spiritual dimension of man, if they do not open the eyes of the young to the question of God, and if they do not propose faith in Christ as the meaning of life?”. According to Cardinal Panafieu, further peculiarities of Catholic education ought to be “the attention it pays to the more disadvantaged and the acceptance of children without any discrimination”; in short “it must be rooted in a climate founded on the Beatitudes”. Catholic schools, continued the archbishop of Marseilles, “are familiar with the problems of every Christian institution in the context of a pluralist and secularised society, and are equally affected by the syndrome of fragility that affects the great institutions of our country, in particular state education”. It is a situation that, in the view of Cardinal Panafieu, “requires the courage of the faith, inventive teaching methods, and the force of convictions. It requires, above all, the wish to work together in a climate of trust and serenity”.
