On Tuesday of last week, a great deal of noise was made in the British press about a Catholic school introuble. For all the coverage, one would expect a clergyman to have been involved – but no.
In fact, the story relates to a Catholic school torn between its desire to continue to share its faith and its avowed mission to aid children in the community. Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Primary, under the Salford Diocese, has announced it uncertainty as to whether, in the face of dramatic demographic changes, it can continue to adequately serve the children of its community.
As the Independent reported, the primary school’s student body of about 200 was 91% Catholic ten years ago. Today, only about 3% still are, and the overwhelming majority are now Islamic. And, although nothing has been finally agreed, the major candidate to take over the school is a local mosque.
The Masjid-e-Tauheedul Islam mosque in Blackburn already runs one of the top ranked private schools in the area, a girls’ secondary school. And, as the director of that school said of Sacred Heart Primary, ‘Given that most of the pupils are Muslim it makes sense for us to engage with the school.’ He was quoted in this piece in the Daily Telegraph, along with the Salford Diocese’s Director of Education, Geraldine Bradbury. Ms. Bradbury said that the diocese ‘would not be serving the local community by insisting that [it] run the school.’ She added that, ‘It would be very wrong of us to insist on putting a school community through that.’
Ultimately, the diocese faces a difficult decision: Does it insist on its religious foundation, even though it is not shared by about 97% of the school’s students? Or does it reduce the number of Catholic schools in the UK even further?
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