State Financing for Catholic Schools

The Acton Institute's Rome office put on a good conference recently on state financing for Catholic schools (and did an excellent job, I must add, providing hospitality for speakers).  The issue is heating up again in Italy.  Both Acton's own Dr. Sam Gregg and I gave papers emphasizing the complexity of the question and the fact that seeking state funding has the downside of inviting increased regulatory strings, a perspective perhaps more typical in American than European Catholic circles.  Zenit reported on the conference and on Sam's paper:

[W]hat needs to be done to secure permissible state financing for Catholic schools while helping such institutions remain faithful to the magisterium? Gregg believes the whole issue needs to be rethought in ways consistent with magisterial teaching. He then presented two possible options. One would be for Catholic schools to opt out of public funding altogether. He believes that would show how much some schools are reliant on such funding rather than faithful support of other groups. It would also reduce bureaucracy and re-engage the laity on how to best educate their children.

A second option would be to shift from direct subsidies to a policy of tax breaks, whereby Catholic parents could nominate a particular school they would like their taxes to go to. That, argued Gregg, would create "major incentives" to educators to pay more attention to parental wishes rather than "the whims of state officials and politicians pushing politically correct agendas."

I presented my own position, which is that the increased ability in the U.S. (at least in theory) to access funding, permitted by recent cases like Zelman and Mitchell, is "a positive development, ... although a highly qualified one" because of the conditions that come with funding.  "It is better that legal rules offer the funding option.  [It's true that c]onditions on the funds can affect the schools’ integrity and mission.  But so too ... can the financial disadvantage of being excluded from assistance that competing schools (and their students) receive."

The effect that financial pressures (intensified by a rule of no funding) can have on religious schools' integrity and mission was dramatized just before the conference by the announcement of a plan to "save" several distresased Catholic schools in New York City by turning them into public charter schools.  As I put it, "The change would permit them to receive funds but would require them to eliminate their religious components entirely—not just in selected classes as [earlier] Supreme Court decisions [reading the Establishment Clause broadly] had required.  That scarcely advances the cause of pluralism in education."

(See also this report from Vatican Radio.)