Response to Steve

With respect to Steve's post, confessing doubts about financial aid to religious education:  The fact (assuming for now that it is a fact) that, in Europe, "the Church has been tied to unpopular regimes and its moral witness muffled. Conditions deeply intruding into the autonomy of the Church have been accepted; and, in the long run, the Church has been thought by millions to be on the wrong side of history" is not, it seems to me, either entirely the result of aid by European governments to religious education or necessarily a consequence of such aid by governments to religious education.  

So, I agree entirely with Steve that the Church's "moral witness" ought not to be muffled, nor its "autonomy" intruded upon.  Some mechanisms for making it possible for parents to choose Catholic or other religious schools for their children would do or risk these bad things, but not all would.  In my view, the general principle -- "the public authority ought to pay for education, at least up to a point, and, in so doing, it should not discriminate against otherwise competent schools merely because of their private or religious character" -- is one that we all should accept, for religious-freedom, social-justice, and policy-effectiveness reasons.