In England and Wales, as in the U.S., the Roman Catholic Church has long maintained a school system of its own, to give children church doctrine along with their Three Rs. Last week, Catholic Parents' Associations in Britain were rallying support for a drastic change: they wanted to persuade the government to take over the Catholic schools. Nobody was happy about it. To the crisis-goaded government it would mean an added financial drain; to British Catholics it might be a dangerous surrender. But there seemed to be no other way out.
English Catholics had winced when the 1944 Education Act was...