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Most youngsters, she says, get little meaning from the catechetic systems of religious instruction in many parochial schools: "One not untypical school, for instance, requires the children to recite the Rosary while they file out for recess." At another, one little girl, who insisted that God was a "supreme bean," tearfully exclaimed when her father corrected her: "Don't bother me with what it means. It's what we have to say when Sister asks us who God is."
The money spent on maintaining this school system, an estimated $1.8 billion annually, and the more than 183,000 teachers it employs could be put to better use if concentrated on improved religious education, Mrs. Ryan contends. Msgr. George W. Casey, an outspoken priest who writes a column in The Pilot, Boston's archdiocesan newspaper, agrees with her in part: "I have been advocating that the church wash out of the elementary grades. Her idea is that we should get out of general education entirely. The book is just a little too sweeping. I don't think her proposal is feasible, because the Catholic school is too firmly entrenched, too interwoven in our lives. But she poses a very real challenge."
"A Foolish Book." To prove his point, Msgr. Casey is building a $500,000 "Christian Confraternity School" next to his church in Lexington, Mass., a town where there is no Catholic school. To be opened next September as the John F. Kennedy School of Religion, it will provide 1,900 Catholic students who attend Lexington's public schools with a weekly class of religious instruction after regular school hours. "It will settle a lot of problems if it works," he says.
Many Catholic clergymen disagree with the Ryan book. Msgr. O'Neil C. D'Amour, associate secretary of the Department of School Superintendents of the National Catholic Educational Association in Washington, D.C., calls it an "incredibly naive book, a foolish book. I feel Mrs. Ryan asked a lot of the right questions, but came up with all the wrong answers." In Brooklyn, the conservative Catholic weekly paper, The Tablet, snorts at the liberals who support Mrs. Ryan's views. "The battle lines are clearly drawn. The book finds Catholic schools 'an obstacle' to the current spirit of renewal and says they must be shut."
The House Committee on Education and Labor has invited Mrs. Ryan to testify at hearings on proposed legislation that would finance a three-year experiment in which parochial-school pupils could spend part of their day taking nonreligious subjects in public schools. Except for a few areas where well-financed parochial-school systems are thriving and even growing, some such recombination of religious and educational responsibilities seems likely in many parts of the U.S.