The ‘irrational attack’ against Catholic schools

Many years ago, a person named Margaret Wente called and offered me a job at the Globe and Mail newspaper, which I accepted. Many, many years ago, I passed through the Catholic school system in Toronto, elementary school at Holy Cross and high school at Neil McNeil. 

This past weekend, those parts of my past intersected when I opened the newspaper and Wente — a self-described “hardened atheist” — penned a brilliant column in defence of the Catholic school system. It was entitled: “Who’s afraid of Catholic schooling? In Ontario, the fight has turned into a crusade, but the public system would be worse off without competition.” (It can be found online at www.globeandmail.ca.) 

We’ve all heard the arguments. The publicly-funded Catholic system is unfair to other faiths. Its “duplication of services” is a waste of taxpayers’ money when we have a perfectly good public system.