An Establishment of Religion in the Schools

In certain cases to be discussed the Supreme Court deals with questions determining whether governmental action involving only a limited number of citizens had been in violation of the First or Fourteenth Amendments. In the other cases, the Court deals with questions of more direct concern to the citizenry as a whole. These latter contests turn more specifically upon the principle of "separation of church and state." The use of public funds for sectarian advantage is the predominant issue. (Private non-sectarian schools may come within the meaning of the statutes contested and of the case law resulting, but none appear to have involved themselves in the question.) The fact that we have parallel systems of public and parochial schools serving the citizens of a nation wherein education is compulsory has lent complexity to the problem.

Education in early colonial America, even where supported by public funds as in Massachusetts, was in large measure religious. That a system of free, secular, and tax-supported education had developed in the United States around the middle of the nineteenth century was possibly an outcome of Protestantism and its diversity finding accommodation in developing democratic dogma and in our expanding nation. But, the Catholic Church, strengthened by floods of immigrants to America, could not, in conscience or in fact, surrender its assertedly rightful function of education to the increasing public schools--schools which to Catholic eyes either shunned any religious training or else afforded it only with a Protestant taint. The resulting growth of parochial schools supported by Catholics left them feeling unjustly burdened by the requirement of contributing also to the support of public schools from which they received no direct benefit. They began to insist that those of their schools which met the accreditation standards and satisfied the compulsory school laws of the state should receive public aid.