The Nation: Battle Over Schools

Amid the muffled clank of advancing legal artillery and the kindling of beacon fires from pulpit and platform, the U.S. was lining up for a major debate over federal assistance to religious schools. Ironically, the commander of the forces opposed to aid for private schools was the nation's first Roman Catholic President, and his principal opponents were the hierarchy of his own church.

At issue was the Administration's request to Congress for federal aid to U.S. education: $3,327,500,000 over the next five years for undergraduate scholarships and for college classrooms and dormitory construction, $2,298,000,000 more in three-year grants to states for public school construction and/or teacher salaries. Fortnight ago, the 13 members of the administrative board ruling the National Catholic Welfare Conference—composed of more than 200 cardinals, archbishops and bishops who guide church policies in the U.S.—met quietly in Washington (TiME, March 10). After the meeting, Archbishop Karl J. Alter of Cincinnati announced that the church would oppose the bill unless it was amended to include longterm, low-interest loans to the nation's private schools, more than 12,000 of them run by Catholic groups. *To that demand, John Kennedy, at his sixth presidential press conference last week, gave a qualified no.

The Softer No. Kennedy's no was a shade softer than the noes of his 1960 campaign. Knowing that all-out Catholic opposition could kill the chance for any education bill this year, the President edged away from his campaign position that all aid to parochial schools is unconstitutional. Although Supreme Court decisions have clearly outlawed direct grants to parochial schools, he said: "There is obviously room for debate about loans . . . This has not been tested by the courts." He made a further distinction between aid to higher and lower education, pointing out that grants for specific purposes to church-run colleges, e.g., the G.I. Bill, have long been accepted in law.

But "across-the-board" loans to non-public schools, as the Catholic bishops were demanding, said Kennedy, raises "a serious constitutional question which, after reading the cases and giving it a good deal of thought, in my opinion would be unconstitutional." Although obviously unhappy about the prospect of a loan amendment, Kennedy declined to say whether he would veto an education bill with the bishops' rider attached. The message to a watching, listening Congress was: Pass the Administration's school aid bill as it is, consider private school loans in separate legislation, if at all.

To many constitutionalists, the President's insistence that Government loans to parochial schools would be unconstitutional was debatable at best. They saw it as a political argument, made to keep a campaign agreement. But the questions raised by the debate went well beyond the issue of one specific Administration bill. They clearly indicated that the whole subject of federal aid to private schools needed a lot more rational thought, and firm national decision, than it has been given so far.