ABSTRACT
The European Convention of Human Rights and the added Protocol are expressly addressed to the climate of opinion in the democracies, and because of this are intended to protect families from the rules and customs of totalitarian states. The school, like the state, declares itself laic; and in fact the state school in the various grades of education, financed by the state and governed by it as to curriculum and methods, has no sectarian character and no religious teaching is given in it. Primitive peoples were the depository of traditions sufficiently powerful to weight education basically with a certain number of obligations in which ritual, language, and symbol—"those some fundamental functions of humanity" —took forms which left no room for choice. So the mere fact that religious instruction is given there is not sufficient for a school to be judged as conforming to the rights of the Church, and as being worthy to be attended by Catholic children.
