The Edgerton Bible Case

Humphrey Desmond’s Argument

A Catholic lawyer and editor living in Wisconsin named Humphrey Desmond editorially supported the parents’ initial petition in The Catholic Citizen, a Milwaukee-based newspaper with subscribers throughout the Midwest. (Incidentally, this newspaper eventually had the largest circulation of any Catholic newspaper in the country.) Mr. Desmond switched from observer to participant when he joined the legal team that presented the case of the Catholic parents to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Here is an edited version of the argument he presented to the court.

Humphrey Desmond:1 The parents of Catholic children attending the Edgerton school are taxpayers supporting the public school and their children are compelled to attend school by state law. They also are conscientious Catholics who reject the Protestant King James Version of the Bible because it both wrongly translates the inspired word of God and omits books they believe are part of Scripture. They accept the “Douay and Rheims” Version of the Bible. They also believe that Scripture ought not to be read indiscriminately, since they believe the Roman Catholic Church has divine authority as the only infallible teacher and interpreter of the Bible.2 Their children are entitled to equal benefit of the law and state education, and they believe exposure to the King James Version will likely lead to the adoption of dangerous errors, irreligious faith, practice and worship. The Edgerton School District is violating the state constitutional provision from 1848 against sectarian instruction in public schools3 (Article X, Section 3) and the state law passed in 1883 (Sec. 3, Ch. 251, Laws of 1883) declaring that, “no textbooks shall be permitted in any free public school which will have a tendency to inculcate sectarian ideas.” Therefore, the School District should direct its teachers to discontinue this practice.

Desmond continues:4 To be sure, this country was founded by sectarian Christian colonists who only after great struggle in and amongst themselves began the movement toward non-sectarianism embodied, for example, in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Yet today, from this distance of time and progress, the School Board beholds the strife-ridden sectarian life of the colonists as light-houses to guide them, while we look at this religious strife as rocks and shallows to be shunned and avoided. Sectarianism dominated the colonies. It hung Papists; it burned witches; it banished Quakers. It made men superstitious, hypocritical and cruel and appealed to the Bible for its justification. Every penalty in the bloodthirsty Connecticut Blue Laws was followed in the official copy by a text of Scripture, and the more bloodthirsty the punishment, the more unctuous the text. But the whole spirit of our growth has been away from the old sectarian life of the divided colonies—ending religious persecution, ceasing taxation to support churches, establishing religious equality and non-sectarian common schools free to all. These measures were necessary to end abuses. The School Board is saying let us go back to the days of sectarian strife, pitting Protestant and Catholic against one another. But a better spirit declares we continue the movement toward religious equality and against religious strife. It will be some years before all men recognize the cruel irony of forcing gospel intended to teach lessons of charity, forbearance, and brotherly love upon a resisting, unwilling, and injured element of the community. The children are the ones who suffer, caught between the religion of their home and the religion of their school.

Desmond continues: What evidence shows the King James Version of the Bible is sectarian? There is conclusive evidence in the printed record of the case. It is admitted that the reading of this version occurred as a school exercise within school hours, and by authority of the board, and the board admits that Catholics and the Catholic Church takes offense at this version of the Bible and perceives it to be a violation of their right to conscience. This fact is admitted, because there are fifty years of battle and contention and protest in American schools to prove it. It is apparent even from a casual glance at history that sectarianism in the schools is centered on Bible reading in the schools. The facts and this admission seem to me to settle the controversy. The American Bible Society, printer and publisher of every Bible that seeks admission as a text-book or reading manual in the public schools, is an avowedly Protestant organization devoted to spreading the Bible as a means to convert readers to Protestantism. The purpose of the public school is to provide instruction in secular studies, not to provide religious instruction. If Bible reading is perfectly legal and morally obligatory, why are the Catholic children theoretically excused from it?

Desmond concludes: In effect, the school board says: Do not permit the Catholics to save their souls in their own way. Appoint us as a guardian for their conscience. They say our version of the Bible is not good for them; but we know better. They say they have a right to conscience; but we must violate their conscience because their conscience is wrong. But it is the height of absurdity to claim it is not sectarian to force the Protestant sectarian conscience upon members of other sects. If justice be our guide, we shall be as loyal to Christianity and the Bible as we are to the secular schools, not by forcing a sectarian Bible upon members of other sects who find it objectionable, but rather by believing and holding our Christianity in the mild spirit of its founder….The law that will most honor the Bible and religion, is the law which most nearly follows the golden rule of each, “Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you.” If you would not have Catholics force the Catholic Bible and beliefs and conscience upon you, then you should not force the Protestant Bible and beliefs and conscience upon them. That is the true meaning of non-sectarian schools.

Notes

1 The remarks in this paragraph are from the parents’ petition to the circuit court, reprinted in State ex rel. Weiss v. District Board 1890 Wisc. LEXIS 74, Prior History, pp. 1-5.

2 In 1840, the American Catholic bishops called on parishioners to reject “private interpretation”: on two counts: (1) it is inconsistent with the commission Jesus gave to the Church to teach, and (2) it asserts that the individual rather than the Church has final interpretive authority. See Newsom, p. 240.