SCHOOL CHOICE AMONG COMPETING "CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHIES

Is there an identifiably Catholic position on school choice? As pilot pro-grams proliferate in the United States, serious consideration of some philo-sophical issues seems in order This article explores two competing moral philosophies and their relationship to parental sovereignty in the public sec-tor. The authors conclude by articulating a Catholic position on the ques-tion. Philosophies that are contradictory in their premises sometimes collaborateon practical projects; on occasion they even utter joint statements of shared human ideals. In 1948, for example, the Communist bloc joined its Western ideological competitors to draft and ratify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This famous accord was achieved in part by political luck and in part by the insight and skill of Western intellectuals, notably Jacques Maritain and Richard McKeon. Still, something like it could emerge even today, for instance, from an assembly of Chinese and American theorists given a similar assignment. Nor is this singular impulse to express agreement a thing that we can reduce to political hypocrisy; whether a signatory is Marxist, liberal, or Thomist, he or she understands that the currents of life may carry any broadly stated manifesto to unforeseen consequences. The 1948 Declaration predictably became the jump-start for movements that Stalinists could hardly have found congenial. And yet conventions of the same sort continue to multiply. We should not be surprised, then, that today's lively political coalition for subsidized school choice comprises such incongruous bedfellows a