Catholic Textbooks in Nicaragua-Courtesy of U.S. Taxpayers
GURNON, EMILY
Catholic Textbooks in Nicaragua—Courtesy of U.S. Taxpayers EMILY GURNON The United States is teaching children in Nicaragua how to be good Catholics—and U.S. citizens are paying for it. In a...
...aid money is shipped overseas...
...The ACLU brought suit against AID on behalf of American taxpayers, alleging that the AID funding violated the Establishment Clause, U.S...
...In his opinion, District Court Judge Leonard B. Sand wrote,"Whether the advancement of religion occurs in the United States or abroad is simply not relevant to the United States taxpayer who objects to United States sectarian institutions receiving money for use in promoting religion...
...On the wall is a cross...
...In promoting one set of basic values, the U.S...
...government attorneys argued that the Establishment Clause does not apply to the United States' foreign activities...
...It's an outrageous violation of church-state separation...
...In a written response to a reporter's questions, a U.S...
...In the fifth- and sixth-grade series, a blond, bearded Jesus sits surrounded by a group of cherubic-looking children...
...government agreed with Belli that the Sandinistas' policies had eroded traditional values...
...Belli spent several years in the United States, teaching at the fundamentalist Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio while his ideological enemies, the Sandinistas, were in power in Nicaragua...
...The U.S...
...They attribute the books' Catholic values to Nicaragua's Minister of Education, Humberto Belli...
...The Nicara-guans desperately needed new textbooks "sanitized of totalitarian messages and promoting basic democratic principles," according to an AID document on the Nicaraguan assistance...
...If you can have a situation where the government feels free to support one religion over another, the flip side of it is that it feels free to discriminate against one religion over another," Brickner added...
...In a little-known $12.2 million project that appears to violate the First Amendment's separation of church and state, the U.S...
...Things go on in foreign aid that, were they going on domestically, would probably cause riots in the streets," says J. Bruce Nichols, author of a recent book on the separation of church and state in American foreign policy...
...In this position, Belli said he wanted to bring "traditional values" back to Nicaragua's children...
...The 8.4 million books are currently being used throughout Nicaragua...
...Baker said AID should have known better than to fund a series of religious books in Nicaragua after what happened with the Lamont case...
...It's terrible," says Rabbi Balfour Brickner of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, who had not heard of the project until called by a reporter...
...The project is a startling example of how the Establishment Clause of the U.S...
...A suggested prayer highlights the first page of the second-grade book: "Help me, Father, with my studies...
...Belli belongs to a group that is the equivalent of the moral right," says Joseph Carney, director of the education and human resources department of the Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean at AID...
...funds underwrote a "civics" series that contains explicit religious instruction...
...They wanted to correct that, but in the process either overlooked or ignored the possibility that the religious component of the textbook project violated the Constitutional separation of church and state...
...Both district court and court of appeals judges disagreed with AID...
...In many ways, the books resemble catechisms—much like any that would be found in a private Catholic school in the United States...
...government spokesperson in Managua said "Neither AID or any other U.S...
...The first ruling was made in October of 1990, the same time AID was preparing the textbook project in Nicaragua...
...If it's against the law nationally for our government to provide these books, why isn't it against the law internationally...
...I would say that, on the basis of the laws that exist at the moment, what AID is doing is unconstitutional...
...Along with math, science and reading books, U.S...
...The new civics series for Nicaraguan children has editions for grades 2-11...
...officials when the textbook project was conceived...
...When they were voted out of office in 1990, Belli returned to his native country to work in the Ministry of Eduction for the new president, Violeta Chamorro...
...Brickner and other Jewish leaders question the legality of such\a project...
...he said...
...government may have foresaken another...
...That case, Lamont v. Schultz (later Lamont v. Woods) involves AID funding of Orthodox Jewish schools in Israel and Roman Catholic schools in several countries through the American Schools and Hospitals Abroad (ASHA) program...
...In another picture, a child kneels in prayer next to his bed...
...Agency for International Development (AID) has provided textbooks to impoverished children in Nicaragua's public schools...
...AID officials in Washington and Managua deny that they have committed a Constitutional sin in approving the textbook project...
...But politics—not the Constitution-was apparendy foremost in the minds of U.S...
...The fact that AID failed to keep religion out of the books was a mistake, according to Edwin Baker, a former American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney who is involved in a similar suit that the ACLU brought againt AID in 1988...
...The fifth- and sixth-grade books begin with several pages of discussion of the Ten Commandments and call divorce a "disgrace" and abortion "murder...
...Constitution, the clause that mandates church-state separation, often gets tossed overboard as U.S...
...government office was involved in deciding what went into the books...
Vol. 17 • December 1992 • No. 6
