The ultra-Catholic Cork school you might not know exists
Cork In At Former Based Farranferris The Mater Private Dei And Academy College The Independent
Nestled in the heart of the Northside, with a commanding view over the city, most Corkonians know Farranferris College as a landmark, a link with the city’s history as a city of spires and with the religious orders among whom young acolytes trained.
Since 2022, however, the college has been home to a new school, one with an ultra-Catholic ethos most people in Ireland, including students at our Catholic state schools, wouldn’t recognise. Citing traditional Catholic values and funded by local donations, parent fees, and money from a staunchly conservative foundation in America, Mater Dei Academy is private and independent, with close to 50 students currently enrolled. Founded in 2020, the school was located on Pope’s Quay before moving to its current premises at Farranferris which is leased by Northside Community Enterprises (NCE), a registered charity part-funded by Tusla, and the Department of Children and Youth Affairs.
On its website, the school is described as “a new paradigm for independent, Catholic second-level education in Ireland” which is “under the patronage of Our Lady of Knock, Queen of Ireland.”
The school’s programme in the classical tradition, is built on the pillars of grammar, logic and rhetoric. Subjects include Irish, English, and Latin, along with mathematics, philosophy, theology, art, music, science, history and physical education. Students pray throughout the day and attend weekly Mass.
Students currently enrolled in the academy plan to sit the Leaving Certificate. No junior cycle exams are taken; in their place, pupils study for international qualifications. As well as in-person secondary education, Mater Dei Academy also provides a homeschooling programme to primary-aged children. More than 20 staff are employed at the school, including six full-time and seven part-time paid positions. As an independent school, the school is outside the remit of the Department of Education and does not have to follow the State curriculum.
Personnel at the school declined to be interviewed for this article, but in its quarterly school magazine, St Joseph’s Cloak, an interview with principal Geraldine Heffernan sheds some light on the ethos of “Ireland’s first Catholic classical school”.
Ms Heffernan comments that working in the state system left her feeling ‘frustrated’ by the ‘disconnect’ between her “Catholic faith and the way in which children were being put through the state system.”
In a written statement to the Irish Examiner, the school identified its mission as being dedicated “to students’ formation in the faith, academic excellence, and the evangelisation of society, rooted in the Gospel message of Jesus Christ.”
The private academy added that it “sees all children as formed in the image and likeness of God the Creator. As such, every child has an infinite and immeasurable value that transcends the child's particular characteristics, gender, family status, age, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion, or membership of the Traveller community.”
Independent schools are not very common in Ireland — just under 60 are registered with Túsla. The majority of these are private primary schools which adhere to the state curriculum, alongside schools with a more child-centred philosophy like the Steiner and Sudbury models. Although there are a handful of other religious, independent, privately run schools of different denominations, Mater Dei has very specific roots in America and very specific evangelical aims in Cork.
The inspiration for the school came from a network of classical Catholic schools in the US. America’s state school system is 90% secular, so these denominational schools are rare.
According to USCatholic.org, these schools “receive support from conservative and Republican politicians and donors…The movement falls in line with a general movement in Catholicism toward traditionalism in worship styles and cultural identification, which aligns many Catholics with the Republican Party on social issues such as abortion or gay rights despite an American history of Catholics tending to register as Democrats.”
Catholicism is in a state of fracture in America, with right-leaning hardliners splitting from a Vatican slowly modernising and inching towards tolerance, if not acceptance, of other viewpoints and identities.
A similar divide, and one small group’s motivation to find something not being offered by mainstream Catholicism or mainstream Catholic schools in Ireland, is also at play in Cork’s Mater Dei Academy.
Its founder Pádraig Cantillon-Murphy said he was inspired by schools like the Chesterton Academies and St Jerome Academy in Hyattsville, Maryland, and “aimed to develop an Irish version that would educate children for life in Christ.”
The Chesterton schools network is named after writer GK Chesterton who was eulogised by Pope Pius XI as “a gifted defender of the faith.”
In , Chesterton writes it is "the illusion of familiarity," when "a perversion become[s] a convention.” The writer famously referred to Oscar Wilde as ‘The Chief of The Decadents.’
Mater Dei has more than ideological roots in America, however. It is supported by a combination of donations, parent contributions and philanthropy. This philanthropy includes funding from the Saints and Scholars Foundation, based in Virginia in the US. The president of the Saints and Scholars Foundation, Connie Marshner, has been central in protests against sex education in America.
The foundation’s website states that the need for classical Catholic education is evidenced in the last two referenda here.
“Recent changes in the Irish constitution on fundamental moral questions such as abortion and the nature of marriage pose real challenges for Catholic education. Following government directives and initiatives, the reality is that many aspects of state-sponsored education in Ireland are now diametrically opposed to Catholic teaching.”
Speaking with the National Catholic Register, Marshner said “Mater Dei Academy is the best news that I’ve heard out of Ireland in my life… It is positive, it is hopeful, and it’s revolutionary in the best sense of the term: It’s starting something new.”
Mater Dei exists on the sidelines of an already tense relationship between church and state in education.
Despite conversations about divestment, almost 90% of primary and close to half of secondary schools are still under Catholic patronage in Ireland’s state school system. This positions the Department of Education’s policy of inclusion, when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality, on shaky ground. The church’s official position is still against same-sex relationships.
David Graham of Education Equality says this is a worrying tension as ultimately a public body (Department of Education) can’t dictate what is taught on private (church) property.
He mentions the controversy of 2022 when parents at Lacken National School in Wicklow received a letter saying it would not discuss same-sex “friendships” with students.
“This was even after parents representing a majority of children at the school had specifically written to the school the previous year to insist that they wanted the school’s approach to RSE to be fully inclusive of LGBTQ relationships.
“At the same time, some Catholic schools fly rainbow flags each year and participate in the INTO’s ‘Different Families, Same Love’ competition. So, the approach taken by Catholic schools to RSE is highly inconsistent and often varies from one school to the next,” says Graham.
So although the inclusion of LGBTQ+ students is championed by Ireland’s state school system on paper, it is a mixed bag among schools.
Stand Up Awareness Week, which took place in post-primary schools and Youthreach centres in early November, is named as an action in the Department of Education’s Cineáltas: Action Plan on Bullying 2023-2027. It calls for students to stand up and be aware of discrimination endured by LGBTQ+ people in their community and many Catholic schools take part. Predictably, Mater Dei Academy offers nothing comparable to the State’s prescribed Relationship and Sex Education curriculum. Its science curriculum is vastly different to what is taught in mainstream school, moving from what the school describes as the ‘logical progression’ from earth and planetary science, on to God’s creation in biology, chemistry and finally to the nature and properties of God’s matter in physics.
Father Brian McKevitt OP, a teacher at the school, has spoken publicly about the ‘cowardice’ in the Catholic church when it comes to speaking out about how the gospel is being twisted, and the destruction of Christian civilisation.
He announces in one of his sermons online that if our civilisation was even half “rational”, many of our politicians and our journalists would “be locked up either in prisons or lunatic asylums” . He refers to the result of the abortion referendum as an “evil.”
Joking about a bishop’s description of the gay marriage referendum as “a wake-up call,” he complains the “whole country went back to sleep.”
Mary Fitzgibbon, who has run for election twice with Aontú in Tralee, is the chairperson of the Mater Dei Academy Parents Council. She has been highly vocal in her position against gay marriage.
During the marriage referendum campaign, she tweeted an image of two male parents meeting their child born through surrogacy with the caption: “A motherless child is the prize — the buying of children” and another saying, “We must reaffirm the right of a child to grow up and be loved where possible by their own mother and father".
The Bishop of Cork and Ross Bishop Fintan Gavin, an official patron in the state system, visited the school in person in January of this year to celebrate the school’s third year. This year's Eucharistic Procession to honour the Feast of Corpus Christi attracted over 4,500 people and was the largest in Cork for 20 years.
Students from Mater Dei were invited to lead the procession and to serve Bishop Gavin for Holy Mass and Benediction. When contacted, a spokesperson from the diocese said: “Mater Dei Academy is an independent school ie independent of the state and independent of any church. It is not in receipt of funding from either and is not regulated by either.”
The spokesperson added, “The Bishop of Cork and Ross has no formal relationship with the school. Nevertheless, as in the case of the many schools across the diocese, the Bishop may visit schools from time to time following an invitation or to make a pastoral visit.”
Mater Dei is one of only two schools in Ireland accredited by Cambridge International for junior cycle assessment in the IGCSE programme. Cambridge International is a Global Diversity Champion for Stonewall, Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organisation. A Cork-based activist, Fiona Pettit O’Leary, has contacted Cambridge International expressing concerns in relation to the school’s policy on LGBTQ+ issues. “I received a response from them to say they are taking my concerns regarding the school’s attitude to LGBTQI+ students seriously,” she said, adding that “they have outlined that they have the power to withdraw their accreditation if they have concerns around safeguarding.”
The organisation also informed Ms Pettit O’Leary that they hold their centres responsible for providing a safe environment for candidates, and they will contact and investigate any school where they are concerned that this responsibility is not being met.
Mater Dei is also the only European member of the Institute of Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE), an international accreditation body for independent Catholic schools, a body which promotes books on its website that reference ‘culture wars’ brought about by ‘gender ideology.’
Mick Barry, TD for the Cork North-Central constituency, has concerns about the funding and ethos behind Mater Dei.
"I would be concerned about any school in Ireland which is being funded from outside the State by an organisation so closely associated with the Christian right. The US-based Saints and Scholars website includes several alarming statements such as ‘On the issue of gender theory or transgenderism, Pope Francis has been unequivocal comparing it to nuclear weapons.’
“Is this what gay children are taught in the Mater Dei school in Cork? Does the school think that this kind of stuff is helpful for trans students and their mental health?”
The description of Mater Dei as something hopeful, returning people to the one truth of Christ, is patterned throughout the school’s materials online.
The co-founder of the school Grace Cantillon-Murphy says in a YouTube recording on the school’s website that “there are so many conflicting messages in schools and society of, you know, you have your truth, I have my truth; I have to respect you and respect your truth but that is not the truth. The truth is the way that is Jesus Christ. He is the only truth.”
Her husband Padraig Cantillon-Murphy, in an article with The National Catholic Register makes similar comments outlining how “Irish society voted overwhelmingly in two referenda, in 2015 and 2018, to legalize same-sex “marriage” and abortion respectively in the Irish Constitution. But observers within the Church pointed out the role of the Church’s educational system in the catastrophe: Nearly everyone who voted came out of Ireland’s Catholic schools.”
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In an interview with The Pilot, America’s oldest Catholic newspaper, the founder is even more explicit.
Referring to the incitement to violence or hatred and hate offences bill, 2022, he says: “It poses all sorts of problems… particularly for us in the church, where people are now scratching their heads and asking, 'Are large tracts of the Bible now considered hate speech?' Because obviously there are very clear references to the way some people live. It seems to be trying to muzzle people."
Mr Cantillon-Murphy notes, "It's the latest in a long catalogue of legislative and constitutional changes which are essentially deconstructing a Christian vision and anthropology of society. And that is seen quite clearly in the schools, even though nominally, many of them retain their historically Catholic ethos. The reality, of course, is very different."
For Mr Cantillon-Murphy, that reality has awakened something positive.
Speaking with the National Catholic Register he said “We’ve gone through a heck of a time as a Church, and as a society, in this country over the last 25 years… For the first time, I see people have dusted themselves off, they’re ready to get up again, and start to fight. And this is part of that fight.”
While it’s unclear exactly what fight Mr Cantillon-Murphy is referring to, it’s clear he sees the school as being in the vanguard of it.