Hosted by the University of Notre Dame Law School, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and The Australian Catholic University.
From December 11-14, 2022, the University of Notre Dame and the Australian Catholic University jointly sponsored a symposium in Rome on Catholic Schools and Religious Liberty: A Global Perspective. The symposium is the fifth in a series which the University of Notre Dame established in 2018 at the request of the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education to increase knowledge about Catholic schools globally.
The aim of the 2022 symposium was two-fold. First, we sought to better understand how legal and education-policy constraints shape the operations of Catholic schools in different parts of the world; and to clarify which types of constraints represent acceptable accountability regulations and which represent undue restraints on religious liberty and school autonomy. The scholarship on these questions was remarkably sparse.
Equally significant was the second goal of the symposium: to learn about the experience of Catholic schools under legal and policy constraints in the different parts of the world in which they operate and to aid them in responding constructively to threats to religious liberty and school autonomy.
The symposium examined these questions in a program including both keynote addresses and panels composed of legal scholars, educators, and Church officials from different regions of the world—Europe, the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Asia.