The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has enrolled his young daughter, Carlota, at ESIC University, a private Catholic university located in Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid). According to various media reports, the young woman is pursuing a double degree in Business Administration and Management and Marketing in English. It is an institution run by the Reparator Fathers or also known as the Dehonians.
The fact would not be newsworthy if it were not for the fact that Sánchez himself leads an ideological offensive against free and Christian-inspired education. His Government has promoted laws and decrees that restrict the growth of private universities, have struck at concerted schools, and eliminated public funding for schools that separate by gender, many of them Catholic. While from La Moncloa they point to religious centers as “elitist”, the president's family entrusts their own education precisely to them.
A policy that preaches equality but practices privilege
The contrast between discourse and reality is evident. The Celaá Law and the recent decree on private universities were born with the rhetoric of “social equality”, but their application has meant a practical limitation on the freedom of teaching. Under the pretext of combating “university shacks”, the Executive has imposed almost impossible requirements to meet for independent centers: a minimum of 4,500 students, 10 degrees, six master's degrees, and three doctorates, in addition to an economic guarantee equivalent to the budget of the third year.
Curiously, not even ESIC University —the center where the president's daughter studies— meets those conditions today. And yet, it is there that Sánchez places the educational trust of his family. In other words, the same model that his Government is trying to suffocate is the one he himself chooses when it comes to his own.
Catholic education, a bulwark of freedom and truth
For decades, Christian-inspired schools and universities have been seedbeds of human, intellectual, and moral formation. Their existence guarantees educational pluralism and the right of parents to educate their children according to their convictions. Attacking that model, as socialism has done in recent years, is not promoting equality, but imposing a single state thought that denies freedom and marginalizes the Church from the public space.
Sánchez's incoherence is, in the end, an involuntary confession that Catholic education remains important. If those who attack it choose it for their children, it is because they recognize its quality, its demands, and its commitment to the values that the public system has abandoned.
The heart of the matter: an ideological attack on freedom
At bottom, the president's contradiction reveals something deeper: the left's contempt for educational freedom and, ultimately, for the moral influence of the Church in society. What bothers is not the academic success of Catholic schools, but their fidelity to a vision of man and life that clashes with the dominant relativism.
Faith, family, and educational freedom are inseparable pillars. When a Government fights any of them, it ends up attacking all. The Church, with its educational centers, does not impose: it proposes. And it does so from a conviction that neither decrees nor ideology can erase: that man, created in the image of God, has a right to the truth and to an education in accordance with it.