And why?
Some in the Catholic church understand better than others that the fight to preserve their separate schools will be tough and complicated.
Here is a segment from an address by Bishop Donal McKeown to the Irish Council of Churches in Swords last week.
It acknowledges that if Catholic schools are to survive they have to offer something different from what the state offers.
It rebukes those who think that Catholic schools in Northern Ireland are for the preservation of Gaelic culture.
It intimates that those schools who insist on selection procedures that privilege the middle class are already in breach of the Catholic ethos.
It says that Catholic schools must contribute to reconciliation in society.
And it recognises that there is now a more secularised generation of head teachers.
Malachi O'Doherty 
As an exile I am not embedded in the current realities of the NI education system; but remoteness does give perspective to this debate. My own schooling in the fifties reflected the realities of the political and social environment – a Prime Minister who proclaimed our unreliability reinforced that unreliabity; the BBC, the Courts, the professions, sports governing bodies, employment providers, the NI Civil Service, the system of government – all were agents of an de facto separateness based on tribalism. Were I an atheist, a diabolist or a pagan, if I lived on the Falls I was a deemed “Catholic”; if I lived on Sandy Row I was a deemed Protestant. Things have changed but the ghost of those attitudes has yet to be put to rest.
I hope the Bishop is trying to open a debate about the purposes of education in the new intellectual environment. Peter Robinson’s ramblings seem to be about pandering to threatened political attitudes and not about the integration of a sundered society.
My own generation’s attitudes to “the other side” were not changed by a theoretical (not to say dogmatic) religious education which urged us to regard as neigbours to be loved, “mankind of every description without any exception of persons, even those who injure us or differ from us in religion”. We lived in the real world where our prejudices were born, fed and reinforced.