The State places the fertile at the service of the infertile in order to assure for the latter an artificial posterity

      "Finally, we can learn from the Jewish tradition yet another lesson:  to place no confidence in the State, such as it is, nor in any other secular power.  We, the French, have great need of this [lesson] because we have been idolaters of the State since the [French] Revolution, Louis XIV, or perhaps even earlier.  The Jewish people, by contrast, learned to do without the State, and to protect themselves from [its] authorities [(administrations)] in the situation of [a] minority exposed to society, and from hostile powers.  This has been its situation for a very long time, and it has become ours, now, too, though we have not been habituated to it nor yet drawn from it the necessary consequences.  But it isn't just a question of historical accidents [(conjunctures)]:  like the Jewish people, the Church stands in contradiction to [the] whole [of] society and to [the] whole [of] the State for theological reasons.  The historical books of the Old Testament contain, with respect to the Hebrew state that they describe, a virulent critique not only of the monarchial regime but of the State in general.  Following the remarkable philosopher Rémi Brague, let us attend to verse 8:15 of the First Book of Samuel:  'He (the king) will subject your fields and your vineyards to the tithe and will give them to his eunuchs and slaves.'  Note Brague’s commentary on this:  ‘The word translated by 'eunuch' can designate an uncastrated functionary.  I take it in the strong sense.  The role of the eunuchs in the administration of a state is a well-attested sociological fact in, for example, Confucian China, Sassanid Persia, or Byzantium.  But their mention in this very concrete sense acquires a shocking depth if one considers the [very] letter of the Hebrew.  [For] it speaks literally of "your seeds (zera) and your vines."  The State gives the seed [of others] to those who can no longer produce any; it places the fertile at the service of the infertile in order to assure for the latter an artificial posterity.'  The State possesses, in itself, no fertility; it is capable only of capturing—by drying them—the sources of fertility that come ultimately from God.  Now, education aims to render minds and souls fertile, and it has a vital need of being itself [an] object of fertility, concretely by the creation of new schools.  Christians can be fertile in the matter of schools to the extent to which they turn themselves toward Christ, who is the source of life.  But if, in their heads and in their hearts, they prefer the collar of the State or an administration to the sweet yoke of Christ, they condemn themselves to sterility.  Thus, a single verse of Scripture suffices to clarify the historical revolution of the Republican school:  as a consequence of the inveiglement [(captation)] by the State of the model [institutions (modèles)] of the Christian Brothers [(Les Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes)] and the Jesuits, fruits of the fertility of the Church, the Republican school has become [a] shadow of itself in little more than a century, despite the always more colossal resources that get allocated to it and the devotion of innumerable professors.
     "An awareness of these realities must, in the light of Scripture, lead those responsible for Catholic establishments to consider with sympathy and with the greatest interest the hors contrat Catholic schools that found and give life to courageous pioneers and laborers [in the work] of transmission.  To the extent that the founders of these schools, their masters [(instituteurs)], and their professors have not—at the cost of the heavy sacrifices that this has required of them—submitted to the State, it is easier for them to be grafted onto Christ as shoots onto the vine, and to become thus sources of fertility.  Their poverty and the abandonment to divine providence required of them are precious riches.  To me, they offer the best chance of new life for the Church of France and for France itself."

     French mathematician and 2002 Fields Medalist Laurent Lafforgue, "Le Christ est la vérite, fondement d’un enseignement catholique," an address to the annual session of the Alliance des Directeurs et Directrices de l’Enseignement Chrétien, 19 November 2009, pp. 7-8, translation mine.