There is an error Catholics and other Christians can commit, and have committed, despite the Church's own historic warning against it. That is the error of supposing that children can legitimately be taken away from their parents for the sake of their spiritual welfare. The subject has come out most recently in the story of the children's bodies found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada. It was also widely discussed, in secular as well as Catholic circles, when a new book brought up the case of Edgardo Montara, a Jewish child taken away from his parents in 1858 on the orders of Pope Pius IX. The reason was that the boy had been secretly baptized by a maid. The supposition in the error is that since children may legitimately be taken from parents to protect them from physical and some forms of psychological abuse, surely it must be acceptable to take them away for the good of their immortal souls. After all, the erroneous reasoning goes, the spiritual is more important than the physical, or anything else. But the Church herself stands for the right of parents, including non-Christian parents, to care for and educate their own children, including bringing them up in their religion or system of belief. This teaching is no modern liberal invention. Aquinas has it in mind when he expressly rejects the idea that Christians may legitimately baptize Jewish children over their parents' objections. Tragically, the author of a recent article in The American Conservative seems to make the error, unless I am somehow misunderstanding his position. "The certain fact that souls were saved by the missionaries, the enduring belief of Christians that the Gospel is true and must be spread, is paramount," Declan Leary writes. "Everything else is secondary."