The North's Catholic bishops have said that rather than being an obstacle to the peace process, the Catholic educational system is ideally placed to assist it.
In a consultation document examining what contribution Catholic schools could make to the peace process, the bishops said the perception that the schools were a factor in promoting division was "superficial, misleading and unjust".
In "Building Peace - Shaping the Future," the bishops said: "We see our schools as being ideally placed to assist our society to move beyond its deeply ingrained divisions into a new openness to the world at large."
Speaking at the launch of the document, the Archbishop of Armagh, Dr Sean Brady, said sectarianism must be rejected but added that "the opposite of sectarianism is not the rejection of all religious convictions".
The document stresses that Catholic schools should not only be for Catholic children and "in principle are open to children of all denominations." Dr Brady said schools would in fact be encouraged to accept pupils, and staff, from other denominations if they had sufficient places and that such pupils should be "welcomed, treated very fairly and their differences respected and cherished".
The bishops say some measures should also be taken as a "matter of urgency". These include an increase in spending on projects "to improve the spirit of community within schools, between schools, and within and between the communities in which schools are situated.
"The aim of these programmes would be to create links of friendship across social and religious divides," the report says.
The parishes where Catholic schools are situated should contribute financially to such programmes, the bishops said, adding that schools could "plan programmes in democracy and politics for all pupils which would contribute to changing present attitudes of confrontation."
The document says that a large challenge facing Catholic schools will be encouraging an acceptance of the new agreed institutions in the North.
Dr Brady would not be drawn on how this encouragement would manifest itself, but said the encouragement of acceptance applied to "all the services".