QUEBEC GOVERNMENT POLICIES ARE UNDERMINING THE FAMILY

Douglas Farrow. Montreal Gazette , 27 April 2008

In Quebec we have many freedoms and blessings for which to give thanks. I hope that we are not taking them for granted or allowing them to lull us to sleep.

Too often we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to disturbing news even from places well known to us that are witnessing an onslaught against Christian civilization and quite specifically against the Catholic faith.  I am thinking of Europe, and especially of Britain, the birthplace of many of the political freedoms we enjoy in what is left of Christendom.  

Recently, the bishop of Lancaster, Patrick O'Donoghue, was interrogated by the government's Children, Schools and Families Select Committee about his directive to diocesan schools to teach the Catholic faith and Catholic morals to their students.   That directive, according to the committee chair, Barry Sheerman, smacked of a “fundamentalism” unacceptable to the British government.  “It seems to me that faith education works all right as long as people are not that serious about their faith,” Sheerman said. “But as soon as there is a more doctrinaire attitude questions have to be asked.”

Only a few weeks ago the Anglican bishop of Hereford was fined thousands of pounds and ordered to undergo state re-education for refusing to hire an active homosexual who had applied for a position as a youth worker.  We have seen similar things happen in our own country through our human-rights commissions.  

When, I wonder, will we wake to the fact that the situation has changed quite fundamentally in the West?  When will we take concerted action aimed at preserving our freedoms, so that they may be handed on to our children and to the next generation?

I think the advent of the new Québec school curriculum, Ethics and Religious Culture, should be a wake-up call.  Let me tell you why.

It is not because I am against the teaching of children – older children – about religions other than Christianity.  As I teach on a faculty of religious studies, you would hardly expect me to be against that.  I am against the new curriculum because it is being imposed even on private and religious schools, and even on young children.

I am against it because – make no mistake about this! – it is intended to wean children away from traditional religious and moral commitments and to train them up in an ideology antipathetic to those commitments, the ideology of so-called “normative pluralism.”  

It is intended to teach them the Sheerman principle that faith is all right as long as people are not that serious about it.  It is intended, in other words, to pry them away from their most basic communities of socialization – their families and their houses of worship – and to unite them in the state, with the state, and under the state,  a state that regards itself as more fundamentally important than their families and churches.

In a piece I wrote for Catholic Insight magazine last month,* I reminded Catholic Canadians of a few things that Pope Leo XIII said in his 1897 encyclical Affari Vos , on the Manitoba school question.

First, that the Catholic Church “stood by the cradle of the Canadian State,” and in particular of its education system, which ought to earn for the Church a more respectful hearing in such matters as we are again having to deal with; and, conversely, ought to remind the Church that it still has a fiduciary duty here.

Second, that “our children cannot go for instruction to schools which either ignore or of set purpose combat the Catholic religion, or in which its teachings are despised and its fundamental principles repudiated.”  This is precisely what the new curriculum compels our schools to do, in forms overt and covert.  “It is necessary to avoid at all costs, as most dangerous,” warns Leo, “those schools in which all beliefs are welcomed and treated as equal, as if, in what regards God and divine things, it makes no difference whether one believes rightly or wrongly, and takes up with truth or error.”  But come September our schools will do just that.  And if not that, then something still more dangerous:  setting up with their “normative pluralism” an irreligious standard for judging truth and error.

Third, that “without religion there can be no moral education deserving of the name, nor of any good, for the very nature and force of all duty comes from those special duties which bind man to God, who commands, forbids, and determines what is good and evil.” As Leo observes:  “to be desirous that minds should be imbued with good and at the same time to leave them without religion is as senseless as to invite people to virtue after having taken away the foundations on which it rests.”

Fourth, that Catholics must stand together, rising above party politics, if they are to make a difference.  Pope Leo pointedly deplored the fact that, in the Manitoba situation, “Catholic Canadians themselves were unable to act in concert in the defence of interests which so closely touch the common good, and the importance and moment of which ought to have silenced the interest of political parties, which are on quite a lower plane of importance.” Would that things had changed on this score a century on, but there is little evidence of change.  Here in Québec even our Francophone bishops cannot seem to act in concert.

In addition to these Leonine points, there is also the travesty through which we lost fundamental parental and family rights in connection with Bills 109, 118 and 95. Stéphane Dion, who as minister of intergovernmental affairs tabled the 1997 resolution to amend the Constitution Act so that the bill abolishing the confessional school system could come into effect, observed at the time that “the right to religious instruction is still guaranteed under Section 41 of the Québec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, a document that has quasi-constitutional status according to the Supreme Court of Canada.”  But this guarantee proved worthless. When Bill 95 was passed in 2005, the Quebec Charter itself was amended without public notice, meaningful debate, or a recorded vote.

The original version of Section 41 granted parents “a right to require that, in the public educational establishments, their children receive a religious or moral education in conformity with their convictions.”  The new version concedes only “a right to give their children a religious and moral education in keeping with their convictions and with proper regard for their children's rights and interests.”  So much for the quasi-constitutional. And who, I wonder, will determine what is or is not in the best interests of our children? That is a hole in parental rights big enough to drive a motorcade through.

It's crucial that we understand how the federal bill on same-sex marriage, Bill C-38, has changed the legal terrain both in Canada and in Quebec. Contrary to Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Canada's highest court has converted marriage into an institution that, rather than being recognized by the state, actually belongs to the state - an institution that is a creature of civil law, not of natural law.  Parliament has then redefined marriage in a way that excludes procreation from its purview.  
Those developments have put most of our parental rights and freedoms in jeopardy.  It is no longer clear, legally speaking, who owns the children or who is finally responsible for the children.  With the demise of traditional marriage, there is no longer any institution that makes it plain that the natural family unit has rights and responsibilities that do not derive from the state but exist independently and are brought to the State. The family no longer exists as something that buffers its members from state power and authority.  

This bears directly on the issue of education.  One particular right we have always cherished, and until recently recognized constitutionally, is the right to educate our children as we wish, especially with regard to religion.  But that right (never unqualified, of course) has now been taken away.  The state has decided for us how to educate our children, even with respect to religion.  And why shouldn't it?  This, after all, is the kind of state that in the same year it passed Bill 95 also happily eliminated, under federal instructions, the one institution that honoured and protected the natural family unit and its rights - the institution that made clear whose children they are.

In Quebec the government is pressing ahead with a plan to form the next generation in the image devised by its professional ideologues, regardless of what Quebec families and religious communities may think about it.  It knows, as one recent ministry document declares, that “to educate is, first and foremost, to train human beings.”  And it confesses that “the need to secularize public schools in order to respect each person's human rights [does] not mean that the schools no longer [have] to deal with the students' spiritual development.”   So it will deal with their development as it sees fit. It will train every child according to an individualist and pluralist philosophy that effectively renders null and void the Catholic view of spiritual development.

Do you think this claim exaggerated?  I can only tell you that if you do, either you have not perused the policy documents behind the new curriculum or you do not grasp the Catholic faith itself.  The Catholic faith - being trinitarian, incarnational, and ecclesial - is precisely not individualist, or pluralist, or relativist.  It seeks personhood, not individuality.  It  seeks communion, not state-imposed homogeneity.  (Beware the “normative” in “normative pluralism”!)  It desires the truth, and therefore acknowledges errors.  It takes no refuge in subjectivism, like the new curriculum does:  a subjectivism that only thinly disguises the cynicism of an intelligentsia and a civil service made up largely of lapsed Catholics.

Perhaps you are not yet aware that prominent figures on both sides of the Atlantic have begun to question the right of parents to educate their children according to their own religious beliefs even in the privacy of their own homes.    Our ministry of education has not gone quite that far, at least not yet.  But it is determined to steal a march on parents.  Day after day, our children will be subjected to the championing of “individualism” over “institutionalism”; which is to say, individualism will now be institutionalized at school.  To what purpose or effect, I ask, if not to isolate children from the institutions – familial and religious – that relativize the state and its institutions? That qualify their dependence on and allegiance to the state? In short, that make for a free society?

Other prominent figures (and this should not come as a surprise) have begun to question the right of religious organizations as such, and not just their private schools, to operate freely on a charitable basis, if their teachings and practices do not conform to the current ideologies of the state.  That the beliefs and practices of these same religious organizations might belong to the founding and progress of the state in question, and lie at the roots of its historic social order, seems hardly to matter.  The new image must prevail; it must at all costs be etched into the features of the next generation.  The main sources of resistance to that image must be neutralized, if not eradicated.  And the primary target here is not, as some fancy, radical Islam, which does indeed import ideas and practices inimical to our historic order.  The primary target  is Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity.

This might sound alarmist, but quite frankly I mean to raise the alarm.  I think we need to understand the larger arena in which the battle over the new curriculum is being fought, and to recognize that it is no longer possible to take no side in this battle.  

*“Rebuilding Babel in Québec City”

http://catholicinsight.com/online/church/education/article_812.shtml

Douglas Farrow is a professor in McGill University's Faculty of Religious Studies. He is the author of Nation of Bastards: Essays on the End of Marriage.

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