From Canada’s National Post comes this urgent message:
Stop the presses! Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the primate of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada, has created shock waves across Canada by … reiterating conventional Church doctrine on the subject of abortion.
Now, it must be admitted that the good Cardinal was reiterating Church teaching on a point that is difficult for many to accept—that abortion is wrong even in cases of rape, that a child should not be killed for the crime of its father. Even many pro-life American politicians allow for rape and incest exceptions.
Mistakenly.
But the climate toward unborn babies is so . . . er . . . cold in Canada that the Cardinal’s comments have occasioned what the National Post refers to as a “freaked out reaction by many pro-choice politicians and pundits.”
How freaked out?
Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois said she was “completely outraged” by the Cardinal’s remarks. A columnist with Montreal’s La Presse newspaper, Patrick Lagace, said he wished that the Cardinal “dies from a long and painful illness.” Even Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Josee Verner—whose international maternal-health policies the Cardinal supports—declared that the man’s remarks were “unacceptable.”
The National Post thus asks a reasonable question:
When, exactly, did it become “unacceptable” for a man of faith to articulate his Church’s position on a controversial bioethical issue? Are there any other issues that Ms. Marois, Mr. Lagace and Ms. Verner would like Christians to shut up about? Gay marriage? Stem cells? Pre-marital sex? Perhaps they should make a list, just so everyone can keep track.
For years now, this newspaper and other conservative outlets have been warning Canadians that the trend toward liberal dogmatism among much of Canada’s political class—buttressed by an out-of-control human-rights constabulary—is serving to muzzle religious Christians who are doing nothing else than giving voice to their cherished beliefs. The appalling reaction to Cardinal Ouellet’s speech demonstrates how serious the problem has become.
Indeed.
While I hate to see our neighbor to the north playing the lead role for a cautionary tale, Americans also need to recognize that our country could go in the same hard anti-family, anti-faith direction that Canada has—if Americans don’t resist the same trends in our own culture that have seized the reins in Canada.
In fact, there has been a good bit of reins-seizing here in America of late.
Fortunately, there is an opportunity to correct some of this coming up in . . . oh . . . November.
What do you think?
Doesn’t he realize that he could hurt people’s feelings?
A true irony of it is that one of the “freaked out” pols is the Parti Quebecois leader. The Parti Quebecois, and the demographic it represents, owes its very existence to the Catholic Church. Recognizing that, up until after WWII, the only hope for the Quebecois’s continued existence in the face of rising Canadian-English demographics and fortunes was to stay rooted in its culture, which very much included Catholicism, the Church preserved the Quebecois for the day when it could assert itself.
Like so many other people who clung to the Faith when their fortunes were down, they seem to have forgotten it now. Long term, that’ll be their doom. As a party which apparently embraces secularism and abortion, they’ll loose their identity completely. To keep up Frenchness as it, the province already has to import the French speaking from outside Canada’s borders, who very often have no particular concern about anything “Quebecois”. So, in a generation or two, having forgotten the Church to quite an extent, Quebecois will be a term applying to a largely washed out cultural heritage.
I was in Canada once decades ago and in Montreal at that and in an art gallery front window was a bronze statue of a Catholic monk but with devil’s horns coming out of his head. I felt so in the prescence of evil at that moment and understand that I am used to Manhattan and had my art works myself in Manhattan Galleries uptown and in the Village and for all the bizarre things in Manhattan, I had never seen an actual explicit attack on the Church in the art world as I did in that one day in Montreal. I’m sure there are wonderful people up there but that brief impression was unfortunate and revelatory of some up there.
Quebecois French is famous (I would say infamous, but most people seem to think it it cool) for using Catholic words as curses.
Words that translate to sacrament, chalice, and tabernacle, have the metaphorical force of the English f-bomb and worse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity
Greek swear words really shocked me when I learnt their meaning e.g. a sexual act done to the Mother of God.
Perhaps the single most interesting thing about the example of the Quebecois is how a fairly religious people can loose Faith rapidly.
I’ll confess that I stem, in part, from a Quebecois heritage (only slightly). But at one time, they were defined by their faith. The English colonist in North American feared Quebec because it was Catholic, and Colonial writings at the time make that quite plain. Part of the rift between the Crown and the Colonist came because the Crown tolerated Catholicism in Quebec after the French and Indian Wars.
After that, the Church focused on the rural Quebecois, making sure that they could keep their land and that they persevered as a Catholic agrarian people, albeit with a strong Catholic urban population as well. Post WWII, as economic fortunes improved, just as we’ve seen in so much of Europe, people apparently felt that the comfort provided by the Church was no match for the superficial glitch of being able to do whatever you want.
Not that there aren’t still very Catholic Quebecois. I’m related to quite a few.
But, again, I think the Quebecois are doomed. Without Catholicism, they just aren’t, and will fade away.
I forgot to note that the Quebecois serve as a cautionary tale. Societies we regards as strongly Catholic, persevering in adversity, can become highly secular seemingly overnight. We humans really are children, who go crying to Mother and Father when hurt or scared, and running from them when we have all we want.
I pray for my misguided country. The culture of death has made particular inroads in Quebec (where I grew up). Satan’s attacks are well planned.
Actually, quite a lot of people in both English Canada and the US are descended from that very small group of French-Canadian settlers. It was one of the most fertile cultures in history, with a very low childhood mortality rate.
Now, the Quebecois culture might be dying out, but those French colonists have still got plenty of descendants outside Quebec who didn’t keep the language, but did keep the faith. My great-grandmother was the last generation to speak French in my family, but what she was proud of was her English-speaking grandchildren and great-grandchildren who still practiced their faith.