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From CatholicInsight.com Biographies Claude Ryan Toronto— In our April issue, pp. 30-31, we praised deceased Quebec politician and thinker Claude Ryan but noted certain deficiencies with respect to Church teaching on abortion and same sex “marriage” items which seemed to be overlooked in the fulsome praise bestowed on Mr. Ryan by political and clerical leaders alike. Then, in the April 2004 edition of the pro-life monthly The Interim, Mr Luc Gagnon, who writes a regular column from Montreal, provided specific details. He points out that Ryan was influenced by Trudeau’s magazine Cité Libre and its liberal understanding of things Catholic. In the early 1970s, therefore, he writes. “Ryan as editor of the Montreal daily Le Devoir took a weak attitude toward abortionist Henry Morgentaler” whose abortuary was illegal under Canadian and Quebec law. While agreeing with the Court’s condemnation of Morgentaler in 1974, after the second acquittal in 1976 Ryan blamed the law and not Morgentaler, calling for the law’s removal on the ground that public opinion was changing. Thereafter his “Catholic” paper adjusted its views to the liberal interpretation of tolerance and consensus. Until the end of his life he remained opposed to what he called “an abortion crusade.” Similarly, when he was Minister of Education in Robert Bourassa’s Liberal government he presided over the abolition of Catholic Boards of Education, setting in motion a movement which eventually saw the last Catholic public schools disappear in 2001. Again, his more recent disapproval of same-sex “marriage” was undermined by his ready acceptance of homosexual civil unions. Already this notion has been overthrown. At the end of March 2004, the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled civil unions unacceptable and declared itself on the side of the B.C. and Ontario courts whose judges have ordered the federal government to declare the definition of marriage unconstitutional. We thank Mr. Gagnon for this additional information. © Copyright 2003-2006 by CatholicInsight.com |