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From CatholicInsight.com Education The sound of Pope Benedict’s Easter greetings will soon ring out from St Peter’s Square. There are more than a billion Catholics in the world, from almost every tribe and tongue, and Urbi et Orbi addresses include an impressive effort to deliver a common message of peace in at least a few of those tongues – a symbolic redemption both from Babel and from the curse of Babel, where linguistic confusion shattered a monolithic and tyrannical culture at the cost of cultural unity as such. Here in Quebec, however, the Catholic Church is not quite what it used to be. It no longer provides the cultural glue it once did, and the government seems to fancy itself as heir to the Church’s redemptive role. The approach to unity it has adopted, to judge from the new curriculum promulgated by the Ministry of Education, is one language/many religions, rather than one religion/many languages. Not that denominational schools will soon be springing up again in the public system! Bills 109 and 118 abolished such schools in Quebec about a decade ago, requiring an amendment to Canada’s 1867 Constitution Act. More recently, Bill 95 took the secularization process still further by imposing a uniform religion and ethics curriculum on all schools, even private ones. Come September, when the new curriculum is first taught, the last remnants of the ancien régime will be eradicated. Many religions will now be displayed, but none will be confessed. “Normative Pluralism” as the ü he advisor in question (Pssor) , a university professor) the imposition of ongues of man ber-religion of the State It has not gone unnoticed that the new curriculum mandated by Bill 95 prides itself on diversity but comes with a “one size fits all” label. Indeed, from the government’s own point of view, it is imbued with the high moral purpose of making every young Quebecer (including my own school-aged children) into an ideological pluralist. As one government advisor, Georges Leroux, reportedly boasted: “Our children will be better than us because they will be more open to religious and moral diversity and more committed to normative pluralism. They will believe that it is preferable to be plural than homogeneous.”
Professor Leroux may as well have said “preferable to be homogeneous pluralists,” for that is really the goal. “Normative pluralism” is about suppressing diversity, not supporting it. In effect, it means no norms but the State’s norms. In a telling slip, the main consultation document for the new curriculum actually stated that the aim of the program is to “enable Québec students to develop a religious culture consistent with ministerial orientations.”
This appalling statism was particularly evident in Bill 95’s denial of family rights and of religious freedom. Stéphane Dion, who as Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs tabled the 1997 resolution to amend the Constitution Act, observed at the time that “the right to religious instruction is still guaranteed under section 41 of the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, a document that has quasi-constitutional status according to the Supreme Court of Canada.” But the guarantee proved worthless. When Bill 95 was passed in 2005, the Quebec Charter itself was amended – quite literally overnight, without any public debate and after a mere twelve hours of consultations particulières.
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 conceded 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! With barely a nod to the public, a public right was repealed. Even the underlying private right was qualified by the State’s power to override parental convictions about what is or is not in the best interests of children.
A protest from the Primate – and from a Pope Marc Cardinal Ouellet, Archbishop of Quebec – wisely accompanying his objections with an apology for the Church’s own heavy-handedness in a past era – voiced his opposition to all of this when he appeared late last year before the Bouchard-Taylor commission on reasonable accommodation. It is one thing to hold out the promise of unity on a “whosoever will” basis, he suggested. It is quite another thing to fashion unity out of diversity by suppressing parental rights and undertaking (however naively or ham-handedly) the social engineering of children.
Quebec politics being what they are, the primate garnered little support from his fellow Francophone bishops, for some of whom “one language” is already religion enough. There can be no doubt that he has the support of Pope Benedict, however. He also has the support of the only pope ever to have made a Canadian problem the subject of an encyclical – the redoubtable Leo XIII, who in December 1897 promulgated Affari Vos, On the Manitoba School Question. That is a document deserving to be read again today (more attention should have been paid to it in 1997) and its circumstances are worth recalling.
The Manitobia.ca Project (http://manitobia.ca) tells us that “the Manitoba Schools Question punched all the hot buttons of nineteenth century Canadian politics: it was a French-English issue, a Catholic-Protestant controversy, a conflict over the roles of the federal and provincial governments, and a struggle about the proper relationship between [the] Church and the State. It brought down a federal government and its shaky and ultimately short-lived resolution was a major defeat for French language and Catholic educational rights outside the province of Québec.”
Mutatis mutandis – lapsed Catholics in the civil service, for example, are more significant players than Protestants in this largely Catholic province – many of the same elements are in play, and those who take this business lightly are making a mistake. Whether there is any hope at all that the Quebec School Question will be settled the other way, perhaps bringing down the government of Jean Charest in the process, remains to be seen however. Mario Dumont, I note, has cautiously taken Ouellet’s side. Practising Catholics should do likewise, regardless of their political stripe, lest they merit Leo’s rebuke to their forebears. It was most deplorable, he complained, that “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.”
Leo described as “noxious” the 1890 law that struck down the publicly funded denominational schools in Manitoba. Cardinal Ouellet came very close to characterizing Bill 95 in the same terms. Why? Not merely because he thinks that any society must be reasonably secure in its own identity before it can be properly welcoming of others, and that Bill 95 will further undermine the historic identity of Quebec society by cutting it off from its Catholic roots, but also because he sees in Bill 95 what Leo would have seen in it – namely, an attack on religious freedom as such, and a transgression of the State against human liberty through an imposed, rather than a voluntary, unity.
Defending the rights of parents and the foundations of culture Pointing out that, historically, education in Canada was a gift of the Church to the State, not the other way round, Pope Leo reminded Canadians that the right to educate their children according to their own faith has always been regarded by Catholics as fundamental, and that this right goes much further than home or parish catechesis. “For our children [he said] 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… Similarly it is necessary to avoid at all costs, as most dangerous, 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.”
That, of course, is precisely what Bill 95 has mandated. For “normative pluralism” there is no truth of any consequence except normative pluralism, and no error of any consequence but its refusal. Why would Quebecers, even if asked nicely rather than compelled, entrust the religious and moral education of their children to those who adopt such a narrow and foolish creed? And would they not soon regret, even if not themselves Catholic, the loss of breadth they enjoyed in a basically Catholic education? According to Leo, “there is no class of study, no progress in human knowledge, which cannot fully harmonize with Catholic doctrine and teaching.” Make of that claim what you will, his commitment to the symphonic nature of truth is the best bulwark against the cynicism coiled at the roots of the new curriculum.
For the likes of Premier Charest and his advisors, it is the task of the State to replace the old and failing unity of Quebec society that derives from religion with the new and promising unity that derives from the politics of normative pluralism. For the likes of Cardinal Ouellet, on the other hand, “normative pluralism” is both an oxymoron and something rather more sinister. It is a pseudo-religion that promises nothing but further decline: “The real problem in Quebec is the spiritual vacuum created by a religious and cultural rupture, a substantial loss of memory, leading to a crisis of the family and education, leaving citizens confused, demoralized, prone to instability and relying on transient and superficial values. This spiritual and symbolic void inside Quebec culture disperses its vital energy and creates insecurity, for want of roots in and continuity with the sacramental and evangelical values that have nurtured it since its beginning.”
Quite so. Normative pluralism, which despises questions of truth and error in religion and worldview, is not so much a strong form of multiculturalism as a new monoculturalism. And this monoculturalism is at bottom an anti-culture, incapable of sustaining a city much less a world. To give Leo the last word: “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. And so, 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.”
Douglas Farrow is associate professor of Christian Thought at McGill University and the author of Nation of Bastards.
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