ANTIRELIGIOUS CANADA

Edmonton Sun - May 19, 2002
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/byfield.html
Canada becoming anti-religious
By TED BYFIELD

If Canadian Christians, particularly Catholics, are becoming somewhat paranoid these days and forming the impression that the direction of Canadian public policy is the enfeeblement, if not the outright eradication, of the serious practice of their religion, that's because they're being given so much evidence of it.

The federal prohibition on any mention of God at the Sept. 11 memorial service was merely a minor instance. There are several major ones.

Example: An Ontario court last week ordered a Catholic school to lift its ban on two young men attending a school dance as a couple because, said the court, homosexual rights take priority over religious rights. So 17-year-old Marc Hall and his boyfriend turned up at the Monsignor John Pereyma Catholic high school in Oshawa, successfully defying the school and the Catholic school board.

The implications are horrendous. Protestant schools, Orthodox Jewish and Muslim schools all teach that homosexual activity is sinful. If they are forced by the state to accept it in their own social functions, how can they convincingly teach it? And how long before they're forced to quit teaching it, subverting their own scripturally founded principles to the dictates of Mr. Justice Somebody-or-Other?

This case will undoubtedly be appealed. But it is not unique. In British Columbia, a Catholic school at Fort St. John introduced a rule that its teachers must be practising Catholics - which meant, among other things, not living together unless married. The B.C. Labour Relations Board ordered the school to rescind the rule, and the bishop of Prince George - reasoning that if a Christian school couldn't require its teachers to observe Christian morality, it couldn't be a Christian school - closed it down. The board last month ruled that the bishop had acted improperly, presumably opening a new human rights case against the church.

Which, of course, reflects the famous Vriend case in Alberta wherein a Christian college fired a teacher for advocating homosexual conduct to the students and was condemned by courts for doing so.

Consider what such rulings, if upheld, will do to the real crisis facing the Catholic Church, first in the United States and now spreading to Canada. That problem is portrayed as one of pedophilia among priests, which has cost the American church an estimated $1.5 billion in out-of-court settlements. However, it's now evident that almost all the victims were not children but boys in their teens.

Philip Jenkins, in a recent book, Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis, points out that the term pedophilia refers to sex with pre-pubescent children. It's extremely rare among Catholic clergy, writes Jenkins (who is not a Catholic), occurs slightly more often in Protestant clergy, and is more likely still to occur among laymen than clergy.

The victims in the American cases are almost all boys who are sexually mature but under the age of consent. It's technically called "ephebophilia." Leon Podles, writing on the same subject in Touchstone magazine, writes: "Homosexuals are often attracted to very young men because they combine the charm of boyishness with sexual maturity."

In the period of 1960 to 1980, when the abuse cases now being prosecuted occurred, says Jenkins, there were an average of 150,000 Catholic priests in the U.S., and about 500 reported (not proved) cases of sexual involvement with minors, a rate of around one-third of one per cent. Most of the cases involved boys 15 to 17 years old.

This means that what the church faces is not a pedophile problem, but a gay problem, and here the evidence against the church is serious. There are no statistics on the percentage of Catholic priests that are gay.

Podles quotes the head of one seminary as citing a figure of anywhere from 20% to 80% depending on the seminary. Jenkins favours the 20% figure, but even this is nearly eight times the population average.

In this circumstance, the Vatican is pressuring the North American Catholic Church to screen out gays from the ministry. But if that's against the law, the church would be prohibited from cleaning up its most pressing problem.

Put all these pieces together and you see why Christians have a growing sense of alienation from Canada itself. It's not becoming a non-religious country but an anti-religious one, a very different phenomenon.

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