Attacks on Catholicism. (News in Brief: Canada).

Christianity in Canada finds itself the object of ridicule and hate. This is nothing new but here are several current examples:

* The Mexican movie The crime of Father Amaro, a box office success in its own country and now released to wider audiences, throws in every thrust against Catholicism it possibly can. The young priest, Father Amaro, has a sexual relationship with a young, virginal, spiritually devout Mexican girl while he quotes from the Song of Songs. The local, elderly priest sanitizes dirty drug money to finance a hospital. A crazed woman feeds communion wafers to her cats; and, into the mix, the film throws pregnancy, abortion, and other issues to tantalize the audience and further ridicule the Catholic Church.

* Mike Bullard, the overrated, definitely unfunny host of the Toronto TV show Open Mike with Mike Bullard (yes, the same show that Carolyn Parrish, MP, made use of to communicate to the country her derogatory remarks about Americans) was well within Canadian standards to ridicule Catholic priests on his show in a satirical skit featuring priests and young boys. The Catholic Civil Rights League protested but the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council (CB SC) ruled that the skits were legitimate satire.

* Speaking of CBSC, it has issued a warning that the movie The Thomas Crown Affair is suitable for those 18 years of age and older--unless you are in Quebec, where 13-year-olds are considered mature enough for the steamy, explicit sex scenes. As the CBSC states: "It's not that we don't want to protect Quebec children...but we can't impose standards from elsewhere across Canada on a society that sees things differently." Apparently Canadian standards do not apply to Quebec, which is hardly surprising considering that its suicide rate is twice that of the rest of the country, it has the world's lowest birth rate and the nation's highest abortion rate, and 41% of Quebec parents would "welcome their teens' sex partners into their homes overnight" (as compared to only 13% in English Canada).

* Bernice Morgan has written a beautiful novel of early life in Newfoundland called Random Passage, which was made into a TV movie and presented to Canadian audiences this winter. This highly lauded novel, which according to critics is historically accurate, was nevertheless toyed with by the time it reached the small screen. As Brother J. B. Darcy pointed out in the Monitor (Feb. 2003), their treatment of Bishop Fleming (1829-1850) and of the building of the cathedral was wildly inaccurate, "Their ability to pack so many inaccuracies into such a short space of time is astonishing," he noted. Bishop Fleming was depicted as a scheming, overbearing, insensitive, and dishonest man rather than one who worked tirelessly for the rights of the poor against the tyranny of the merchant class.

* Michele Landsberg is the Canadian Catholic basher supreme. Nary a week goes by that her Toronto Star article doesn't have some sneaky or blatant slap at the Catholic Church. In her March 9/03 column she had this little tidbit about those who oppose AIDS funding for countries that offer family planning (read "abortion"): "While President Bush rants on about the "axis of evil," he has long allied his regime with the world's most oppressively misogynist powers. Just last spring, the United States joined forces with Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and the Vatican (what a panoply of enlightenment) to strong-arm the United Nations Special Session on Children."

* Another Catholic basher, this one in the Globe, is Gerald Caplan, like Landsberg, also Jewish. For the third time in three years (this time in an article attacking President Bush) he falls back on his own report of the Rwanda massacre (1994) which he co-authored with Stephen Lewis (Landsberg's husband). In it he and Lewis falsely accuse the Church of having "betrayed" Rwanda. This time, in passing, he also kicked the Church for opposing war. "It is true that many others abandoned Rwanda as well, most notably those passionate opponents of the impending war against Iraq: France and the Catholic Church, both, with unparalleled influence within Rwanda, could very possibly have stopped the genocide before it began. Neither even tried."

* Last fall Vision TV was proud to show the documentary Condoms, Fish, and Circus Tricks examining the AIDS crisis in Africa. Made by Quebec film makers Brenda and Robert Rooney, the film discovers that there is "a quiet revolution taking place." What is it? Oh, hey, "Young people are talking for the first time about safe sex." Great!

Condom sex is as safe as Russian roulette with a loaded gun put to your head, with a one-in-five chance of getting killed on the first try, and a 100 per cent kiss of death if you keep pulling the trigger.