Cardinal Carter at 90.

The editor of Toronto's Catholic Register, Joseph Sinasac, marked Cardinal Gerald Emmett Carter's 90th birthday, on March 1, with an article based on an inter-view entitled "Cardinal Carter marks milestone" (C.R., March 17/02). The Cardinal is disabled after the ill effects of two strokes but continues to receive friends and well-wishers including those from the political world. He remains proud of his record of reaching out to politicians.

Mr. Sinasac notes that "Carter believes that if he has made a significant difference in the Canadian Church, particularly the Church in Toronto, it was in releasing Catholics from their embattled minority syndrome." The Cardinal sees the equal funding of Catholic schools in Ontario, announced by Conservative Premier William Davis in June 1984, as a major part of this achievement.

Editor Sinasac also notes that "Carter was never one to avoid a battle. In 1968, he helped draft a response to the controversial encyclical Humanae vitae, in which Paul VI had confirmed the Church's traditional opposition to artificial contraception. The response, which underlined the individual Catholic's duty to use informed conscience to make a decision about birth control, earned him the ire of traditionalists. He never regretted the bishops' stand."

The bishops' response to Humanae vitae is known as the Winnipeg Statement of September 1968.

Comment:

Two comments seem in order, one on Humanae vitae, and one on Catholics as a minority. Msgr. Vincent Foy writes as follows:

The Cardinal and conscience:

Unfortunately, this (Winnipeg) commentary did not "underline the individual Catholic's duty to use informed conscience to make a decision about birth control."

An accurately informed conscience would know that the Church declared with the authority of Christ that contraception is intrinsically evil (Humanae vitae, n.6 and n.14). It would know that it is not licit for the gravest reason to do evil so that good may come of it (Ibid n.14). It would be aware that contraception is to be judged objectively as so profoundly unlawful, as never to be, for any reason, justified (Pope John Paul II, October 8, 1983). It would know also that an informed conscience is to be conformed to the truth in this vital matter (cf. Vatican II, The Church in the Modern World, n.51).

The Winnipeg Statement of 1968, tragically, did not say these things. It erroneously said that there were circumstances in which the spouses could be told that "they may be safely assured that, whoever honestly chooses that course which seems right to him does so in good conscience" (n.26).

The misguided Winnipeg Statement would falsely give spouses the divine prerogative of deciding what was good and what was evil in moral law. It is, in a true sense, a blasphemy. We are not surprised to hear that Pope John Paul II declared "that to say there are circumstances in which contraception would be legitimate is equal to maintaining that in human life a situation may arise in which it is lawful not to recognize God as God" (L' Osservatore Romano, October 10/83).

That is the tragedy of the Winnipeg Statement. Thousands of Catholic couples have invoked it as a justification for practising contraception. Its effects have been disastrous. It is anti-God, anti-Church, anti-society, anti-family, anti-spousal, and anti-self.

In fairness to Cardinal Carter, it must be said that in a private letter dated June 15, 1995, he said "I am not prepared to defend paragraph 26 totally. I think we might have found a more lucid way of expressing our ideas." In a sense, the phraseology was misleading and could give the impression that the bishops were saying that one was free to dissent at will from the Pope's teaching. It would be immensely helpful if this and a full retraction of the errors in the Winnipeg Statement were publicly stated.

"Minority syndrome"

The Cardinal's view that Catholics have been released from "their embattled minority syndrome," suggests that this was a good thing. What we also have to acknowledge however, is--or so it seems to me--that the Catholic community of yesterday has been dissolved and immersed into a secular environment in which the Catholic faith has become invisible.

We no longer seem to have Catholic politicians, only politicians whose Catholic faith is so very, very private that it no longer has an effect on what they say or do. (Please see Editorial on page 3 "A litmus test of MPs.")