Exorcise Catholic dissenters.

Fifty years ago, the overwhelming majority of Canadians--Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical and secular--understood that fornication, adultery, sodomy, abortion and assisted suicide are immoral. What has happened in the meantime ? How have so many Canadians been deluded into thinking that there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these evils ?

At the root of the problem is a disposition to rely entirely upon human reason as a guide to moral understanding. Even many theologians, Catholic and Protestant, are given to this error: they contend that the basic moral precepts revealed in the Bible and expounded by the Church are no longer relevant to today's world.

Father Josef Fuchs, SJ, (died 2005) has been one of the most influential exponents of this viewpoint. In a collection of essays written between 1988 and 1992 entitled Moral Demands and Personal Obligations, he argued that "Neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament produces statements that are independent of culture and thus universal and valid for all time; nor can these statements be given by the Church or its Magisterium. Rather, it is the task of human beings--of the various persons who have been given the requisite intellectual capacity to investigate what can and must count as a conviction about these responsibilities."

Jesus, of course, had a decidedly different viewpoint. He advised the young man who asked what he must do to have eternal life that he must obey the ten commandments and love his neighbour as himself. In contrast, many liberal theologians counsel that a loving person can in good conscience ignore the moral commandments of the Bible against fornication and adultery. In a 1979 study commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society of America entitled, Human Sexuality: New Directions in American Catholic Thought, a team of theologians led by Father Anthony Kosnik of Detroit went so far as to declare that "All else being equal, a homosexual engaging in homosexual acts in good conscience has the same rights of conscience and the same rights to the sacraments as a married couple practicing birth control in good conscience."

Pope John Paul II repudiated such heretical teaching. In his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendour of Truth), he pointed out that the Bible and the Church have always taught that unaided human reason is not a reliable guide to moral truths. Therefore, he warned the faithful that instead of attempting to devise their own moral rules, they should recognize "the dependence of human reason on Divine Wisdom and the need, given the present state of fallen nature, for Divine Revelation as an effective means for knowing moral truths, even those of the natural order."

In particular, John Paul emphasized the continuing relevance of "the law which God gave to the Chosen People, beginning with the commandments on Sinai." He counselled that the fundamental negative commandments of the Bible such as "you shall not steal," "you shall not kill" and "you shall not commit adultery" are not antiquated precepts, but universal moral rules that "oblige each and every individual, always and in every circumstance."

In conformity with this authoritative teaching, Pope Benedict XVI undertook in his former capacity as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to advise Catholic theologians that they must acknowledge these basic precepts of Christian morality as a condition for teaching in a Catholic institution. In response, some dissenters quit their teaching posts. Others, including Kosnik, decided to leave the priesthood altogether. Meanwhile, most leaders of the mainline Protestant churches continue, in varying degrees, to embrace the kind of value relativism advocated by Fuchs. And the same goes for a multitude of laymen, including judicial activists in the appellate courts of Canada. These judges are especially apt to presume that they have "the requisite intellectual capacity" to devise by the light of their own unaided reason a new moral and legal order suitable for our time.

In the 1993 Rodriguez case, former chief justice Antonio Lamer of the Supreme Court of Canada made this pretension plain. In addressing the issue of assisted suicide, he said: "In my opinion, the Court should answer this question without reference to the philosophical and theological considerations fuelling the debate on the morality of suicide or euthanasia." As justification for this assertion, he contended that "the Charter has established the essentially secular nature of Canadian society."

In fact, the Charter has done no such thing. In the preamble, it unequivocally states: "Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law." Sir William Blackstone likewise held in his authoritative Commentaries on the Laws of England that the common law derives its moral authority from the natural law. Blackstone explained: "This law of nature, being co-eval with mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original."

Not so, say Canada's judicial activists. Time and again, they have repudiated not only the natural and divine law, but also the common law, the statute laws and the Constitution of Canada as originally understood. On the pretence of upholding the Charter, these judges purport that they are entitled to impose new laws of their own devising on Canadians. Thus, in the Rodriguez case, Lamer and three of his Supreme Court colleagues came within one vote of legalizing assisted suicide on the patently absurd ground that the right to life, liberty and security of the person in section 7 of the Charter implicitly includes the right to choose death by suicide.

Similarly, in a unanimous ruling in Halpern in 2003, Chief Justice Roy McMurtry, Mr. Justice James MacPherson and Madam Justice Eileen Gillese of the Ontario Court of Appeal unilaterally wrote same-sex marriage into law on the ground that the common law definition of marriage as the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman allegedly violates the equality rights of homosexuals in section 15 of the Charter. Lamer and Gillese are both Catholics. Yet they, no less than Catholic politicians like Prime Minister Paul Martin and his predecessor Jean Chretien, have no compunction about imposing new laws and policies on Canadians that clearly contradict the basic precepts of the Bible and the authoritative teachings of the Catholic Church.

Nonetheless, the great majority of Canada's Catholic bishops refuse to discipline these errant Catholic judges and politicians. Correspondingly, many of the Protestant leaders who still uphold the plain words of the Bible as the ultimate authority on all questions of faith and morality are also reluctant to discipline their prominent parishioners who flagrantly violate Christian truth.

These timid clerics need to be reminded that Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pope John Paul II, and all of the other great Christian leaders of the past were made of sterner stuff: They spoke truth to power. They openly and fearlessly defended the faith once delivered to the saints. On no other basis can the Church long survive.

Rory Leishman is a national affairs columnist for the London Free Press in London, Ontario. His homepage is www.roryleishman.com