Grave thoughts.

I am the daughter of a Canadian patriot, a naval veteran of World War II, a loving husband and father of ten children, a successful businessman whose retirement was spent as an ordained deacon who quietly performed countless acts of charity in churches, hospitals and private homes that I will never know about.

I knew him as Daddy, then Dad, a handsome man whose boundless energy was devoted to our mother and to each of us from our births to his death on January 2 of this year.

How blessed we were with love and with happiness, dual graces which in turn helped every one of us through the difficulties that are an inevitable part of family life. Of these, two struggles in particular stand out as I ponder Dad's life in the days after his burial January 6.

The first was the health of our beloved sister Celeste who, after a life-long struggle with diabetes and its complications, died in October 1980, leaving our parents in profound grief yet unshaken in their Catholic faith.., and us with a bevy of warm memories of our sister, as fresh today as they were 25 years ago.

The second struggle was more universal, a struggle experienced by a generation of happy families who found themselves clashing head-on with what is now known simply as "the Sixties," a decade in which no principle or belief went unchallenged, even the existence of God Who was the bedrock and cornerstone of our family.

In the crosshairs of that tumultuous and destructive era was Dad's--and therefore our family's--steadfast belief that the faithful practice of the Catholicism in which we had been so carefully raised would result in the life God intended for each and every one of us.

He was absolutely right, of course. But in those chaotic days when we were young and naive "children of the sixties" we thought we knew better. We soon mended our prodigal ways, however, when life itself confirmed the truth of what Dad had been saying all along. Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all else will be added unto you.

What has not changed, however, is the ongoing attack on religion in general and Catholicism in particular which became a central topic in the ongoing conversation I've been having with my parents since I was born. At the breakfast table, being tucked into bed, over homework, over the telephone and during long visits to my parents' Toronto home, where early in the morning and late into the night, we would talk, talk and talk on all our favourite topics which invariably included politics, history and one of my father's grandest passions, Canada.

"I find the state of Canada so depressing," Dad lamented in one marathon discussion during a recent trip home in October. "This is not the country I was born into. This is a country losing its soul and its way without realising it and oblivious to the consequences."

In recent months, Dad had been particularly distressed by the arbitrary and undemocratic imposition of same-sex "marriage" on Canada, a move he viewed as the most blatant proof yet that a once coherently-Christian Canada is being systematically dismantled by judges and politicians too blinded by worthless ideologies to understand the enormity of what they are doing.

Nor would the Boxing Day shooting that killed 15-year-old Jane Creba have surprised him, though it would have depressed him further, not because he was a pessimist but because he believed the country was already suffering the consequences of the effective removal of the cornerstone of Christ from the edifice we call Canada and that we would face worse in the future as a result.

How long can a building stand after its foundation has been been removed? Only God knows but you can bet the farm that the paper tiger called the Charter of Rights and Freedoms will not prevent its destruction.

How will it happen? Again, only God knows, but I thank God that Dad has been spared seeing the further costs to his beloved Canada charged by my generation and the foul, faithlesss and foolish teachings they've been passing on to the next generation which deserves so much better.

Oh, it's not THAT bad, you might argue. I hope you're right, and that these grave thoughts can be simply attributed to the mournful musings of a woman who's just lost her adored dad.

Still, the death of Jane Creba stands out in my mind as a watershed event, first because it occurred the day after Christmas--my family's favourite day of the year--and secondly, because minutes after Creba was lying dead on Yonge Street and ambulances were arriving by the dozen, shoppers continued to hunt for bargains, unfazed by what had just happened and heedless of the implications.

Which are these: the daughter of an apparently happy family had just been senselessly killed, not because of poverty or because there are too few "social programs" for her killers) but because, in Canada, the family is under vicious and relentless attack by smiling politicians, judges and social engineers who seek to replace God and the family--from cradle to grave--with themselves.

Poor Canada.

Paula Adamick is the daughter of Deacon St Clair recent book Living Heaven was published by the Life Ethics Information Centre, 104 Bond Street, Toronto M5B 1X9 in October 2005.