Our civil religion. (Editor).

The May editorial called for resistance on the part of Catholic and Evangelical MPs in Ottawa with respect to embryonic stem-cell research legislation. I appealed to their Christian convictions, and their respect for the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. After all, issues such as this, abortion in 1969, and many others such as euthanasia are first and foremost moral-religious issues. They are "political" only in the sense that, since the middle nineteen-sixties, legislators in the Western world felt pressured to abandon existing Christian standards and replace them with new ones of their own making.

Jean Chretien, our Prime Minister, doesn't like to hear this. Jane Taber reported in the National Post (May 2) that Chretien told the Liberal caucus on May 1st that the "best decision" he made after September 11 was not to have a priest speak at the memorial service on Parliament Hill. Apparently the PM spoke for almost 10 minutes "about the dangers of mixing religion and politics and about the Catholic Church." One MP described it as a "rant."

It is not clear what caused this outburst. But some may remember how during the federal elections of November 2000, the PM suffered a similar experience, threatening that if issues like abortion were to be brought up, he was prepared to fight "a Church vs. State" battle.

On May 1st he also mentioned his 1985 autobiography. There he claims that in the Quebec of his youth "people were excommunicated for their liberalism which advocated the separation of the church and the state." Whether or not this was actually so I cannot say. What should be clear, however, is that the "separation of church and state" is not an invention of the Liberals. It dates to Pope Gelasius I (pope from 492-496) who explained to the Emperor in 494 that there are two authorities, not just the temporal one but also the spiritual, and that both should work together for the common good. Of the two, the spiritual power cannot and must not allow itself to be controlled by the temporal power because, although both are divinely created, the spiritual power deals with the higher good, eternal life. That's how it stands today. In other words, the Catholic Church not only has the right to defend what belongs to the spiritual order but it has the duty to do so, regardless of whether we live in a "pluralistic" soci ety. That's what the May editorial was all about.

Catholic laity

Last month I also reflected briefly on the view of Cardinal Gerald Emmett Carter that in the last three decades Catholics in Ontario have been released from "their embattled minority syndrome" ("Carter at 90," p.11). Perhaps, I said, this wasn't a great step forward. We no longer have Catholic politicians, I wrote, only politicians whose Catholic faith is so very, very private that it no longer has an effect on what they say or do.

Shortly after that a friend gave me a copy of the English weekly Catholic Herald, edition of April 28. In reviewing a book on how King George IV in the late 18th century had to keep his marriage to the Catholic Maria Fitzherbert a secret, the editor, William Oddie, quoted another writer as saying how in the early twentieth century Englishmen were still very conscious that at the Reformation England had chosen the Protestant side.

To be a Catholic, in a sense, was to be disloyal to the national history; this was a feeling so deep-rooted, Oddie noted, that it was universally remarked on the death of Basil Cardinal Hume (d. 1999) that one of his greatest achievements was making people feel that there was nothing intrinsically unEnglish about being a Catholic.

Our acclimatisation has come comparatively recently, the editor noted. So Catholics in Britain too have been released from "their embattled minority syndrome." But apparently at the same cost. As English Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor put it not long ago, Catholics now exist only at the margin of English society. How strange, one may think, that at the very moment Catholics are accepted, they no longer count.

A reflection on the United States shows that the same theme finds confirmation there. In 1961, John Kennedy, the first Catholic President of the United States, had to appear before a large gathering of Baptist and Methodist ministers in Houston, Texas, to assure them he would not take orders from the Pope.

Today no one questions American Catholics about the Pope. Although represented in large numbers in Congress, they have become so "acceptable" that they seem to have forgotten that Christianity demands different behaviour from them than from others. Numbers of Catholic Senators, and Congressmen and women, regularly vote for pro-abortion measures, even gruesome partial-birth abortion.

My preliminary observation is that so many Catholic politicians are not prepared to stand up for key Christian principles at this moment in time because of an overwhelmingly pagan and hedonistic influence in our society. But it is the duty of other Catholics to call them back to their responsibility. There are many Catholics in the Liberal party in Ottawa. And we must not give up on them. The more de-Christianized society becomes, said John Paul II last March, the greater the need for laity and priests of "radical faith."