Quebec bishops allow schools to drop religion. English Catholics angry (Canada).

Quebec-The Montreal Catholic Times (MTS) of June, 2000, reports that Quebec's Minister of Education, Francois Legault, tabled legislation on May 10 to abolish confessional schools within the new linguistic system introduced in 1999.

That earlier change to linguistic divisions required the removal of the constitutional guarantees for Catholic and Protestant schools in the BNA Act of 1867. Quebec's bishops went along with these changes on the grounds that what counts for French-speaking Quebeckers is the Quebec Civil Rights Code and not the new (Anglo) Canadian constitution (which Quebec has never signed).

In May of this year the Minister took the second step and proposed the elimination of all religious units within the two linguistic streams of English and French's schools. All schools will be completely secular.

Again, the Quebec bishops are not concerned. "We will not go to war over maintaining the confessional status of schools," said Quebec auxiliary Bishop Jean-Pierre Blais, chairman of the bishops' education committee, in a telephone interview with MCT on May 9.

Said Bishop Blais. "The school does not belong to us. It does not belong to the Church or to the government. The school belongs to the society, not to the bishops." He forgot to mention that the schools belong to the parents and that over the last 2000 years, bishop everywhere in the world have supported the call of Catholic parents for Catholic schools. Just recently the Holy Father called for the Catholic schools. Just recently the Holy Father called for the right of Italian Catholic parents to proper Catholic schooling for their children.

But no longer in Quebec. Here the hierarchy is confident that Catholicity will survive in the schools of rural Quebec without the support of rural Quebec without the support of institutional structures. Bishop Blais believes, that if a school is majority Catholic, the "pastoral animation" will remain Catholic, just under a different name.

He will almost certainly be proven wrong. The experience elsewhere is that it takes only one bitterly secular, anti-Catholic parent in a school, to stop practices which are not specifically mandated in law. It also takes only a few "secular-minded bureaucrats" to revamp a formerly Catholic religion course into secular propaganda.

The Anglo-Catholics in Montreal and elsewhere, meanwhile, look upon the Parti Quebecois proposals as a straightforward betrayal of what had been promised them.

The editorial in MCT's June issue is entitled "Betrayal!" It sees the proposed removal of Catholic schools-- after the loss last year of Catholic boards--as nothing less than deceit.

Already last September, 1999, the new English linguistic school board in Montreal moved into the former "Protestant" (really secular) headquarters and began to insist that English Catholic schools be closed or put under secular control. The Anglo-Jewish community of 100,000, for example, has watched the constitutional demise of Catholic schools with glee. Today they can insist on total secularity. Take a few years and Catholicity in the Montreal schools will have vanished.