Review article.

Terence Fay, A history of Canadian Catholics, Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism. McGill/Queens University Press, Montreal, QC, 2002, pp. 392, Paper: $27.95, Cloth: $75.00, Cdn.

At least since Vatican Two, the Catholic Church has been in a state of theological civil war. On one side are legitimists, who justify their belief in a divinely ordained papacy by pointing to John Paul II, and on the other, revisionists, for whom our present pontiff's continued occupation of the throne of Saint Peter is the clearest possible sign that church government needs restructuring. Legitimists argue that the Holy Spirit chose John Paul to lead a world-wide crusade against neopaganism and the culture of death. Revisionists insist that, if he had had a human electorate to answer to, he would long ago have legalized artificial contraception, admitted women to the priesthood and given the okay to homosexual matrimony.

Revisionists

Most Catholics have had little difficulty accommodating themselves to this doctrinal stand-off. Revisionists, in the habit of gritting their teeth at pro-papal homilies, could always move to a church which offered less offensive sermonizing, as could legitimists, weary of Sunday exhortations on the spiritual significance of wind power. Nor has the quarrel over sexual sinning caused permanent bad blood. Users of contraceptives quickly learnt to seek absolution from priests who thought as they did on Humanae vitae, and after 1968 even that penitential subterfuge became unnecessary when the Canadian Catholic Conference of Bishops meeting at Winnipeg agreed to let the faithful home-school their own consciences. Concerned Catholics (a favourite revisionist euphemism for propagandists) have perhaps been most successful in adapting to wartime psychology. Having long ago made the willing suspension of disbelief in their opponents' credibility, they content themselves with keeping abreast of arguments supporting their version of the truth, available in English-speaking Canada to legitimists from Catholic Insight, and to revisionists from The New Catholic Times.

Historians

Church historians, however, constitute one class of Catholics who cannot allow themselves to indulge in such enlightened partisanship. They're supposed to be looking back through unjaundiced eyes. But in a time of civil war, from where is there a neutral vantage point to do so? They face the challenge of having to put into historical perspective a dispute that they themselves are party to. For them, Catholic Insight and The New Catholic Times are part of the problem, not the solution.

And what makes their task even less agreeable is the fact that these days the split between true believing schismatics and schismatic true believers is as evident among historians as it is among Catholic theologians. Studying Canadian history at graduate school in 1959,1 certainly remember scholarly disputes. What would a university department be without them? We used to argue over whether the determining factor in shaping European settlement in North America had been the western frontier or the imperial homeland. But this was by no means a fight to the last footnote. All of us could agree that, whatever modern Canadians owed to the spirit of democracy which may or may not have prevailed among our pioneering predecessors, the long arm of the British Empire has had a huge and beneficial impact on our national development. In that age of historiographical innocence, the word "imperialism" could still have a non-pejorative ring to it.

No longer. Today our most influential historians regard empire-builders as nothing less than international pirates. In our case, they filched Canada from its rightful owners--which means we are living on stolen property. Ask any grade-eighter how he thinks the West was won. British connection has become the sick joke of our history. No wonder its contemporary exponents prefer to shun the big picture, where possible confining themselves to specialized studies with uncontroversial implications, on the grounds that, in Jack Granatstein's words, "...if only we could understand how maids in Moosonee were treated, we could understand the place of women today." In this anti-imperialist age, where Canada as a whole came from is too uncomfortable a question to try answering.

Hats off, therefore to Father Terence J. Fay, S,J., who, in his latest book, A History of Canadian Catholics, never hesitates to generalize about either the Catholic Church or Canada. Here is no maids-in-Moosonee cop out. "This volume," Fay claims in its introduction, "uses the published insights of new history to construct an integrated and candid overview of Catholics in Canada."

Revisionist leanings

Alas, in these divided times, such impartiality is beyond human reach. No doubt to lend Canadian Catholics the necessary air of dispassionate broad-mindedness, Fay conceals from its readers the fact that he is a Jesuit priest, and has chosen to have it published jointly by two secular university presses as part of a series of studies in the history of religion. . .To no avail. The book's very first two sentences betray its author's revisionist leanings. "Formal Christianity has existed in North America for four hundred years," he begins. "Some Amerindians explain that Christ was known among the native people in their own terms centuries before the Europeans arrived." This distinction between formal and believe-it-yourself Christianity is central to revisionist thinking. What it does not imply, however, is that revisionists are Protestants. They support the idea of having a magisterium as strongly as the rest of us do. But it must be their magisterium. They want us to know Christ in green and feminist terms. A nd the fact that they think they see in aboriginal culture concern for the environment and respect for the personhood of women explains why they favour letting aboriginals make up their own Christology as they go along.

Such self-propagandizing is what revisionists call inculturation, a missionary technique which, in Fay's words, "consists not in imposing religious culture from without, but in animating the sense of God within..." You don't convert non-Catholics, argues Fay; you trade spiritualities with them, as, so he claims, did Jesuit missionaries with Huron animists in the early seventeenth century. The Jesuits learnt to appreciate the prayerfulness of sweat lodging. Their neophytes received the sacramental graces to be derived from becoming Catholic. As Fay would have it, moreover, in this exchange the missionaries necessarily came out on top. For here is a central dogma of revisionism: we learn more from members of other religions than they do from us. Sweat lodges are nearer to God than rosary crusades. At the battle of Roncesvalles between Christendom and Islam in the eighth century, Roland, last-ditch defender of the French rear guard, comforts himself with the thought that pagans are wrong and Christians are right . Today's Catholic revisionists take for granted that the opposite is true. Pagans are right; Christians wrong. But that's because revisionists are defining what paganism is.

Siding with the enemy

This siding with the enemy to promote one's own cause is, of course, a key strategy employed by the "new" historians whom Granatstein so eloquently deplores. Fay is the Catholic equivalent of a new historian. Invariably he takes the side of those who resist the authority of Rome. But only because he wants to usurp Roman authority for his own purposes. Legitimists obstruct those purposes; therefore, he dismisses them as anti-Catholic paranoids. Or, to use his favourite code word to mean the same thing: ultramontanes, his put-down of mid-19th-century Ontario parents who worried about what they saw as modernist tendencies at the then recently founded St. Jerome's College in Guelph.

"To the open-minded, ultramontane Catholics seemed obsessed with the dangers of secular education, especially the mixing of sexes. They believed secular education would lead to religious indifference, and that God spoke only through the voice of the Church." For liberal Catholics, Fay goes on, "The college... was a bright light in the sombre sky of ultramontane loyalism hovering over Canada." Plus ca change. Fay's visceral commitment to new history is even more clearly captured in a remark he makes about the great Catholic social activist and founder of the Antigonish Movement, Father Moses Coady. "Although a theological conservative," Fay says of Coady, "he was a social radical."

Moving leftwards

Since Vatican lithe centre of ideological gravity at Rome has moved leftwards. Hence revisionists are faced with having to sanitize ever more radical agendas. Fay, for example, now finds himself in the same corner as Joanna Manning. Possessor of a degree in theology from Regis College, Manning, as Fay tells us, having carefully read and analyzed the papal encyclicals including Mulieris dignitatem (dignity of woman), perceived from this last document (how else could she have done so but by using ESP?) that the Pope, when describing women as 'equal but different,' "really meant that women should be dependent, passive and remain below men in the chain of being."

But even more of a bombshell for Manning was John Paul's 1994 pronouncement against women's ordination. Its ferocity, she tells us, left her "stunned" so stunned, in fact, that she had half a mind to leave the Church. Another shell-shocked feminist, Mary Malone, then teaching at St. Jerome's College, actually did leave it. This "well educated and well-loved committed Catholic", in Fay's words "fell into loose union with Rome because she experienced it as endemically patriarchal;" and finally, her eyes opened to its oppressiveness ". . .preferred to pursue God in freedom outside its restrictive embrace." For Fay her gain was our loss. Once admitted to the priesthood, women, he predicts, "would transform the sectarian history of Catholicism into a world view and help the Graeco-Roman church slough off its exclusiveness and open itself to universality."

Demonizing the orthodox

By embracing the far left, revisionists have found themselves obliged to demonize the near right. It is surely a compliment to Opus Dei, Communion and Liberation, Focolare and the Pro-Life Movement that as well as canonizing Joanna Manning and Mary Malone, Fay takes the trouble to excommunicate these four mildest mannered of legitimist organizations. But he has to, because they are, as he rightly understands, among the most effective upholders of the current Vatican regime he is so eager to see chased from office. Thus he revives some antiquated libels against Opus Dei, without mentioning the great service it performs for Catholic laity. Strangely enough, he leaves his readers in the dark about what he has against Communion and Liberation and Focolare, concentrating instead, as he puts it "for the sake of brevity", on skewering pro-lifers. Which skewering takes the form of a diatribe against Campaign Life Coalition whose members Fay accuses of joining forces with discontented traditionalists in encouraging "t he factional division of Canadian Catholics." Fay knows where his enemies are.

Style

Let's not, however, be too hard on him. He is a revisionist and therefore can hardly be blamed for arguing like one. Something one can hold him to account for is stylistic sloppiness. His writing abounds in mixed metaphors. On page 43, for example, we learn that Bishop Plessis "...made a number of attempts to subdivide the geography of his diocese;" on page 119 that "St Jerome's College was a good omen on the Catholic horizon." And on pages 313 and 314 that "the women's movement and native rights are the cutting edge of the churches in Canada today." But these are trivial blemishes, no doubt attributable to lazy proofreading. With or without revision, A History of Canadian Catholics is a blockbuster. By now it has reached the shelves of libraries, in schools, colleges and universities across Canada. A generation is about to graduate for whom the assertion that Pope John Paul hates women will have become axiomatic. (+)