Toronto dissenters during WYD. (News in Brief).

Toronto -- During World youth Day week, July 22-29, 2002, Toronto's professional Catholic dissenters were given hospitality by the Anglicans' downtown Trinity Church for their activities as an "alternative" church. Although small in numbers (perhaps two dozen of them), their ideas fitted those of the secular media --married priests, women's ordination, adoption of flexible morality, acceptance of birth control, abortion, euthanasia, and homosexual liaisons, an end to male domination--in short, the destruction of the old Church and the creation of a new one based on democratic principles. A howler to the orthodox, but taken seriously by the wise men of press, radio, and TV.

Mary Ramerman of the schismatic Catholic community in Rochester, New York, was there to celebrate the Eucharist. When she was "ordained" last November, Joanna Manning gave a glowing account of it in the Catholic New Times for December (see also C.l., March, 2002, p.31). Ramerman is now excommunicated (compare Austria in this issue, p.30).

Joanna Manning's group, formerly known as "Concerned Catholics" and "We are Church," appeared this time under the title "Challenge the Church." They were hailed as defenders of truth and freedom by such people as Jim Coyle in the Toronto Star, and Michael Valpy in the Globe--but above all, by CBC 9 p.m. Newsworld, which championed their cause throughout the entire week.

As a National Post editorial put it, "The CBC remains rigorously uninspired and pursues the marginal story of anti-Catholic political activism as though it were of roughly equal scale and importance." Speaking of the CBC's "jaded editors and its bias against Catholic doctrine," it thought that what was more telling this week was the public broadcaster's inability to deal with the big issue that World Youth Day raises (July 27).

Members

The group's website listed its partners as the European dissenters of "We are Church" (see Austria); Catholics for Women's Equality; the AIDS committee of Toronto; Survivors network; Can. Abortion Rights Action League (CARAL); and the Anti Capitalist Convergence (from Quebec, the ones who desecrated Notre Dame's Basilica in Montreal).

The main personalities were described as Mary Bayer (former nun, contributor to sex education programs); Melanie Baudot and Lisa Cristini (two recent graduates of Peterborough's St. Peter's secondary school); their former English teacher Rosemary Ganley (a long time feminist teacher, who in 1993 announced in the Catholic New Times (CNT) that she was fed up and could no longer attend the male-dominated liturgies in the Catholic Church. After spending some years in Jamaica, she returned home and last year became associate editor of CNT without a word of her earlier public apostasy): David Gagnon (former "chaplain" and campus minister," an abuse victim who fiercely denounced the Church as corrupt); Bernard King (described as a "queer Catholic activist" who has "a partner and two children").

Joanna Manning (a well-known dissenter of long standing, currently a Globe and Mail favourite for her quarterly attack-the-Catholic-Church articles); Nancy Mayer (social worker); Cherie MacDonald (a former Morgentaler spokeswoman); Dr. Rosana Pellizzari (family physician in community health care issues); Andrea Schmidt and Jaggi Singh (of Montreal's violent "Anti-Capitalist Convergence"); Rob Shearer (a United Church minister currently living with the homosexual Toronto Catholic Worker Community); and feminist and animal rights activist Emily Visser.

Names mentioned in the press as part of the group included Sister Veronica Dunne; Mary Ellen Morgenstern (who now "worships" with an ex-nun at a community centre near Queen and Broadview); Jane Walsh, social worker; and Eloise Bucholz of Peterborough, who made the stole for Mary Ramerman on her "ordination."

The participants continue to see themselves as Catholics, though in fact, many have excommunicated themselves from the Church.