Anti-Christian Madness on Parliament Hill

Barbara Kay's column in The National Post, "Gilles Duceppe Owes an Apology to Catholics," names and shames the extreme anti-Christianity of Gilles Duceppe and the dominant political class in Quebec.

This mentality is the same as that which characterized the madness of the French Revolution. No literal guillotines yet, but the level of rhetoric is getting pretty violent and, of course, violent speech prepares the way for violent acts. When secularists start calling for the dissolution of the Church and for the painful death of Cardinals, we have passed way beyond liberalism and tolerance into a dark space that reeks of fascism and irrational fanaticism.

On May 27 Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe tried to set a witch hunt in motion with a political drive-by shooting of several completely innocent people:

“Mr. Speaker, Ottawa’s bishop stated yesterday that a sizeable pro-life caucus is working behind the scenes within the government. The Prime Minister, who controls everything, must know about this caucus.” With McCarthyite melodrama, M. Duceppe then intoned the names and positions in the Conservative Party of three practicing Catholics, as if that were proof of the ominous “caucus.”

These Catholics are all members of Opus Dei, a prelature of the Catholic Church, a group I am very familiar with, and amongst whom I count some of my closest friends. Opus Dei means in Latin “God’s Work.” Members of “the Work” believe that holiness is something to be strived for in one’s daily life: in one’s job, however important or however humble, in one’s friendships, one’s family life and civic obligations.

Opus Dei does good works all over the planet (I have seen documentaries on their projects in the hellholes of the world, bringing aid, comfort and social assistance to the poorest and most forgotten, without fanfare or publicity-seeking or missionary profit), punching far above their demographic weight. Few in number – about 85,000 world-wide and only a few thousand in all of Canada – they are immersed in public life in the most positive and benign ways. And of the more than 100,000 members of the Conservative Party, why yes, there are probably two or three members of Opus Dei.

But the back-story to Duceppe’s naming (and by implication shaming) of these three good people (two of whom I know well as ideal Canadian citizens and warm, engaging, admirable human beings ) is not his apparently high-minded upholding of the division of church and state. It is his loathing for the Catholic Church, a loathing he is at small pains to conceal. In this he is entirely representative of the media and political elites that dominate Quebec’s public discourse. And that is the real story here.

Look at the reaction to Cardinal Marc Ouellet’s call for public debate on the morality of abortion. Note: he did not call for legislative change. He called abortion a “moral crime.” In response the francophone media went ballistic. Would Patrick Lagacé of La Presse have dared to curse any non-Catholic religious leaders? It is unthinkable that any Canadian pundit would say of an imam, as Lagacé did of Cardinal Ouellet: “We must all die. We are all going to die. Cardinal Ouellet is going to die one day. I hope he will die of a long and painful sickness…Yes, the paragraph I have just written is vicious. But [Cardinal] Marc Ouellet is an extremist. And in this debate, all blows are permitted against religious extremists…the Cardinal is a fundamentalist. This is a known fact. From there on, whoever agrees to share a political podium with him should be treated like an accomplice to the fanaticism of Kazem Ouellet… “

(By “Kazem” he refers to Kazem Sedighi, an imam in Teheran who declared that recent earthquakes had been caused by certain women’s indecent wardrobe.)

Similarly, would any Canadian journalist call for the dissolution of Islam because parts of shariah law run counter to Canadian gender values? Yet on May 28 Le Devoir published an op-ed written by a sociologue who calls for the dissolution of the Church and its transformation in Quebec into a network of cooperatives : “This cooperative network, based on modern values of equality and non-segregation of the sexes, of anti-racism and the rejection of homophobia, would permit us to experience together, socially and ceremoniously, the great moments of life between birth and death. This project of modernization of the Catholic institution seems to me, moreover, completely compatible with the fundamental secularity of the state which is indispensable to social peace.”

Read the rest here.

Secularism has become a new religion and, like many new religions, its zeal, if not checked, can lead to a kind of violence that most of Christianity has outgrown. If Marc Cardinal Ouellet is an extremist then practically every religious leader, political leader, great artist, humanitarian and scientist who lived prior to 1968 was also an extremist. So who is the real extremist here?

Kay is right that these people would not dare criticize Islam. I am growing weary of journalists insulting and bashing Christians and holding back from saying anything critical of Islam. Let's be honest: they are cowards and eventually cowards are conquered and dominated by the strong. To be blunt: they are crazy in the sense of not recognizing their own enlightened self-interest.