Righteous battle
Court should end Quebec’s trampling of religious freedoms
Lost amid all the clamour about Quebec’s xenophobic Charter of Values is a case set to be heard before the Supreme Court of Canada next March about another aspect of religious freedom in that province. The case, brought by Montreal’s Loyola High School, a private Jesuit-run school for boys, challenges the right the province of Quebec has arrogated for itself to prevent religious schools from teaching curriculum from their faithbased perspectives.
The course in question is Ethics and Religious Culture, which the Quebec government mandated in all schools five years ago. There was fierce opposition in the province when the course was brought in because some parents felt the course ran roughshod over their charter right to freedom of religion. The course was billed as something of a comparative religion course and objections also arose over the fact that in its zealousness to be egalitarian, it treated the wacky cult of Raelianism as deserving of as much legitimacy and seriousness as the three Abrahamic religions, for example. The Supreme Court ruled in that instance that the Quebec government has a constitutional right to set curriculum in its public schools.
However, the Loyola case contains a disturbing twist that is directly linked with the tenets of the contentious Charter of Values, which was tabled in the National Assembly on Thursday. The province says that this Catholic school is forbidden to teach the course from a Catholic perspective, even though the students’ parents have obviously enrolled their sons at Loyola — which has existed since 1896 — because they want them to receive a Catholic education.
If the Supreme Court rules in favour of the Quebec government’s stance, it will legitimize the province’s position that religion is a mere lifestyle choice and not a matter of deeply rooted personal identity, according to Peter Stockland, senior director of publications and media with Cardus, a Hamilton-based think-tank whose focus is on the intersection between faith and the common life of Canadians. Cardus is supporting Loyola in its fight, and two of its members, along with Loyola principal Paul Donovan, visited the Herald editorial board recently as part of a cross-Canada trip to raise awareness about the case.
Stockland explained that the Quebec government’s attitude is to dismiss the vast intellectual storehouses that religions have amassed over the centuries, reducing them to a superficial matter of lifestyle. It’s as though religious belief, instead of being woven through the very fibres of an individual’s identity and playing a profound role in self-definition, matters no more than the choice of toppings on offer at a salad bar.
The right to freedom of religion is not one-sided; it does not mean that secularism — a religion in itself, by the way — gets to squelch faith wherever it is found. Religious schools, while they must teach the provincial curriculum — something Loyola doesn’t dispute — must absolutely enjoy freedom of religion, too. That means the freedom to teach their faith-based precepts, without unreasonable state interference, to children whose parents have enrolled them in that school for that very purpose.
Charter rights to freedom of religion are under attack in a variety of ways in Quebec these days. That freedom must be restored. We look to the Supreme Court to wisely restore it.