Spock Would Make A Great Catholic

Well done by Larry D.

Here’s a link to Father Barron’s (Word On Fire Ministries) review of the movie. He doesn’t recommend it.

http://www.wordonfire.org/WOF-TV/Commentaries-New/Fr-Barron-comments-on-2012-movie.aspx

Here’s the U-tube version;

Click here to view the embedded video.

As it happened, I discovered that there were other reasons, sound legitimate theological reasons for leaving that faith community behind and I entered the Catholic Church. By then I realized that the truth of the faith is not measured by how seriously its adherents take it. Indeed, at the time I entered the Church the clerical abuse scandal in the Boston, Mass area was at its peak. But there had been other scandals and most recently it has been the same thing all over again in Ireland.

I think that in this case, while the details of the problem are terribly sad and a real indictment of the leadership of the Church in Ireland, the report that was commissioned was very instructive, and well worth reviewing for its clear assessment of what went wrong, who was responsible and what it was they were thinking.

Here’s an excellent article by Michael Kelly on that report called, The Wolves Roamed Freely.

I have encountered the same sort of argument that I would have made many years ago, that those Christians, or those Catholics cannot be right about their religion because they themselves do such bad things. At the very least they don’t follow their own teaching. That argument is compounded and magnified when the offenders are the leaders of the Church, in this case the Bishops of Ireland.

Moreover, in the Catholic faith, unlike the many Protestant groups, there is not the possibility of leaving the Church and starting one’s own. The full recognition must be made, even by those the most aggrieved, that despite the abuse, despite the betrayal of trust, despite the lack of honest and fair leadership, the truth of the faith itself lives on, and the objective necessity of the sacraments remains, as well as the necessity of the ordained ministers of those sacraments.

That is a hard pill to swallow, and I cannot in the least blame those who are the victims in all of this. I cannot imagine what it is that goes on inside of them, and I pray the Lord guides their hearts and minds, wherever they end up going, so long as they do not reject Jesus Christ as a result. That would be the worst harm that could come to those souls, and the reason that Jesus took very seriously those who lead “little ones” astray. He did not mince words, saying it is better that a millstone were hung about such a person’s neck and that they be drowned. That’s rather unequivocal.

He also preached forgiveness and we believe that even those abusers can be forgiven, as well as their confreres and superiors who effectively collaborated with them by hiding the abuse. But we also know that such a thing requires true contrition on the part of the sinner. There is no fudging this. Jesus takes this extremely seriously.

But what I found interesting about the report on the investigation in Ireland was that it seems that the secular authorities resisted some of the temptation to generalize against the Catholic Church in a way that is so prevalent over here. Perhaps that is because it was in Ireland, whose long history has been closely intertwined with the Church for much of that time.

But it goes to the point we were making earlier, that the truth of the faith is a separate issue from the way in which some do or do not practice it, including the clergy and leaders of the Church. In fact, there is an interesting take on the entire question expressed in the report. It is quite lengthy but nonetheless quite damning of what we might call “The Spirit of Vatican II”;

Before the report was published in late November, it was common among some commentators to insist that the root of the crisis was too heavy a reliance on canon law. Michael McDowell, a former Minister for Justice, even insisted that the abuse of children was compounded by canon law.

Judge Murphy’s report demolishes that mythical thinking in one fell swoop and serves as a vindication of the Church’s law. The report makes it clear that canon law was not the problem. In fact, the problem of child abuse by clerics was made worse by the reckless actions of Church officials, who simply refused to implement canon law. In the opening pages of the Murphy Commission report, it is made clear that Church law refers to the abuse of a minor as the “worst crime.”

As the commission wrote: “There is a 2,000-year history of biblical, papal, and Holy See statements showing awareness of clerical child sexual abuse…. Over the centuries, strong denunciation of clerical child sexual abuse came from popes, Church councils, and other Church sources. These denunciations are particularly strong on ‘offences against nature’ and ‘offences committed with or against juveniles.’”

“The 1917 Code of Canon Law decreed deprivation of office and/or benefice, or expulsion from the clerical state for such offences,” the report notes. The commission goes on to report that “in the 20th century, two separate documents on dealing with child sexual abuse were promulgated by Vatican authorities.” The documents, says the commission, were “little observed in Dublin.”

The report also notes that in Dublin “the Church authorities failed to implement most of their own canon law rules on dealing with clerical child sexual abuse.” In a vindication of the law of the universal Church, the report notes: “The commission is satisfied that Church law demanded serious penalties for clerics who abused children. In Dublin, from the 1970s onwards, this was ignored.”

The report goes on: “Canon law provides the Church authorities with a means not only of dealing with offending clergy, but also with a means of doing justice to victims, including paying compensation to them.”

For David Quinn, director of the Iona Institute, the reports’ findings about canon law are crucial. “What we see in the report is a rejection of canon law by more liberal elements within the Church,” he said. “From the 1960s onwards the Church’s penal process is virtually abandoned in Dublin and a purely therapeutic approach to the issue of sexual abuse by priests is adopted.”

According to Quinn, “within liberal elements canon law began to be discredited and this has wreaked the most terrible havoc.”

His contention is backed up by the report itself. Judge Murphy notes, “Canon law, as an instrument of Church governance, declined hugely during Vatican II and in the decades immediately after it.”

“What’s clear is that an attempt to correct an excessive legalism in the Church pre-Vatican II led to an opposite extreme where the laws of the Church became so disrespected in some circles that it was impossible to enforce them,” Quinn added.

The general disrespect for Church law is made clear time and time again in the report. In one section, the commission notes the case of a Father Vidal (this is a pseudonym) who admitted to abusing young girls and to being engaged in an ongoing sexual relationship that began when the girl in question was just 13 years old. By the time the girl reached her early 20s, Father Vidal decided to marry her and applied for laicization.

However, before his laicization process got underway, Father Vidal was illicitly and invalidly married to the girl in a Catholic ceremony by one of his fellow priests. When the marriage broke up five years later, he seamlessly returned to ministry and, to avoid public scandal, was transferred from the Dublin archdiocese to the Diocese of Sacramento, California. The US diocese was never informed of Father Vidal’s past.

For Marie Collins, who was sexually abused by a priest while she was a patient in a children’s hospital, the Church’s response to her abuse destroyed her once-cherished Catholic faith. “My abuser didn’t take my Catholic faith,” she told CWR. “That was taken from me by the appalling way I was treated when I came forward. I was accused of lying and I was bullied. I am still a Christian, I have my faith and devotion to Jesus Christ, but my Catholic faith, which I loved and cherished so dearly, I have lost that and it makes me very sad.”

For those not familiar, the so-called spirit of Vatican II was a self-described movement that used the fact of the Second Vatican Council as the springboard for a radical, liberal, sometimes relativist agenda which wreaked havoc on the liturgy, catechesis and on the faith of the people who were led astray by its claims that since Vatican II everything is changed, including moral standards of conduct and received doctrine. Their advantage was confusion and ignorance, because many people had not read the documents. In fact most people had not read them. The average Catholic was taught misinformation.

I have heard even recently expressed an opinion from someone who hasn’t been to Church in a long time regarding a young couple getting “fixed” so that they cannot have any more children. “Oh, the Church doesn’t teach that anymore,” was the expression when told that as a Catholic, that is out of the question. Sad. The Church does still teach that and has produced many documents that not only teach it but give a very thorough theological background for the teaching as received from Christ.

In the context of the abuse in Ireland we see another sad example of the fruits of “the Spirit of Vatican II” in the refusal to abide by Canon Law. Is it not reasonable to think that in the course of 2000 years this issue might have come up already? Indeed it has, and the Church has taken it very seriously and put in place the measures and procedures required to do justice for the victims of such abuse.

The question then becomes, why? Why not follow the Church law and deal with this when it first became known to the Bishops in Ireland? Their answer was that they thought they were protecting the good name of the Church. But look at them now. The good name of the Church has suffered as much or more, they have been shamed for their cover-up, and there are victims and others who believe they no longer can trust the clergy, and what can we say to them?

We know that the vast majority of the clergy in the Catholic Church have suffered as well because their brother priests have brought shame upon them all, mistrust among their parishioners and hatred from many outside the Church. Ordinary Catholics have felt the shame and suffered for this as well. I, myself, have been mocked for being Catholic because of this scandal. It touches us all yet we know that the true Church founded by Jesus Christ subsists in the Catholic Church. We cannot leave.

I think that we should not hesitate to make the case loudly that this abuse scandal is just one more fruit of the “Spirit of Vatican II” movement in the Church. We need to pound it home. We need to beat the drum. This is a very tangible result, with very real victims, of that movement which has no doubt given the devil himself many a hearty guffaw. We need to push back in the name of Jesus Christ and his Church.

This unholy spirit is really a branch of secular humanism. It is based on the sentiment, the idea that the past is irrelevant to now, the people no longer need the doctrine of the past, the moral prescriptions and the means to be reconciled with God. Humanity is improving on its own, heading for higher ground and it can trust the sciences of psychology and psychiatry to handle the moral problems of men. And if that doesn’t work we can always change the discipline of the Church, because after all, a celebate priesthood is a relic of the Dark Ages, is it not? If priests could marry we would have more of them and they would not be abusers of children, right? The statistics of abuse show that this solution is hogwash.

But in the meantime, we have started along this path of forgetting that mankind is the same moral mess that he was in Jesus’ day, or in Moses’ day for that matter, or at any time in history since the fall of Adam and Eve. We have forgotten, conveniently, that sin is still sin, and that God is still God, and the way to reconciliation is through contrition, sorrow for sin, and then forgiveness. And we cannot come to that point until we recognize sin for what it is in the first place.

In this season of Lent may we take the time to examine ourselves, our consciences, in honesty and humilty, looking to the great unchanging doctrines of the Church, received from Christ through his revelation in Scripture and Tradition, and sincerely fall on our knees and ask forgiveness for our failures.

Here’s the blog and a sampling of some of the links at the blog from the usual suspects.

Here.

Here.

Here.

Here’s a thought. The translation we are discussing, which Benedict XVI and the USCCB is attempting to correct, is an English translation of what is official in Latin. How is it such a terrible thing to want to get the English version to match the Latin standard?

I think that there is a theological basis for this. Without examining it in any detail, isn’t that an interesting commentary that some would want to keep a translation of something so integral to the Church as her liturgy, that is flawed? Why? What is there in the correction that offends them so much? Or is it just the fact that the Pope is exercising his proper authority over the liturgy that offends them?

Here’s a reminder of how seriously we should take the liturgical dissenters. Given a choice between these people and Benedict XVI? Is there any question?

There is another article regarding two UK Bishops who are encouraging their parishioners to observe Lent by going green and as it turns out, they are of the Anglican communion. That story here and here.

This reminded me of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (http://www.usccb.org/sdwp/international/globalclimate0406.shtml) discussion of global warming that came out a few years ago, well before the recent weekly revelations regarding the fraud at the IPCC and the collusion of falsifying data evident in the e-mails from East Anglia. It all tends to highlight for me a fundamental shift in our society that is currently underway, not started by but accelerated by the East Anglia e-mails.

Let’s step back to the previous generation for a moment and perhaps the one before that, of which most of the Catholic Bishops are a part. I know that the way that I was raised in the culture was to assume that science, scientists, the scientific method, etc., etc. were automatically above reproach and above manipulation and so on.

How does that kind of doctrine of infallibility come about? I think the generation that saw the explosion of the results of science and technology just accepted; because those results were so positive, so exciting, so unimagined and so socially useful; that the assertions of “science” must be true.

I know that I was taught the scientific method in school and it appeared to be above the regular fray, above opinion, above emotions; just hard, clear and rational. And is it not, in its purity? That is to say that a scientist makes a reasonable hypothesis regarding an object or a material or a phenomenon, and then he constructs tests to show if his hypothesis is true or not. If not true, he either checks his experiment for contamination, or uses another test, or abandons his theory. And to say that something has been proven requires the successful test to be duplicated by others in other locations. Pretty simple and straightforward, yes?

Thus, the scientist was given a place of prominence in our minds and in our society. It is a place of trust, perhaps almost a place of priesthood, as the mediator between us and the cosmos. Indeed this faith in science has taken on many of the aspects of religion and has for most of us non-scientists, has established a genuine practical faith. The practitioners, the scientists, are held automatically to be above any moral suspicion at least in the realm of science.

I think that this backdrop heavily influences the people of the past few generations perhaps even more than today’s generation, who are so into themselves and the uses of the technological toys that they don’t even consider the issue. However, they do accept the brainwashing of educators so the net effect is the same.

How many times in our lives have we heard, “scientists say”, or “it is scientifically shown” or “it’s a matter of science” or other similar invocations of the infallibility of science. More recently we have heard that “scientists agree” which suggests something new, that they might not agree; in which case it would be morally acceptable not to just swallow the theory at hand without some caution. But when the “scientists agree” people get offended or shocked that someone might not accept what they agree upon. This was one of the reasons that the IPCC statement on climate change had so many signatures of “scientists” on it, because the people at the IPCC wanted to create that sense that if one disagreed with the conclusions, that such a person was doing the verboten, the sacrilegious act of disagreeing with “science.” That is the moral equivalent to saying there is no God, in our society.

So it is not surprising that a group of older men raised in the believing generation, might equate reason, mathematics and science to such an extent that they swallow the global warming theory hook, line and sinker, as is evident in this preamble from the USCCB website from 2001;

At its core, global climate change is not about economic theory or political platforms, nor about partisan advantage or interest group pressures. It is about the future of God’s creation and the one human family. It is about protecting both “the human environment” and the natural environment.

The issue of global climate change raises two central religious and moral concerns: “How are we to fulfill God’s call to be stewards of creation in an age when we may have the capacity to alter that creation significantly, and perhaps irrevocably? How can we as a ‘family of nations’ exercise stewardship in a way that respects and protects the integrity of God’s creation and provides for the common good, as well as for economic and social progress based on justice?”

U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, June 2001

Note that they want to avoid the partisan politics but in buying the concept, which they have assumed is pure and above-reproach science, they inadvertantly took a political side. Some might say, not so inadvertantly. I will give them the benefit of the doubt.

Later on they come close but not quite to the point of endorsing, putting their imprimatur, on the global warming theory;

In their June 2001 statement, Global Climate Change: A Plea for Dialogue, Prudence and the Common Good, the bishops note: “Although debate continues about the extent and impact of this warming, it could be quite serious … Consequently, it seems prudent not only to continue to research and monitor this phenomenon, but to take steps now to mitigate possible negative effects in the future.” The statement also calls for a less polarized public debate and more focus on the global common good. The bishops call for thoughtful dialogue that relies on the political virtue of prudence. Prudence is not simply a cautious and safe approach, but rather a thoughtful, deliberate, and reasoned basis for taking or avoiding action to achieve a moral good.

Prudence. Yes indeed, this is a matter of prudential judgement and they realize that fact, which is no doubt why they stopped short of committing themselves to the global warming theory.

Now we are faced with the new paradigm. Science might not be so reliable after all, because scientists are not reliable. Surprise, surprise! Scientists are human beings with human tendencies and human biases, etc. There are still those who refuse to believe that science as we practice it is not infallible. Some have political reasons in this case for their refusal, but I think there are other honest souls who just can’t get over the idea that some in the scientific community could actually trump up numbers and charts and re-write history to “prove” their theory, knowing that it is tenuous at best, and an utter fraud at worst, just for a socialist/marxist political/ideological agenda.

The USCCB urges us to leave the politics out of it, yet it has become increasingly obvious, long before the most recent explosive revelations of out and out fraud and deception, that the only solution that the global warming movement theorists and activists were interested in was a massive transfer of wealth, extorted from the west through creating a crisis and manipulating guilt on an urgency basis. The crowning scene for this was Copenhagen in 2009. They had set aside all pretence by that point and the communists were demonstrating in the streets.

I wouldn’t bame those bishops if they mourn for the loss of scientific purity, reliability and accountability, but then we might all take a pause and reflect this Lent that placing our faith in man and/or science is to actually have a god other than God, a violation of the first commandment, and henceforth we should view what we are told by “science” with some of the suspicion that we normally reserve for door-to-door salesmen and street-vendors with Rolex watches for ten bucks.

And to compound it, they are mocking people with disabilities on top of that, which in their most self-righteous mode they would tell the rest of us is unacceptable and “inappropriate.”

Hypocrites.

The mocking.

The response.

Sarah Palin was not supposed to “choose” to have a Down Syndrome baby. She was supposed to kill it. That was the acceptable choice and she has been attacked for this ever since the 2008 election. It goes to show how vicious the compassionate political left really are, and when they tell you they want this or that for “the people” because they care, don’t believe them. They are about power and control. The compassionate face is just a fraud.

5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Deuteronomy 17;
[2] “If there is found among you, within any of your towns which the LORD your God gives you, a man or woman who does what is evil in the sight of the LORD your God, in transgressing his covenant,
[3] and has gone and served other gods and worshiped them, or the sun or the moon or any of the host of heaven, which I have forbidden,
[4] and it is told you and you hear of it; then you shall inquire diligently, and if it is true and certain that such an abominable thing has been done in Israel,
[5] then you shall bring forth to your gates that man or woman who has done this evil thing, and you shall stone that man or woman to death with stones.
[6] On the evidence of two witnesses or of three witnesses he that is to die shall be put to death; a person shall not be put to death on the evidence of one witness.
[7] The hand of the witnesses shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all the people. So you shall purge the evil from the midst of you.

If we think about this just a little we will see something in common between the Israelites and let’s say, the Spanish Inquisition.

In Israel from the time of Moses and throughout the history of the Israelites down to the Jews of Jesus’ time, whenever they were able to self-govern, that is, whenever they were not subjugated by some other power, there was no separation of church and state.

Now if we move forward to Europe in the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the majority of the countries were Catholic countries. There was technically a separation of church and state but not as we understand it today. When the King was Catholic the country was Catholic. The only thing comparible in our modern day are the Islamic states and even so they are structured somewhat differently.

In the Catholic states of Europe there was a secular power but because the cultural order and the Catholic faith were so intertwined and interdependent, in many cases, to distrupt the religious order was to disrupt the civil order. Any attack on the Church was an attack on the social order and an attack on the state itself. So in general, it was essentially treasonous to attack the Church, by extension. Heresy was viewed through that lens.

The Spanish Inquisition

In Spain at the time of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the situation was unique in this sense. They had been at war with Islam for some 779 years. The Christian north had taken that long to reconquer the whole of Spain, Granada being the final conquest. Because of this, there was an understandable paranoia, if you will, that Islam would return to attempt to once more conquer Spain. Nor was that an idle fear.

In 1480 the Ottoman Turks invaded Italy at Otranto, killing some 12,000 men 800 of which were martyred by beheading for refusing to renounce their Catholic faith. Their skulls are on the wall at the Skull Cathedral of Otranto to this very day. The Archbishop was sawn in half while still alive.

It is not hard to understand the fear that Ferdinand and Isabella had that the Muslim Turks might decide to invade and re-take Spain just when it had finally been restored to Catholic rule. Moreover, they were worried about help that the Muslims in Spain that remained might give to the invaders.

Because it was now a Catholic kingdom, the way to rise in the court or anywhere within the power structure was to be Catholic. Hence there were a number of “conversos” or converts to the faith who had done so merely for personal advancement. It fact, it was known that there were many conversos, as many as 10,000 it is estimated, that still practiced their Muslim religion or Jewish religion in secret. Some of them were even priests. Ferdinand and Isabella recognized the problem as not only a religious one but also a security problem and not having the expertise to ferret these people out and decide their cases, they called the Pope and the Spanish Inquisition was set up.

It must be remembered that it was not illegal to be a Muslim or a Jew in Spain. Their goal was to find the fake Christians who were Muslims or Jews, force them into the open and expose their religious fraud. What they had done was sacrilegious at the very least, and at that time of close ties between church and state, their crimes were treasonous as well. There was some evidence that some of these were plotting against the King and Queen.

All in all the Spanish Inquisition examined and released a large number of people as innocent of the charge against them. One of those was honoured by the Church as a Doctor of the Church.

(”Certain ecclesiastical writers have received this title on account of the great advantage the whole Church has derived from their doctrine.” -Catholic Encyclopedia)

Her name is St. Theresa of Avila, and like some others, was falsely accused of heresy. One of the reasons the Inquisition was asked for was so that those falsely accused would get a fair hearing by competent examiners and be exonerated if innocent.

Without getting too deep into the statistics, there were many imprisoned and some repeat offenders were executed. Approximately 2000 in total. That’s 2000 too many for a charge of heresy, obviously and in retrospect. (That is a far cry however, from the 93,000,000 number that some wild-eyed anti-Catholics have attributed to the “Black Legend”. Demographics alone would rule that out. In order to kill that many people every man, woman, and child in Spain would have had to die as well as large chunks of other European countries.)

Two things that we must remember in the context of the time. Again, any attack on the Church was an attack on the state in their minds, and the Church had jurisdiction over anyone validly baptized, whether done in subterfuge or not. The Church still claims authority over all the baptized.

Witch Hunts

As a side note this was not about witchcraft, as some have imagined. They have blurred and confused the Inquisition with the Protestant witchhunts that were rampant much later in places like southern Germany. In England of the 16th and 17th centuries (post-Reformation), the logic of the witch hunts and trials was similar to that of the Spanish Inquisition, although the target was different.

Because the monarachs of England, such as Elizabeth I, were the head of the Anglican communion, they viewed any rebellion as blasphemy against God and any blasphemy as rebellion against them. Perhaps, they were closer to the real unity of church and state than the Catholic nations of Europe.

Torture

One of the objections, and it has merit in the objective sense, is with respect to torture. Again, it must be remembered that the use of torture was a common method of extracting information throughout Medieval Europe and conducted by the state, whether in regular courts or on behalf of the Inquisition, wherein the state prosecuted and the Inquisitor examined. Methods and uses of torture varied by nation and region but it’s use was carried on right into the twentieth century in one form or another, most recently used as an interrogation method by police or government agents behind closed doors rather than on public display as in the former days. In fact, there has been an ongoing debate in America over the use of torture to interrogate terrorist suspects, as recently as 2008.

Hindsight

There are those who categorically condemn the Catholic Church and use the Inquisition as proof against the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility. If we were discussing papal impeccability they would be right. The Church should not have been associated with execution or torture for any reason, not even heresy. No doubt it was this bloody mindedness of the time, as well as the close ties between Church and state so that religious rebellion was indentified with political and social rebellion; that led the Reformation into open warfare and nations like England to the persecution and slaughter of Catholics who wouldn’t convert to the Church of England.

In retrospect we cannot justify bloodshed in the name of religion, but it was normal at the time and for many centuries after the Spanish Inquisition. Their world was threatened at any time by the Ottoman Turks and the invading Muslim armies were ruthless in persecution of Catholic priests and religious.

Common Themes

The theme that I see in common in all of this is the closeness of church and state, from the Israelites being commanded by God to purge idol worshippers from their midst to the Medieval Catholic Church ferreting out heretics to the English kings eradicating papists, right down to the Salem witch trials in the United States.

And I don’t think this can be wholly eliminated, or eliminated at all. The greatest experiment in governance emphasizing the separation of church and state started out with the constitutional statement that government could not make a law that instituted a state religion. Yet, up until JFK, it was not possible for a Catholic to hold the highest office in America.

And what did he have to do? He made the commitment that he would not let his faith interfere with his governing as president. There had been a certain fear among some that he would have greater allegiance to the Roman Pontif than to America.

It is a great irony that by the time he was elected a secular movement was underway that made his protestations moot, yet he paved the way for another generation of ambitious Catholics to renounce their faith on the public stage and pretend they could practice it in private nonetheless. Why? Has not the Protestant influence waned? Of course, yet what has taken its place is that secular movement that has begun to take on all the characteristics of a religion itself.

The great anti-religion has become a religion. It tolerates no heresy either. It has not reached the point yet of the Spanish Inquisition because people are allowed to rise to high office while maintaining a private religion other than secularism. But they are expected to make the Kennedy claim that their religion will not interfere with their politics, and most Catholics it seems are quite willing to do so.

The highest office in the House of Representatives is the Speaker, held right now by Nancy Pelosi, an advocate of abortion rights for women and as far left on the political spectrum as she can be without switching to the Communist Party of America. She has publicly made the JFK claim and sees nothing wrong in it. Other Catholics have done the same such as the late Senator Edward Kennedy, his junior Senator John Kerry, the appointed head of Health and Human Services in the Obama cabinet Kathleen Sebelius and so on.

It seems to me that they have been called by Caesar to worship him and having done so are allowed to practice their private religion, something that the early Christian martyrs would not do.

In Canada the debate is long over, and the Catholics have capitulated for the sake of power. Jean Chretien and Paul Martin are two that come to mind as Catholic former Canadian Prime Ministers.

The final analysis in this overview is that there will be a religion that is offical to the government no matter what century or form of government. It gradually returns even when the possibility is specifically warned about by the founding fathers. I don’t think there will ever be a complete absence of religion in the public square. It is only a matter of which religion it happens to be.