Cardinal Collins of Toronto calls for resistance to a controversial new government requirement
“It’s very odd, and I think unique in Canadian history, that applicants for for a summer – or any – program, any grant from the government, have to attest not that they are going to obey the law or that they are legitimate applicants, [but] they have to attest to their beliefs…”
The Archbishop of Toronto, Canada, Thomas Cardinal Collins, is calling for resistance to a controversial new government requirement on organizations applying for summer hiring assistance. Canada’s government has introduced the change to the standard application form used to request funding through a program that provides wage subsidies to various outfits for summer hires.
Until recently, applicants have had to attest to having read and understood the terms of the agreement, that the job or jobs for which the applicant is requesting the funding would not be created without the assistance being requested, and that the applicant has all the necessary authorities, permissions and approvals to submit this application.
A Calgary-based pro-life group allegedly used some of its government funding to produce and distribute materials containing graphic images of aborted babies, in response to which the Canadian government introduced a new requirement. All applicants must now attest to the following:
[That] both the job and the applying organization’s core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, color, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.
This new language is not only proving problematic for faith-based organizations. It is not sitting well with many people who find themselves broadly sharing the government’s social policy commitments, but do not believe persons or organizations ought to be required to take what amounts to an oath of ideological purity.
“It’s very odd, and I think unique in Canadian history, that applicants for for a summer – or any – program, any grant from the government, have to attest not that they are going to obey the law or that they are legitimate applicants, [but] they have to attest to their beliefs,” Collins said during an interview with the Thinking with the Church podcast hosted by CWR contributor Chris Altieri. “There’s an ideological test here,” Cardinal Collins went on to say, “your thinking must be correct.”
Cardinal Collins said he is not alone in finding the new attestation requirement at odds with the words and plain sense of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms — a document, he explained, which is designed to protect citizens from government intrusion, not to empower government to enforce political orthodoxy. “Not only have people of faith objected to this intrusion, but people who have not faith at all,” Cardinal Collins said. “What amazes me is that the government representatives say, ‘Well, we love what you’re doing – we don’t mean you we like you – just check the [attestation] box [on the application form] and get the money.’ I suspect they truly don’t understand that you sign your soul away. It’s like Thomas More,” said Cardinal Collins. “Are our signatures so cheap,” he asked, “that we can say, ‘Cross your fingers and sign’?”
He said any society that values citizens’ given word so cheap is in serious trouble. “The issue is of conscience and of integrity: that, if we are in a society where [the government] can even suggest, ‘Well, sign. Don’t worry we’ll give you the money, as long as you say in writing what you do not believe,’ — have we come to that? That is really, profoundly sick,” Cardinal Collins said. “Words have meaning,” Cardinal Collins concluded, “and when we forget that, we are on a short path to destruction.”
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Members of the Sts’ailes First Nation at Holy Rosary Cathedral last year for the first Mass to integrate a First Nation language. A Cardus report presents the voices of Indigenous Canadians speaking about their faith and distinguishing it from the traditional spirituality they’re often associated with. / Photo courtesy Nicholas Elbers, 2022
Vancouver, Canada, May 17, 2023 / 14:15 pm (CNA).
A groundbreaking report published by the Ottawa-based Cardus Institute has given voice to Indigenous Canadians who are frustrated by secular society’s unawareness of — or unwillingness to accept — the fact that almost half of them are Christian.
“I find that insulting to Indigenous people’s intelligence and freedom,” Catholic priest Father Cristino Bouvette said of the prejudice he regularly encounters.
Bouvette, who has mixed Cree-Métis and Italian heritage and now serves as vicar for vocations and Young Adults in the Diocese of Calgary, was one of 12 individuals interviewed by Cardus for the report “Indigenous Voices of Faith.”
Prejudice against Indigenous Christians has become so strong, even inside some Indigenous communities, “that Indigenous Christians in this country right now are living in the time of new martyrdom,” Bouvette said.
Although that martyrdom may not cost them their lives, “they are ostracized and humiliated sometimes within their own communities if they openly express their Christian or Catholic faith.”
Statistics Canada reported last year that the 2021 census found that 850,000, or 47%, of Canada’s 1.8-million Indigenous people identify as Christian and that more than a quarter of the total report they are Catholic. Only 73,000, or 4%, of Indigenous people said they adhere to traditional Indigenous spiritual beliefs.
Ukrainian Catholic Deacon Andrew Bennett, program director for Cardus Faith Communities, conducted the interviews for the think tank last fall. He published his report in March at a time when Canadian mainstream media and many political leaders continued to stir division and prejudice through misleading commentary about abandoned cemeteries at Indian Residential Schools.
The purpose of the report, he writes, “is to affirm and to shed light on the religious freedom of Indigenous peoples to hold the beliefs and engage in the practices that they choose and to contextualize their faith within their own cultures.”
Too often, however, “the public narrative implies, or boldly declares, that there’s a fundamental incompatibility between Indigenous Canadians and Christianity or other faiths,” Bennett said. “[M]any Indigenous Canadians strongly disagree with those narratives.”
Father Bouvette is clearly one of those.
“We did not have Christian faith imposed upon us because of [my Indigenous grandmother’s] time in the residential school or her father’s time in the trade school that he was sent to,” Bouvette said. “No, it was because our family freely chose to receive the saving message of Jesus Christ and lived it and had continued to pass it down.”
Bouvette said his “grandmother was not tricked into becoming something that she didn’t want to be, and then tricked into staying that way for 99 years and 11 months of her life. She was a Christian from the day of her birth, and she remained a Christian until the day of her death. And so that was not by the consequence of some imposition.”
Nevertheless, Canadians continue to labor under a prejudice holding the opposite view. “I do believe that probably the majority of Canadians at this time, out of some mistaken notion of guilt for whatever their cultural or ethnic background is, think they are somehow responsible for Indigenous people having had something thrust upon them that they didn’t want,” Bouvette said.
“But I would say, give us a little more credit than that and assume that if there is an Indigenous person who continues to persevere in the Christian faith it is because they want to, because they understand why they have chosen to in the first place, and they remain committed to it. We should be respectful of that.”
The executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League, Christian Elia, agrees and says society should grant Indigenous Catholics the respect and personal agency that is due all Canadians.
“Firstly, I am not an Indigenous person, so I cannot speak for our Indigenous brothers and sisters, but neither can non-Indigenous secularists who choose to ignore that Indigenous people in Canada continue to self-identify as Christian, the majority of these Catholic,” Elia said in an interview with The B.C. Catholic.
He said his organization has heard from many Indigenous Catholics who are “growing weary of the ongoing assumption that somehow they have been coerced into the faith, that it is inconceivable that they wish to be Catholic. This condescending attitude must stop.”
Deacon Rennie Nahanee, who serves at St. Paul’s Indian Church in North Vancouver, was another of the 12 whom Bennett interviewed. A cradle Catholic and member of the Squamish First Nation, Deacon Nahanee said there is nothing incompatible with being both an authentic Indigenous person and a Catholic.
“I’m pretty sure we had a belief in the Creator even before the missionaries came to British Columbia,” he said. “And our feelings, our thoughts about creation, the way that we lived and carried out our everyday lives, and the way that we helped to preserve the land and the animals that we used for food, our spirituality and our culture, were similar to the spirituality of the Catholic Church.”
“I believe that’s why our people accepted it. I don’t think anybody can separate themselves from God, even though they say so.”
Interviewed later by The B.C. Catholic, Nahanee said he is not bothered by the sort of prejudice outlined by Bouvette. “People are going to say or do what they want,” he said.
Voices of Indigenous Christianity
Bennett, program director of Cardus Faith Communities, interviewed 12 Indigenous Canadians, most of them Christian, about their religious commitments, “which often clash with the typical public presentation of Indigenous spirituality.” Here is a selection of some of their comments:
Tal James of the Penelakut First Nation in Nanaimo spoke about the relationship between Indigenous culture and his Christian faith:
“I think … that our [Indigenous] cultures were complete, and in Jesus they’re more complete. I think that’s a big thing and a big step for a lot of us. You’re going to have a lot of non-Indigenous people look at you and question your actions based on your Aboriginal heritage. Don’t take that to heart. They’re the ignorant ones who don’t want you to flourish. Those of you who are Christians, First Nations Christians, you come to the table with the same gifting that non-Aboriginal people have. For them to say, ‘We want to make room for you at the table,’ correct them. You are already at the table, and encourage them to step back and allow your gifts to flourish. Because it’s one in the same spirit.”
Rose-Alma McDonald, a Mohawk from Akwesasne, which borders New York, Ontario, and Quebec, talked about re-embracing her Catholic faith:
“I surprised everybody, including myself, in terms of embracing Catholicism after 20 years away. So I’ve had a few epiphanies in the sense that this is why my mother made me do so much in the church growing up. When I’m working, volunteering, and doing stuff in the church, I remember that. I keep remembering I’m Catholic and I’m still Catholic. I will stay Catholic because of the way I was raised.”
Jeff Decontie, a Mohawk from the Algonquin First Nations who lives in Ottawa, talked about being a person of faith in a secular world:
“Secular worldviews can sort of eat up everything around them and accept a whole wide range of beliefs at the same time. For example, you have the prevailing scientific thinking alongside New Age believers, and people in society just accept this, saying, ‘Oh, whatever it is you believe in, all religions lead to the same thing.’ No one questions it. How can these contradictions coexist? … Then we ask an [Indigenous] elder to lead prayer? Any other religion would be a no-no, but you can ask for an elder who’s going to pray a generic prayer to some generic Creator, and it’s not going to ruffle any feathers. I think that’s the danger of secular thought creeping into Canada: It goes unnoticed, it’s perceived as neutral, but at the same time it’s welcoming a whole wide range of beliefs. And it doesn’t just influence Indigenous thought. It’s influencing Christianity.”
Rosella Kinoshameg, a member of the Wikwemikong Reserve on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, spoke about being Indigenous and Catholic:
“Well, I can’t change being Indigenous. That’s something that is me. I can’t change that. But to believe in the things that I was taught, the traditional things, the way of life and the meanings of these things, and then in a church, well, those things help one another and they make me feel stronger.”
This article was originally published May 10, 2023, in The B.C. Catholic, a weekly publication serving the Catholic community in British Columbia, Canada, and is reprinted here on CNA with permission.
It has been an apocalyptic year. As one who teaches theology and ethics, and writes biblical commentary too, permit me to explain that an “apocalypse,” properly speaking, is not a disaster, a scene of death […]
Photos of the man who allegedly set a fire at St. Mary’s Cathedral and charged at two staff members on May 19, 2023. / Calgary Police Department
Boston, Mass., May 26, 2023 / 14:15 pm (CNA).
Local police in Canada are asking for the public’s assistance in identifying a man who allegedly set a fire and assaulted two men at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Calgary, located in the western province of Alberta.
Police responded early in the morning to reports of a “deliberately set fire” at the cathedral on May 19, the Calgary Police Department said in a May 25 statement.
Two staff members at the cathedral heard a “commotion” outside and opened the back door to see what it was, the statement said. When they opened the door, a man “aggressively charged at them,” according to police.
The two staff members, both men, closed the doors before the man could reach them, police said. The man continued to attempt to enter the church, the statement said.
Law enforcement was called and the Calgary Fire Department put out the fire when it arrived.
According to police, a description of the man says he is between 35 and 45 years old and bald. The man is about 6 feet tall and 180 pounds, police said. The police department’s Hate Crime Prevention Team is investigating for “hate motivation,” police said.
The cathedral referred CNA to the Diocese of Calgary for comment. The diocese did not respond by time of publication.
It is wonderful that Cardinal Collins made it clear our Church, our Faith and our Conscience.. just like the great Saint in England Thomas MOre…-
come first.
No government has the right to try to ‘force’ us as Christians to disobey God ..disobey our conscience. Mr. Trudeau take note………………..
you are way out of bounds and the only western leader to impose such a draconian law which will come back to bite you right out of a job….
why is it odd? this has been building for years, and it’s going to get worse.
thank you, Cardinal Collins.
It is wonderful that Cardinal Collins made it clear our Church, our Faith and our Conscience.. just like the great Saint in England Thomas MOre…-
come first.
No government has the right to try to ‘force’ us as Christians to disobey God ..disobey our conscience. Mr. Trudeau take note………………..
you are way out of bounds and the only western leader to impose such a draconian law which will come back to bite you right out of a job….
You need to retract it now………….
St. Thomas Moore, pray for us.
Dear Cardinal Collins, we must resist this controversial requirement, please advise us how to go about doing this.