There is unquestionably some comfort in the federal justice department’s reassurance that, as the Register reports this week, churches and places of worship will be protected under Ottawa’s amped up anti-hate legislation.

“The proposed Combatting Hate Act would amend the Criminal Code to better protect access to places of worship, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other places of worship, as well as schools, community centres and other specified places. If passed, this legislation would more clearly address and denounce hate-motivated crime and apply to everyone in Canada,” a department spokesman told our Quinton Amundson.

“Canada will not tolerate anyone being made to feel afraid because of who they are, how they worship or where they gather,” added spokesperson Kwame Bonsu.

Advertisement

It would have been infinitely more comforting if this ringing declaration of intolerance for intolerance had come from Justice Minister Sean Fine when he first tabled Bill C-9 to the metaphorical peal of bells two weeks ago. 

Homophobia and Islamophobia were highlighted among key concerns of the federal government’s effort to stamp out both symbols and acts of hatred across the land. Christian churches? It took a complaint from Phil Horgan of the Catholic Civil Rights League, and some journalistic pursuit by our man Amundson, to have our faith acknowledged by someone far down the Ottawa power rung from the Justice Minister. 

Without appearing to look a gift horse in the mouth, even the clarifier that Christians will count, too, still feels like the feds are opening the jailhouse door after the church steeple has burned down. 

Mangled metaphors aside, that is literally what has played out here. We’re to be included in the new era of inclusiveness but only after years when violent attacks against our houses of worship were met with shrugged shoulders, averted eyes, and tight lips from the federal Liberal government. 

When the mouth of a certain former Prime Minister did open to utter forth a pronouncement on the 33 Christian churches that were burned and 85 desecrated in the aftermath of unproven claims about bodies of 215 Indigenous children being discovered, it was to proclaim the violence “understandable.”

Advertisement

Letting bygones be bygones is well and good. A new Liberal government day has dawned, and we are a people called to forgiveness. But even the spirit of charity is challenged by the routine cold showers of contempt from official Ottawa for Holy Mother Church and our Christian co-religionists.

A ruling political class that truly accepts Christians as full participants in the public square would never have tolerated release of the odious recommendations in a pre-budget report from the Standing Committee on Finance that called for stripping those engaged in the “advancement of religion” – e.g., churches and pro-life groups – of charitable tax status.

A certain incoming and current Prime Minister, publicly noted for his Christian commitment and Catholic Mass attendance, would have made it his business to declare that anyone in his government who spoke favourably of those appalling recommendations would see their political careers go up in smoke. There is nothing like the prospect of a firing in the morning to focus the political mind.

But no. The recommendations sit, squat as toads, while an October budget comes into view and those responsible for “advancement of religion” fear that their historic ability to keep the funds they raise from the clutches of the tax collector will be viciously stripped away.

Granted, the recommendations do not meet the current legal definition of hatred. They certainly match any imaginable understanding of political contempt.

As Christians, of course, we are told by Our Lord to expect the scorn of the world as we proclaim His name. We are simultaneously called to works of conversion, however. If that work brings the benefit of uplifting our place in the public life of our country, well, thanks be to God.

That’s why it was uplifting to hear the incoming president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops committing to work with our Christian confreres to assert our right “to speak, to contribute to the common good, to bring reflection.”

Advertisement

It was doubly invigorating to hear Bishop Pierre Goudreau frame that collective effort in the form of “concrete actions” beyond the necessary futility of sending clerical letters into the void of Canadian officialdom.

What those actions will be, only God and the clergy know. But unquestionably they will be more comforting than waiting for a government that forgets us to protect us.