High on the list of the most frequent letters we receive from readers are calls for Prime Minister Mark Carney to start demonstrating his Catholic bona fides.

Rarely are they mere anti-Liberal screeds founded in partisan party labelling. Rather, they tend to be issue-specific. One such concern is that a publicly-professing Catholic PM is allowing his government to pass the infamous Bill C-9, which eliminates existing Criminal Code protections for religious speech. 

Obviously, obdurate Liberal favouring of abortion and euthanasia – what the Church itself condemns as pillars of the culture of death – also causes angst for those aware Carney otherwise fulfills his Catholic obligation to attend Mass and be in a state to receive the body and blood of Christ. 

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Nor is it just readers who express disquiet that Canada’s leading Catholic federal figure professes the Faith yet does not put Church teaching into political practice. The Register’s own Quinton Amundson penned a column as Parliament returned from its Christmas break arguing the time is now for the PM to step up with legislation reflecting Catholic social and moral teaching. During last year’s federal election campaign, our Montreal correspondent Anna Farrow asked pointedly whether Carney was “a Catholic man or a Davos man,” referring to the annual World Economic Forum gathering of new world order billionaires at the elite Swiss resort.

In a recent Globe and Mail column, however, one of Canada’s leading Catholic thinkers argued thoughtfully, if not fully persuasively, that division of Canada’s prime minister into spiritual and political parts is itself short-sighted.

Commendably, Michael Higgins, Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College, avoided the siren call of so-called “Kennedy Catholicism” dating back 60 years to election of America’s first Catholic president. In that debacle, John F. Kennedy vowed to keep his political actions inviolably separate from his private faith, which he then violated 50 ways from Sunday.

Higgins notes how Carney, by contrast, manages to skillfully marry Catholic man and Davos man. Exhibit A is the PM’s January 20 speech at the WEF colloquium in the land of cuckoo clocks. Leaving aside its jabs at Donald Trump, he writes, the speech “drew from the well of Catholic thought (that) referenced the common good…called for a ‘third path’ or via media, and…deployed the social justice principles of subsidiarity (implicitly) and solidarity (explicitly).”

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In other words, without even mentioning God, Carney turned the heads of those who worship mammon toward the spiritual goods preached by Holy Mother Church. In doing so, Higgins argued, Canada’s prime minister both “anchored his speech in a centuries-old intellectual and spiritual tradition” and established “his legitimacy as a political thinker.”

The purpose of obtaining such legitimacy, he stressed, is not mere worldly self-aggrandisement but rather the revival of ways of thinking about the world that are “grounded in Christian principles” but framed so effectively in secular language that they foster “co-operation in the pursuit of the common good.”

Carney’s willingness to call for such a pursuit, he said, places the PM among the profound thinkers of post-War Europe such as Germany’s Konrad Adenauer and even the sainted Jacques Maritain, whose political metaphysics of “integral humanism” underlay the drafting of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

On that point, Higgins is either bravely or recklessly tip-toeing out to the very edge of a bridge too far. A single speech by a rookie politician who routinely mistakes grand announcements for promises fulfilled hardly vaults Carney into the ranks of the last century’s great thinkers and men of action. More, to read his actual text, rather than being swayed by theatrics, venue and audience, is to come quickly back to earth. Let’s be polite and call it pedestrian.

Still, Higgins’ arguments do offer a comforting, perhaps even compelling, “third way or via media” to resolve the Carney conundrum of publicly visible Catholicity and apparent political disregard for what the Church holds sacred. Others, he rightly argues, have blazed a worthy hybrid path without lapsing into the scummy ditch of Kennedy Catholicism. Their history is not nothing in a time of totalitarians such as Vladmir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping or a destabilized octogenarian adolescent such as Donald Trump.

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“In fighting the new despots and their cabal of power-hungry votaries, Mr. Carney has resources and historical precedents. And he knows that,” Higgins concludes.

Whether our readers or even some of our own writers will be convinced remains to be seen. But then, so does Heaven.