The one thing to regret about Pope Leo’s June 7 Mass and Eucharistic procession, which attracted about 1.2 million celebrants, is that it occurred in Madrid, not Montreal.

What a rebuff having it in Canada’s second largest city would have been to the Quebec government’s nanny goat bid to butt religious believers out of the public square via its ludicrous law forbidding faith-based assembly without State approval.

What a revival it would have been for the celebration of Corpus Christi in the streets of what was once North America’s – possibly the world’s outside Rome – most Catholic city.

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As it stands, the Archdiocese of Montreal may now end up having to queue up in front of faceless secular bureaucrats to ask for permission to process through the streets en masse.

The annual Good Friday Way of the Cross organized by the lay group Communion and Liberation is apparently in similar peril. In an obnoxious extension of the State ban on visible religious clothing and symbols in “public” spaces, the thousands who followed the Cross from Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours chapel to Marie-Reine-du-Monde Cathedral must first prove their group bona fides to the civic bureaucracy.

Of course, such processions have always required Church-State cooperation to ensure orderly conduct and public security, equivalent to that expected for outdoor political rallies or any generic shout-at-the-wall protest.

But this year, the Quebec government went far beyond that with legislation imperially commanding religious groups to seek approval purely because they are communities of believers. Ostensibly, the expanded law came into effect as a result of Muslim groups praying in front of Notre Dame Basilica in Old Montreal in conjunction with disruptive pro-Palestinian demonstrations. 

There is no need to pray in public, then-Premier François Legault peremptorily declared, adding conversation with God or any other deity should be confined to private spaces.

The massive affront this represented to Church-State separation barely registered with Quebec’s political-administrative class, which can’t fix the potholes in Montreal’s infamously degraded boulevards but happily imposes secular say-so upon the care of citizens’ souls. 

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It’s part of provincial mania for the anti-faith intellectual abstraction called laïcité, an import from France that arrived in Quebec 230-plus years after the French Revolution and is being applied with the vengeance unique to officialdom desperately trying to catch up with the times. 

Yet in words that would ring out with truth whether spoken in Madrid or anywhere else there are ears to hear, Pope Leo gave homiletic counsel to the massive Corpus Christi crowd on exactly how to peacefully counter the pernicious effects of government interference in spiritual matters.

For Christians and Catholics especially, he said, the first step is to remember that we walk with Christ – and He walks with us.

“He who wished to offer us His life so that we might enter into communion with the Father and become His children, is here as the living Bread come down from Heaven, to nourish us with the very life of God, with a love stronger than death," Pope Leo said.

Christ is, of course, always ever-present in the Eucharist, the Holy Father said. But He is also in our cities, our towns, our villages, available along the routes we traverse to earn our daily bread.

“Just as Christ gives Himself as food in the Eucharistic celebration, the procession shows He is not confined to the Church but comes out to meet us. Jesus travels the streets, crosses the squares and visits our neighbourhoods, dwelling in the settings of our daily lives," Leo told the 1.2 million gathered in Madrid. 

He reminded those present that procession is subordinate to confession. While important, it is a way, not an end, toward drawing out of ourselves the sinful habits that impede the full humanity to which Christ calls us.

“It is not merely a matter of bringing out the monstrance, but of allowing ourselves to be brought out of our selfishness and indifference, of a comfortable, private faith, so as to respond to His invitation to conversion, to change our perspective, and to welcome His presence which transforms us,” he said.

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The reminder is essential whether we are in Madrid, Montreal, Toronto, Tuktoyaktuk or Timbuktu. In the streets of those cities and everywhere else, whether we are in a crowd or walk alone, we are public Catholics proclaiming our faith by how we comport ourselves in loving of neighbour.

No passing law of man can ever suppress that eternal commandment from Christ.