Doubtless according to plan, bureaucratic banishment of public prayer by Canada’s military chaplains went virtually unnoticed amid the perpetual media crisis that filters into Canadian summer consciousness.

Yet contributors to the Register’s comment pages, in addition to our own reporting of the story, unveil why the internal edict issued by the Department of National Defence in late July is critical, even transformational, for this country.

For Fr. Tim Nelligan, a long-time military chaplain in Ottawa, the “spiritual neutrality” mandated (and masked in banality of evil bureaucratese) by the July 29 General Instruction from the Commander of Military Personnel assaults the very soul of Canada. 

Advertisement

“Nowhere in the history of human religious faith expression has there ever been a definition of ‘The Spirit’ as being neutral…. Neutrality is a choice, a willful act of the mind, but it is never inactive since it serves in working to its own decided end of maintaining lukewarmness and indifference,” Nelligan writes.

Some might see fresh evidence of ancient Irish stem-winding in Fr. Nelligan discerning possible demonic sources for the commandment to prohibit any public mention by military chaplains of “God etc.” 

Quinton Peralta-Greenough, an emerging political philosopher in Toronto, is more sanguine about the harm of the directive for our religious life and freedom. He discounts it as a direct attack on liberty of faith. It is more, he says the confusions of democratic secularism colliding with themselves. 

“To accuse (the Liberal) government of wanting to destroy religious freedom is simply unfair to (its) record — even if (its) supposed policies and rhetoric may leave much to be desired…Nothing about (that) suggests Canadian secularism is coherent,” he says.

Veteran journalist and former citizenship court judge, Joe Woodard, nimbly skips the difference. He sets the threat squarely among fundamentalists of the federal bureaucracy he served for several years. Civil service gradualism intent on removing the cornerstone of faith from public life is but one, albeit deeply alarming, aspect of the new idolatry in Ottawa, he says. 

The Golden Calf being raised is the mandarinate’s worship of itself as the image of what Canada is and shall be. High praise is sung, Woodard notes, for the ineffably faceless occupants of federal officialdom busily “building Canadian society” whether we mere mortals – formerly known as citizens – like the results or not.

Advertisement

A future without faith might seem unthinkable to Canadian Catholics and other Christians, indeed to all who manifest the genuine religious sense that is indivisible from the meaning of being human. But Woodard’s warning is ultimately that we should never let what we can’t imagine blind us to what is already being planned and carried out. 

Andrew Bennett, a former Register columnist and Canada’s inaugural/only Ambassador for Religious Freedom, reminds repeatedly that religious liberty is the foundation of all other liberties because its very essence is freedom to believe and express.

Drawing on his own experience, Woodard puts it more starkly vis-à-vis the July 29 General Instruction: “Now is an opportune moment (for the federal bureaucracy) to eradicate the last vestiges of faith among its own employees.” 

The caustic irony, of course, is that military chaplains, like all chaplains, are “employees” only in the most basic sense of living their vocations by serving in the Canadian Armed Forces rather than, say, hospitals or schools or prisons or wherever else they do their daily duty. But they truly serve, to deploy Catholic-Christian language, the One whose service is perfect freedom.

To deny them that freedom, to prohibit them publicly using “the language of God etc.” is an even worse travesty than assaulting religious freedom. It is to efface, with the stroke of a bureaucratic pen, their reason for being, we might even say their Being. 

If they can be effaced so blithely, if a central planning committee can decree that chaplains formerly known as servants of God will henceforth perform before Canadians as fuzzy-wuzzy caring-sharing pseudo-therapists and social workers, what becomes of the manifold faces of faith? What becomes of the face of liberty itself in this country? 

 Are those questions before us, as Fr. Nelligan suggests, because of demonic drift? Or have they arisen, as Quinton Peralta-Greenough cautions, through democracy ensnaring itself in natural contradictions? Regardless, it’s crucial to let Joe Woodard’s words pierce our late August consciousness.

Advertisement

“As George Orwell said, he who controls the past, controls the future,” Woodard points out.

Which makes this a moment that must not pass unchallenged.