Critical mission

Critics might accuse Montreal’s Loyola private Catholic school of capitulating to the Quebec government’s anti-faith obsession by choosing to forego public funding and become officially independent.

To justify the claim, they will have to rely on either full-bore amnesia or at least memories that cannot stretch back a decade.

In 2015, what was then the Loyola school for boys – it has since successfully gone co-ed – won a landmark victory in the Supreme Court of Canada for its right to teach all its curriculum from a Catholic perspective.

Advertisement

Leading Montreal Catholics such as McGill University’s Prof. Doug Farrow and historian John Zucchi, Loyola’s own principal Paul Donovan, and a determined band of others fought back against government imposition of a so-called Ethics and Religious Culture educational straight jacket.

They were fully supported by Archbishop Christian Lépine, who recognized that the ERC program’s intention to prohibit Catholic content from certain subjects was not only an unconstitutional violation of religious freedom but also a direct assault on Loyola’s raison d’être.

As Paul Donovan summarized it perfectly, removing Catholicism from some of Loyola’s teaching was like asking a Jewish person to accept “just a little bit of pork in the soup.” Some things are all or nothing at all.

Justice Rosalie Abella, one of only two Jewish Canadians to sit on the SCOC, upheld that line of argument in the Loyola decision when she famously wrote: “A secular state respects religious differences, it does not seek to extinguish them.”

Alas, the beauty and truth of her axiom failed to penetrate the dismal reaches of the Legault government in Quebec’s National Assembly. As a result, it passed its infamous Bill 21 and Bill 9 that transformed the concept of laïcité, i.e. society-wide secularism, into a cudgel to beat back all religious faiths from the public square.

Ostensibly, the legislation was intended only to prevent devout Muslims from praying in front of Montreal’s Notre Dame Basilica and thus blocking streets during mass protests against Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

But warnings were voiced last spring that the legislative beast being unleashed would not be so easily contained. On the cusp of autumn, that prophecy’s truth appears to have landed on Loyola’s roof.

“Loyola High School in Montreal has opted to protect its 130-year-old Jesuit Catholic identity by forgoing provincial government subsidies starting in 2029 and becoming an independent school,” the Register’s Quinton Amundson reports.

Advertisement

“Beginning that year, due to the passage of Bill 9 last spring, any institution accepting this funding – public and faith-based alike - is forced to comply with Quebec’s secular policy by banning prayer spaces, faith practices during school hours and religious symbols,” he adds.

School officials are rolling out what seems laudably effective communications to keep Loyola’s parents and stakeholder community well-informed about the implications of the historic change of identity.

That, of course, is essential given the reality of student costs potentially rising $7,500 a year from $12,500 to more than $20,000 annually in 2029 and beyond. To its credit, as well, Loyola is launching a capital campaign to provide student fee assistance so that its baked-in-the-bricks Jesuit character isn’t unwittingly transformed into garden variety prep school elitism.

 All to the good as a response. Yet the situation itself is a travesty. Why should a school that has formed young minds in growth, faith, love, charity and civic character for 130 years have to interrupt its own historic success in order to protect itself from reckless governmental secularist excess?

It is also a signal for those far from Montreal, far from Loyola, to heed Archbishop Lépine’s invitation to “reflect deeply on the place we wish to give, in a pluralistic society such as ours, to religious freedom and to the ability of faith-based institutions to live out their mission fully.”

We at the Register would go a step beyond that pastoral wisdom and say such reflection is essential for all Catholics, all Christians, all people of authentic religious belief, at this moment.

Optimists insist there is no call to set our hair on fire about the indefatigable encroachment of secularist ideology on religious freedom in Canada. Up to a point, they have a point. It is never prudent, individually or collectively, to set our hair afire.

But that doesn’t preclude thoughtful, directed, democratic effort to make clear lines are being crossed that offend our religious freedoms and, indeed, menace our very identity as people of faith.

On the contrary, given what has befallen Loyola as but one example, it makes it mission critical.

Advertisement

A version of this article appeared in the September 20, 2026 issue of The Catholic Register with the headline "Critical mission"