Abstract
Douglas Farrow is a conservative Catholic who occupies the Chair in Catholic Studies at McGill University. In this collection of five rather brief essays, supplemented by 66 pages of endnotes, he laments the current relationship of church and state in Canada. His is clearly a minority position on the topic.
Why does he desire a better country? He begins by reflecting on the foundations of human rights. Despite their importance in the constitutions of most Western countries, he considers the common understanding of human rights to be invalid because it lacks a strong foundation, which only the Christian faith can provide: “The truth of the matter is that we cannot have human rights that are rightly or justly ordered without acknowledging God and rendering thanks to God” (23).
This misunderstanding of human rights is clearly evident in the legalization of same-sex marriage, which Farrow considers to be the end of marriage as traditionally understood and the absorption of civil society into the state: “As procreation is removed from the purview of marriage, blood relations are exchanged for mere legal constructs … The family no longer stands over against the state as a buffering or mediating institution that provides refuge for the individual citizen. Vast tracts of social life are thus conceded to the state over which it has no proper authority” (34).
Farrow’s home province of Quebec has been a testing ground for the type of church–state relationship that he deplores. He is particularly concerned about the Ministry of Education’s imposition of a new curriculum on ethics and religious culture. He contrasts the normative pluralism on which the curriculum is based with a Catholic pluralism; the former grants equality to all religions while the latter encourages respect for others while proclaiming its own superiority. Farrow supported Loyola High School in Montreal, a private Jesuit institution, in its court case against the Ministry, asserting its right to teach the curriculum in accordance with the Catholic faith (an appendix in the book contains his expert witness report to the court), but he doesn’t discuss whether other religious schools should have a comparable right.
Farrow does not disagree with freedom of religion but he subordinates it to what he terms libertas ecclesiae, “the sacred freedom of the Church in and over against the state” (75). The Church here referenced is the Catholic Church; the libertas ecclesiae does not apply to other religious bodies: the Church “asks the state to respect the Church’s canon law. This it does not do for other religious institutions … because it does not regard them as having the same kind of authority. And it does not think the state should regard them as having the same kind of authority” (98).
Given the wide and probably unbridgeable gap between Farrow’s desired better country and the present reality, it is not surprising that he provides no suggestions for moving from the latter to the former. Nor does he deal (except in one footnote) with a major initiative to determine the limits of “reasonable accommodation” of cultural (and religious) positions in Quebec, the 2007–2008 Bouchard-Taylor Commission. His special pleading for the Catholic Church will likely alienate rather than convince his fellow citizens, especially non-Catholics and political authorities, and his lapses into rhetorical excesses (e.g., “Man will honour God and his Christ, or he will honour Antichrist. God has left no other option to man. The ‘neutral’ state is just the state in transition from the one to the other” [175]) further undermine the credibility of his analysis.