The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) on Monday released a pastoral letter
on freedom of conscience and religion. Issued by the CCCB Permanent Council, the letter
expresses concern about an “aggressive relativism” in Canada that seeks to relegate
religion to the private sphere.
“The effective functioning of a democracy is
absolutely dependent upon the protection of fundamental human freedoms,” says Archbishop
Richard Smith of Edmonton, the President of the Canadian Bishops’ Conference. “That
includes freedom of conscience and freedom of religious expression. So for the sake
of the common good and for the sake of protecting those who find their rights are
being challenged, the bishops felt it necessary to speak by issuing this letter.”
Archbishop
Smith says the letter was occasioned by “various threats to, or indeed sometimes overt
attacks upon both of these fundamental human freedoms.” He notes examples of violent
religious persecution in various countries throughout the world, including Egypt and
Nigeria. While Canada does not face the same kind of violent challenges to religious
freedom, he says, “we also notice, in our own country, far more subtle challenges
to freedom of conscience, freedom of religion.”
He says that Church-state
relations in Canada have historically been very good, but warns against a “radical
secularity” that would exclude religious voices from the public square. ““We need
to work towards having healthy church-state relations based not on radical secularity,
but what we could call a legitimate one, wherein the political sphere, the religious
sphere are recognised as having autonomous spheres of action — one does not run the
other — but they do intersect in that our common life together, and our political
life, can never be separated from morality or ethics.”
Freedom of conscience
and of religion, he explains, “are inherited rights, they are not granted by the state,
therefore they cannot be taken away by the state, but must instead be honoured and
protected by the state. Where this does not happen, we feel impelled to speak.”
Listen
here to Christopher Wells' complete interview of CCCB President, Archbishop Richard
Smith: