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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 20, 2007
Backstop
Ottawa, we learned last week, will at last have a new archbishop. Pope Benedict XVI has appointed a Jesuit, Terrence Thomas Prendergast, to assume the pastoral care of the diocese’ half-million Catholics, succeeding the Most Reverend Marcel André J. Gervais. We’ve been waiting for this appointment for some time.The Montreal-born Prendergast was most recently archbishop of the Halifax diocese, and chancellor of St Mary’s University; before that, an auxiliary bishop at Toronto. He is a teacher and writer, serving on the Canadian bishops’ theology commission, and doing a column in the Catholic Register. He is a Canadian member of Vox Clara, an international advisory commission on the English translation of the Roman Missal. According to websites, his hobbies include cycling, skating, “foreign films,” and most usefully, Italian cooking. And he must have at least some slight capacity for drollery, judging from his immediate greeting to the inhabitants of Canada’s national capital region: “My request is that you please pray for me; I have already begun to pray for you.” My reader will know I’m still a new Catholic, of only a few years’ standing. I know nothing of the new archbishop personally, and little second-hand. I am disposed to think well of any new appointment from Pope Benedict, who seems determined to move the Church, in Canada and elsewhere, forward from the disastrous “glib-liberal” era. He must choose among the people he has, however. As Chesterton said, one of the biggest problems with the Catholic Church, is Catholics. They are human (like the members of other congregations), and given to being difficult, disobedient, and often downright sinful. Our media have -- whether usefully or not -- a special standard of perfection for any professing Catholic or other believing Christian, set well beyond the human, and make it their business to trash, whether justly or unjustly, anyone who might fall short. Yet we need much of the Catholic hierarchy, in a time like this. We are desperately in need of people with not only the authority but the courage to invoke some moral, spiritual, and even intellectual standards. Not only Catholics need this; and not only Catholics benefit when Rome tries to hold the line -- against the cheap relativism that has come to govern our moral order, the weird gnosticism of contemporary spirituality, and the irrationalism that is displacing consecutive thought. Evil has always been at large in the world, but what makes our age special is the degree to which what the previous pope called “the culture of death” has come to dominate the public forum. This applies broadly, both West and East. Here, in what was Christendom, we knowingly sacrifice babies on a scale unimaginable to the ancient Carthaginians, in the vast annual holocaust of abortions. There, in what was the Dar al-Islam, suicide bombings and terrorism are celebrated. And these are just leading indicators, of ghastly truths sunk deeper. The Catholic Church, with well over a billion members worldwide -- markedly larger in number, and more universally distributed, than any other religious congregation -- would have a grave responsibility for upholding the good in this world, even without its transcendental claims. What it does and says has a huge effect, beyond the lives of its initiates. All men and women of goodwill -- Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, and many others, including those who profess no religion -- depend on Rome as a kind of backstop. Her pope and bishops have the most solemn duty to maintain difficult positions, that help others who are smaller hold their difficult positions, against the world’s ghastly realities. Ontario’s premier, the nominally-Catholic Dalton McGuinty, was quoted in this newspaper on Wednesday, excusing himself from any obligation to obey Catholic teaching. He said, "I have a different constituency than does the Pope. I am responsible for representing all kinds of people from all kinds of different backgrounds, different faiths, different cultures, different traditions." It is hard to imagine a statement more fatuous. Though also comic, to think of our little provincial apostate, claiming a broader constituency than the man who occupies the Throne of Peter. It will be the solemn duty of Ottawa’s new archbishop, from his particular station at the heart of our nation’s political life, to stand up to that kind of cant -- not only for Catholics, but for all kinds of people from all kinds of different backgrounds, different faiths, different cultures, different traditions. For we share a vital interest in defeating moral, intellectual, and spiritual depravity. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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