A rchive Date
[ 26-05-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/byfield.html
Trudeau's spirituality explored
By TED BYFIELD - Edmonton Sun
May 25, 2003
St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ontario, has favoured the nation with a full-scale conference on the "spirituality" of Pierre Trudeau. The news report on it was headed, "Pierre Trudeau's secret soul." It delved at length into the "privacy" of the former prime minister and how he so admirably never let his religion enter into public discussion.
"The things about Pierre Trudeau that touched Canadians most deeply," concluded the report, "were things bound to his spirituality."
You wonder how long it will be before anybody in Canada's ultra-conformist intellectual establishment gets courage enough to question the aura of sanctity so formidably erected around this man. How long will it be until some daring professor steels himself against the inevitable contempt and disgust that will descend on him, and raises just the slightest doubt about what Trudeau actually accomplished? I'll say two generations, as Canada's intellectuals are such a singularly gutless bunch.
You do hear the odd voice in the national media. Columnist Norman Spector quoted an American friend who asked: Why do Canadians make so much of this Trudeau guy? He was wrong about Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Castro.
The American might have added that he was wrong about the national debt, which he increased from $17 billion to $200 billion, wrong about the West, and most wrong of all, it becomes increasingly evident, about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. What did he do that was right? "He told us who we are," says one gooey-eyed devotee. "He gave us our soul," says another.
Did he now? Do you suppose anybody at that conference gave thought to Trudeau's soul beyond its "secrecy?" I'm authoritatively told that it's an non-negotiable rule of the Catholic Church, for instance, that anyone who aids, enables or facilitates an abortion is therewith excommunicated. Trudeau introduced the legislation under which Canada aborts about 100,000 fetuses a year. To the unsophisticated observer, this would seem to be aiding, enabling and facilitating on a rather large scale. By the rules of the church, therefore, Trudeau was simply not a Catholic.
If this came in for discussion at the conference, the fawning news report didn't mention it. And if such an indelicate question arose, it surely would have been noted. You therefore have to conclude that the validity of Trudeau's Catholicism was not considered worthy of mention in a full-scale discussion of Trudeau's "spirituality."
The organizers no doubt reasoned: If the church didn't raise the question, why should we? Exactly. So why didn't the church raise it? The Catholic Church in Quebec gave him something akin to a state funeral, and practically trumpeted him into heaven. Unusual treatment, you would think, for someone whose actions demanded excommunication.
How, you have to ask, does this make the genuinely faithful feel? Church attendance in Quebec is the most dismal in Canada. But this means there's a remnant hanging on, holding things together for the kind of miraculous renewal that has happened so often in the church before.
Take the case of some poor young girl, a devout Catholic, who has a baby rather than aborting it, because that's what her church teaches. Unless, of course, you're a former prime minister, idol of the media and of the people who count. In that case, the rules don't apply to you. Such is the church's message.
What would have happened, do you suppose, if some courageous archbishop had announced that the church was refusing to bury Trudeau because he had not publicly repented of his abortion legislation?
The liberal media and the CBC would have gone ape. They would have shrieked for months over the outrage and the humiliation to Canada, all the while forecasting the inevitable doom of Canadian Catholicism. Meanwhile attendance at Catholic churches all over the country, and especially in Quebec, would have risen steadily because the church would have shown unmistakably that it believes what it preaches. Instead, they caved in. They blew it. So, it appears, did this conference.
Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@edm.sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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