Comment
End Catholic school funding
I resent that I am compelled to burn this page today to denounce the advice of the local Catholic Church—advising Catholics and all Christians to stay away from Pride events or risk contaminating children with such ideas, going further to encourage dissent among our elected institutions in order to stymie such events. To be clear, my resentment is not because I am struggling to protect the faith and institution in which I was raised. Steeped in, even. But rather because I had come to understand the Catholic faith to be so irrelevant in my life and my community that it no longer possessed the power to cause damage and pain. I was wrong.
The instructions from the parish priest contained in the St. Gregory’s church bulletin last week, were a repugnant reminder that poisonous ideas continue to fester in the darker corners of this institution. They demand a strong and clear rebuke from everyone with a pen and a voice. The only good news from this sorry episode is that the pushback has indeed been sharp, broad-based, loud and persistent.
Mayor Steve Ferguson earned full marks for quickly rejecting the comments last week and supporting the Picton BIA’s initiative to install Pride banners along Picton Main Street in order “to make the community more visibly inclusive to all visitors as well as the growing LGBTQ2S+ community in Prince Edward County.”
I am encouraged that so many others have taken this message to heart. But it remains a troubling fact that these foul notions continue to find purchase in our churches and permeate our schools. And personally, a jarring indication of how disconnected the Catholic Church has become from the broader community.
Some have recoiled at the heat and ferocity of the pushback to the instructions contained in St. Gregory’s bulletin. And of course, individuals are permitted their own ideas and beliefs, no matter what I or anyone else might make of them. But this isn’t one person’s beliefs—this is an institution directing its followers to act in defiance of community norms and basic decency. The harshness of the response is, I think, a measure of the deep harm such ideas cause.
And personally, a jarring indication of how disconnected the Catholic Church has become from the broader community.
Perhaps there is more we can do.
Perhaps it is time we started talking seriously about ending Catholic school funding. It is an anachronism that politicians fear to upset. Yet, the actions and pattern of abuses perpetrated in the name of the Catholic Church have drained it of the power and authority it once wielded.
Catholic school funding is an artifact from Confederation that bears no reflection of Canada today. Or Ontario. Or Prince Edward County. It is time, in the development of this diverse and inclusive nation, that we ended public funding for a single faith. Thirty-three years ago, separate schools survived a Supreme Court challenge by a single vote. Surely Canadian society and its jurists have evolved in the intervening years to end this bizarre arrangement.
Separate Catholic schools drain precious resources from a public system already under intense funding and enrollment pressures in rural Ontario. Teachers. Buses. Books. Desks. Duplicated in communities across Ontario where schools are closing or threatened, due to declining enrollment.
The previous provincial government slated as many as 300 schools to be closed across the province. The current government put a moratorium on such closures. Yet the pressure remains.
Perhaps there is something we can do in this community to signal that this parish priest’s directives do not reflect our collective values. That we, as Mayor Ferguson wrote, “recognize the valuable contributions the LGBTQ2S+ community make to Prince Edward County. Just as important, Pride Week gives all of us an opportunity to recognize the human rights and dignity of all persons in our community.”
St. Gregory’s parish is currently working toward acquiring the recently shuttered Queen Elizabeth School in Picton. They are first in line. Public elementary students who once attended Queen Elizabeth, meanwhile, have been uprooted and sent to the high school. The result of budget cuts to the public system.
St. Gregory Elementary school’s enrollment is up, as parents who weren’t ready for their seven-year-old to navigate the halls of secondary school, chose the only other alternative available. But at what cost? What other toxic ideas proliferate inside the mind of the leader of this parish and school?
The separate school is seizing the market opportunity created by a squeezed public system to expand into a larger school. But surely it wasn’t the intent of the province and the school board, when they closed Queen E, to push children out of the public system toward Catholic schools. So, talk to your trustee. Talk to MPP Todd Smith. Ask them not to allow the separate school to gain from the public school’s loss.
There are better uses for this building. Affordable housing. Long-term care facility. Recreation. Anything, it seems to me, would be better.
This is why OPEN (One Public Education Now) has retained a law firm and an expert witness to launch a challenge under the Charter of Rights to the public funding of one religious system. See https://open.cripeweb.org/aboutOpen.html for more information and to donate. The Supreme Court decision in Reference re Bill 30 over 30 years ago should be re-examined. The current system not only wastes money on unnecessary busing and duplicate administration system; it is clearly unfair in what is supposed to be a multicultural society to publicly fund one religion’s school system. You can do something.
You know what they say about one bad apple and about throwing the baby out with the bathwater…
In your trademark manner you have opened an important discussion by taking an extreme perspective.
My experience was extreme satisfaction with the Christian schools of The County and they provide the only options other than home-schooling for parents who wish their children to be educated on a morally-based campus.
My sons attended the tuition-funded Sonrise Christian Academy then one completed his elementary career at the publicly-funded St. Gregory’s Catholic. The conventional public schools have their hands tied re: any sort of religious persuasion so we voted for education with greater freedom.
My daughter went to school in the French Catholic school system of Quebec with equal satisfaction. Our Jewish friends in Montreal sent their daughter to a Jewish school, which I believe was also publicly-funded. Who knows what’s going to happen over there now. You want Ontario to pass a racially-culturally-religiously-descriminatory law too?
Catholics have privileged funding in Ontario that has to stop! Ontario clearly rejected funding of all faith based schools when John Tory was Conservative leader. I find the funding situation to be repugnant as well. One public system appropriately funded. Buy your religious education on your own dime, not mine!
That’s a very small minded and biased comment. It is your choice to send your children to a religious educational institution, it isn’t however your right that others have to bare the cost of it. Especially since the morals and ethics of the religious are divisive and fuel hatred towards peaceful members of society. No one should have to foot the bill for a persons religious indoctrination. That is a violation against another’s human rights! You wish to send your kids to these Institutional hate groups? – then do so out of your own pocket!