New Bishop of Victoria Lost an Important Battle in the Yukon

Bishop Grdon ceelbrates Mass in Yukon

Bishop Gary Gordon reportedly let territorial government weaken Catholic school curriculum

By Steve Weatherbe

The Vancouver Island Christian News June 23, 2014

The Facts

Pope Francis has selected Victoria (and all Vancouver Island)’s new bishop. He is Vancouver-born Gary Gordon, bishop of Whitehorse since 2006. The news media reports on Gordon’s appointment say there are 90,000-plus Catholics on the Island but that is a census number. There are between 5,000 -10,000 actually signed up with parishes. The rest are lapsed, out of lack of interest or opposition to Church teachings or a combination of both. Born in Vancouver in 1957, Bishop Gordon was ordained in 1982 and served in several Vancouver parishes. He demonstrated an administrative flair and rose to head committees of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops related to prison chaplaincy and relations with the Anglican Church. As bishop of Whitehorse he was recently involved in conflict with the Yukon government over Church teaching on homosexuality. The education ministry developed an approach to homosexuality, in order to respond to allegations of bullying, that went beyond tolerance and required the school system to teach homosexuality was normal. Some parents and media pundits complained that the Catholic schools, all tax-funded but under Gordon’s authority, were teaching, as they should, Catholic doctrine. The media focused on a few dramatic phrases in the Catholic Catechism which declares homosexual activity to be “gravely depraved” and “seriously disordered.” Bishop Gordon responded with a policy document and directive to teachers which balanced the need to show equal love to all students and prevent bullying with the need to teach Catholic sexual morality. The territorial government said the policy was out of line and that religious liberty must submit to sexual liberty. Last fall Bishop Gordon came out with a policy that was, as Lifesite News noted, not only revised but renamed: “The original policy contested by the government was called ‘Living with Hope, Ministering by Love, Teaching in Truth.’ The new policy title reads: ‘One Heart: Ministering by Love.’” Gone, says Lifesite, were any negative references to homosexuality.

The Comment

That confrontation reflects the unfortunate position that all Catholic schools –and their bishops–find themselves in, especially those which are funded by the taxpayers. On the one hand, Catholic schools exist for one reason: to teach the faith along with the ordinary public school curriculum. On the other hand, many parents who send their children to these schools do not support certain aspects of the faith, such as the Church’s–and Christianity’s–untrendy teaching on homosexuality. Nor do many teachers in the Catholic system support it. (It is worth noting that the Yukon media and complainers cited the Rome-written Cathechism and not the locally produced Catholic curriculum to make their point—could it be because there wasn’t anything in the curriculum condemning homosexual activity.) Moreover, it is unlikely supporters of the schools would want to lose government funding over the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. Bishop Gordon may also have been influenced in his decision by the fact that practising Catholics are a tiny minority in the Yukon—as they are in B.C. In Alberta and Ontario where there are more Catholics—and Christians in general, political parties are less pushy in these matters, and bishops bolder. In reality, self-identifying Catholics and their institutions in the U.S. and Canada have long reflected the immigrants’ eagerness to “fit in” to the larger, once Protestant, and now secular, popular culture. The actual outcome of Catholic school teaching in the two countries reflects this. Two surveys of graduates of public and private, Catholic and Protestant schools in the U.S. and Canada, conducted in the last five years by Cardus, a Toronto Evangelical Protestant think tank in conjunction with Notre Dame University in the U.S., revealed Catholic school graduates emerge with little in the way of Catholic knowledge. But they are more trusting than the public graduates in big government, for example, and more supportive of same sex marriage and sex before marriage, more likely to accept evolution as fact, and less likely to make decisions based on religious morality. That’s compared to public school grads, let alone Protestant ones. On the plus side, Catholic grads are better prepared for university. Protestant private schools, on the other hand, produce graduates markedly more oriented to Christian values, and less to university. The Catholic schools have, significantly, never published a similar study to refute Cardus. So why would Bishop Gordon go to the wall for a school system that doesn’t deliver on its founding premise, and whose parents wouldn’t want him to? Let us hope Vancouver Island Catholics are more willing to stand up for their rights and their faith. Don’t think the secular humanists will stop at dictating what is taught in religious schools. The pulpits will be next and the homes finally.