In a letter to parishes entitled ‘Totalitarianism is alive and well in Alberta’, Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary denounces moves by education chiefs in the province to enforce tailored policies on all schools, including religious-backed, to accommodate transgender pupils by allowing a boy identifying as a girl to use girls’ toilets, among other measures.
“The Alberta Government ‘Guidelines’ issued on January 13th show no evidence of consultation with or sensitivity to the Catholic community. They breathe pure secularism,” Bishop Henry wrote.
“This approach and directive smack of the madness of relativism and the forceful imposition of a particular, narrow-minded, anti-Catholic ideology … and must be rejected,” he insisted.
The imposition of the new policies, Bishop Henry continued, with no regard to the ethos of individual institutions “does not allow for any differing opinion. In no way does it differ from an attitude of ‘Shut up’ or ‘Don’t get involved.'”
The new Alberta school policies will require schools to allow pupils to use the toilet of their choice depending on their self-identified gender, to dress based on the same criterion, join sports teams of their chosen gender and to be addressed by their preferred gender pronoun and to have this recorded in official school records.
Accusing Alberta’s Minister of Education of leading the “imposition of a particular narrow-minded anti-Catholic ideology”, Bishop Henry concluded by pointing out that “the Supreme Court held that ‘to tell a Catholic school how to explain its faith undermines the liberty of the members of its community…it amounts to requiring a Catholic institution to speak about Catholicism in terms defined by the state rather than by its own understanding of Catholicism…and it also interferes with the rights of parents to transmit the Catholic faith to their children”.
