Montreal Gazette – June 19, 2010
Court backs Loyola over ethics course: Ruling slams Quebec approach. Attempt to impose secular focus on teaching compared to Spanish Inquisition
By James Mennie

A private Catholic school in west end Montreal has won a court ordered exemption from a provincial government order that it teach a controversial ethics and morality course within the boundaries established by Quebec’s Education Dept.

And while the principal of Loyola High School says the Superior Court decision simply confirms what his institution has already been doing – examining other religious and ethical creeds through a Catholic perspective – the judge in the case was withering in his assessment of the Education Department’s conduct in its dealings with the school, going so far as to compare the province’s attempt to impose a secular focus on Loyola’s teaching of the course to the intolerance of the Spanish Inquisition.

“In this age of the respect of fundamental rights, of tolerance, reasonable accommodation and multiculturalism, the attitude adopted by the (Education) minister, is surprising,” wrote Judge Gerard Dugre in a 63-page judgment handed down yesterday. “Canadian democratic society is based on principles recognizing the supremacy of God and the primacy of the law – both of which benefit from constitutional protection.

“The obligation imposed on Loyola to teach the ethics and religious culture course in a lay fashion assumes a totalitarian character essentially equivalent to Galileo’s being ordered by the Inquisition to deny the Copernican universe.” Dugre ruled that by trying to compel Loyola High School, a Catholic institution founded in 1848, to adhere to rigidly secular teaching guidelines, the provincial government violated the school’s freedom of religion as guaranteed by the Quebec Charter of Rights.

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