1. CATHOLIC POLITICAL LEADERS AND PUBLIC VALUES: SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AND PRIME MINISTER MARTIN

The movement toward legal recognition of same-sex marriages in the Canadian context has its roots in the passage of the Constitution Act, 1982, an addition to the Canadian constitutional order that brought with it a substantive and extensive set of individual rights guarantees in the form of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While early interpretations of the Charter were mixed in their recognition of homosexual rights, beginning in 2002 Canadian courts of appeal began to conclude that statutory definitions of marriage that limited it only to opposite sex couples were infringements of the Charter's s. 15 guarantee of equality. Prime Minister Paul Martin's Liberal government declined to seek appeals from those cases to the Supreme Court of Canada, a fact that suggested to many observers the sympathy of the government of the day for the plaintiffs in those cases and for the idea of recognizing homosexual equality in the realm of marriage.

In 2004, Martin's government, which was considering same-sex marriage legislation, sought an advisory ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada on its constitutional obligations in this area (Reference re Same-Sex Marriage [2004] 3 S.C.R. 698). Surprisingly, however, the Court refused to answer the central question of the reference — whether or not recognition of same-sex marriage was constitutionally required — on the grounds that the government had had the opportunity to receive an answer on this question through the appeals process in previous cases. While the Martin government had perhaps been seeking an opportunity to justify their legislation on Charter grounds to those in the public opposed to it, the Supreme Court refused to provide the desired fig leaf (Reference re Same-Sex Marriage (2004)). Nonetheless, Martin's government introduced same-sex marriage legislation for consideration by the House of Commons in early 2005, and, with the support of the government as well as most of the members of two out of three of Canada's opposition parties, the measure passed, ultimately becoming law on July 20, 2005.

In addition to the public disapproval of the prime minister by opponents of same-sex marriage, Paul Martin, a Catholic, also drew criticism from a variety of Catholic lay people and spiritual authorities in the lead up to and aftermath of the legislative process. In a number of public statements, Bishop Henry suggested that he would contemplate denying Martin communion were the prime minister in Henry's Diocese of Calgary. In a public interview, Bishop Henry noted that

In explaining his position on the subject, Prime Minister Martin described himself as a “strong Catholic,” but noted as well that “I am also a legislator and I believe in the separation of church and state” (These Last Days Ministries 2005). In a more formal pastoral letter on the subject, Bishop Henry responded by citing approvingly the conclusions of the Church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the obligation for Catholics to act with “moral coherence” in the “public square”:

And most unflinchingly, in January 2005, the Bishop wrote that “since homosexuality, adultery, prostitution and pornography undermine the foundations of the family, the basis of society, then the State must use its coercive power to proscribe or curtail them in the interests of the common good” (Henry Reference Henry2005, 1).

Each of Bishop Henry's statements here would seem to be a clear indication that Catholic doctrine is inimical to the sort of intra-comprehensive recognition of liberal political structures called for in Political Liberalism. The Church's denial of the viability of “parallel” lives, the imposition upon Catholic political leaders of a duty to translate the Church's moral teachings into public policy at the risk of excommunication for failing to do, and the Bishop's conclusions about the validity of using the coercive powers of the state to enforce the Church's moral conclusions about a wide range of individual choices for Catholics and non-Catholics alike are mutually consistent statements implying a categorical rejection of the essentials of a liberal polity: state neutrality about private choices.

Of course, that Thomist, virtues-oriented Catholicism might be unenthusiastic about a neutral state is hardly unexpected, as scholars like Roger Magyar (Reference Magyar1998, 1) have pointed out. This phenomenon is equally unsurprising in the Canadian context. The primary mover behind the Canadian Charter of Rights, Pierre Trudeau (himself a Catholic), has noted in a number of his scholarly works, for example, that among the staunchest foes in the 1950s of the modernization and secularization of Quebec, the centre of Canadian Catholicism, was the Catholic Church (see, for example, Trudeau Reference Trudeau1958, 302). Until the province's “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s, the Church was extremely influential in then-Premier Maurice Duplessis's socially conservative government, an influence that included virtually direct control over the province's schools as well as ongoing encouragement of the premier in his government's efforts to suppress religious freedom for non-Catholics in the province (Botting Reference Botting1993, 105–116). There is nothing new in the idea that Catholicism and liberalism are a poor mix.

How is it then that John Rawls fails to account for the problem of Catholicism in his theory? The problem arises, I would argue, because his conceptualization of comprehensive religious systems is based almost entirely on the one work in philosophical history, which might be thought most sympathetic to the idea of finding support for liberalism within religious belief — John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration. In his central discussion of overlapping consensus in Political Liberalism, Rawls invokes Locke's famous (and profound) arguments that Christianity conduces to liberal toleration because, for example, it denies that a person can turn his or her salvation over to another and because of its mandate that authentic religious belief be adopted with free will (Rawls Reference Rawls1993, 145, citing Locke Reference Locke2007 [1690], 129). These and other precepts suggest for Locke and for Rawls the possibility of recognizing the value of the neutral state from within the Christian perspective.

Unfortunately, Rawls fails to note that Locke, of course, excluded Catholicism from the set of beliefs that ought to be tolerated, precisely because its adherents failed to recognize the untimacy of local governmental authority in conflicts with their own state transcendant religious authorities. (There really is nothing new in the idea that Catholicism and liberalism are a poor mix!) The problem, then, is that Rawls advances his theory of the viability of intra-religious recognition of liberalism by relying on the least oppositional understanding of religious belief that could possibly be mustered. Nor is this simply a problem of Catholicism. Any number of systems of religious belief — including fundamentalist Protestantism, but also the beliefs of shari'a Muslims — implies the doctrinal rejection of a Church-state separation. Rawls' theory relies on a conceptualization of religious believers as what might be called “Letter on Toleration political liberals.” While such persons exist, they hardly represent the only important paradigm of religious faith in western society, and they clearly are not the sort of citizen embodied in Bishop Henry's theory of the duties of Catholic political representatives. Religious priorism and fundamentalism raise serious doubts about the viability of John Rawls' liberal hopes.

2. CATHOLIC POLITICAL LEADERS AND THE FAITH VALUES: THE CALGARY CATHOLIC SCHOOL DISTRICT

A second conflict between Frederick Henry and political representatives of his faith arose in the summer of 2006. The issue here concerned the offering by schools in the CCSD of occasional charitable casinos to generate funds for a variety of school related activities. Because the educational activities of these schools are fully funded by the provincial government, the funding at issue here was primarily used for optional purchases like school computers and secondary activities such as field trips and school athletics. Following a joint pastoral letter issued by the Bishops of Alberta in which the collective religious authority gently asked Catholics to examine their duties in regard to the gambling issue, Bishop Henry more uncategorically requested that the Catholic schools in his diocese end gambling related fund-raising. While both the pastoral communication and the Bishop noted that Catholicism did not condemn gambling per se, Bishop Henry emphasized that among his main concerns was that by offering casinos, the schools were promoting a “culture of gambling” and by doing so contributing to the victimization and exploitation of those with gambling problems (Calgary Catholic School District 2006, 1).

In June of 2006, the Trustees of the CCSD offered a formal policy response to the Bishop's request that effectively constituted a refusal to obey Bishops Henry's orders. In a briefing paper on the issue, the District emphasized that the Catholic Catechism and the original pastoral letter from the collective Bishops of Alberta indicated that gambling was not intrinsically wrong, and outlined a policy alternative to that mandated by Bishop Henry. While the Trustees asserted in public statements that they “understood where the bishop is coming from” (Henry Reference Henry2006a, 1), they also noted the important role that the funds raised through gambling played in schools as well as the disadvantage ending such funding would create for students in schools in poorer communities. The District declared that it would leave the decision as to whether to host a casino to each individual school, encourage the development of alternative mechanisms for fund raising, mandate that five percent of the proceeds of gambling fund raising go to charities providing services to those with gambling addictions, and fund educational materials directed to students and parents encouraging them to make “healthy choices” regarding gambling (Calgary Catholic School District 2006, 3).

In his turn, Bishop Henry responded with another pastoral letter, lamenting that the Board's decision “… constitutes a failure in Catholic leadership” that merely “pays lip-service to the pillar of ‘Catholicity.’” The Board's refusal to forego gambling related fund-raising for the sake of the money was in the Bishop's eyes “equivalent to Esau selling his birthright for a mess of pottage (cf. Gen. 25: 29–34)” (Henry Reference Henry2006a, 1). Bishop Henry went on to note that the reasoning behind the CCSD's decision:

The dispute between the District and the Bishop intensified thereafter. Bishop Henry declined to participate in the CCSD's annual September schools opening mass, and threatened to withdraw his recognition of the Catholicity of district schools that participated in gambling. Ultimately, despite its strong and persistent initial refusal to heed the Bishop, the Board relented, and in March of 2007 announced its intention to entirely phase out gambling related school fund raising.

Arguably, the initial self-understanding on the part of the trustees of the Catholic School Board in their dispute with the Bishop seems little different from that taken up by Paul Martin in his role as prime minister representing the entire population of an ostensibly secular nation. This is perhaps somewhat surprising, given that the Board was constitutionally mandated to provide Catholic education, was elected by Catholic ratepayers, and was at least theoretically under the spiritual guidance of the Bishop. Despite this, the Board's position and reasoning on school gambling essentially could not be differentiated from what one might expect from any institution of public government scrupulously adhering to the most carefully recognized mandates of liberal theories of political legitimacy. The Board justified leaving decisions about gambling to individual schools in the name of “giving parents a choice,” which in turn followed from the confidence the Board expressed in the ability of parents to “make moral decisions.” These are relatively direct endorsements of what would seem to be liberal notions of autonomy. The Board's choice to endorse education about the potential perils of gambling over alternatives such as condemnation or prohibition is also in keeping with the mechanisms of response associated with liberal neutrality rather than a substantively Catholic morality.Footnote ³

Indeed, among the most interesting aspects of the dispute was the extent to which the CCSD not only adopted the mandates of liberal political structures, but in fact seemed to ally itself through the forms of reasoning and vocabulary it employed with the much more expansively comprehensive norms of what is usually called “ethical” or “cultural liberalism.” Two attributes identify liberalism in this form. The first is a valuation of the ideals of self-constructing individualism as goals in their own right. William Galston's suggestion that John Stuart Mill's comprehensive liberalism flows from a valorization of the idea of human life as best lived with the goal of the “full flowering of individuality” (Galston Reference Galston1991, 230) accurately captures this motif. The second attribute of cultural liberalism is its related endorsement of what is in effect an ideal of the “liberal person,” an individual decision-maker who seeks his or her guidance not in a-rational and self-constraining sources of value like religion, but fundamentally in reason and self-interest.Footnote ⁴

At least two examples of this culturally liberal orientation are to be found in the CCSD's response to Bishop Henry's condemnation of gambling. First, the Board appears in its deliberations to have endorsed the neutral and liberal ethic of efficiency as the ultimate determiner of choices in working out its position. Their communication on the issue emphasized the potential loss of funds associated with ending gambling related fund raising, and, indeed, noted specifically their concern that a no gambling policy would “also adversely affect the competitiveness [of schools], possibly impacting enrolments” (Calgary Catholic School District 2006, 5). There is no evidence in its briefing paper or its public statements that the Board seriously considered an alternative possibility: that the District's students might forego extra computers and optional field trips in order to give recognition to their religious obligations and to the Catholic valuation of the “common good” of the community.

A second element of cultural liberalism is discernible in the very vocabulary the CCSD adopted in its justifications for denying the Bishop's commands. The foremost exemplar of this is perhaps the Board's invocation of the value of “healthy choices” in outlining its opting for a policy of education rather than prohibition on the gambling issue. The Board noted that

The “healthy choices” trope employed here is highly suggestive of cultural liberalism's emphasis on the idea that rationally discernible goods should be understood as the central sources for discerning individual obligation. The idea of healthy choices is a nod to one of the foremost such sources in the contemporary world; that is, the idea of health and fitness not just as good things, but as morally fundamental and profound aspirations — “healthism”.Footnote ⁵ It says much, then, that the CCSD made use of this item of cultural liberalism's vocabulary in its explanation of its self-understanding of its obligations while eschewing the more authentically Catholic moral language of spirituality and absolute obligation that was available to it.

In considering the implications of the CCSD's perspective here, it is also worth noting that the Board's position seems not to have been particularly unpopular with Catholic parents. While there was some parental support for the Bishop, there is little evidence that that was particularly overwhelming, and many parents expressed the same sort of concern the Board did that the loss of gambling related funding would have resulted in the loss of various extra-curricular activities for students (CBC News 2006). The overall conclusion suggested by this fact and by the Board's position is that the Catholic comprehensivism Bishop Henry is preaching has been supplanted by the very system of value the Bishop is most anxious to suppress — liberalism, and, indeed, by what seems to be verging on becoming an ethically comprehensive form of that doctrine. The trend toward this perspective would seem in turn to suggest a potential solution to the problem of Catholicism for Rawlsian overlapping consensus which was initially suggested by Henry's previous critical responses to Paul Martin on the same-sex marriage issue. Surely, the incompatibility of Catholic doctrine with an overlapping consensus on political liberalism is only a technicality if liberalism in even its most far-reaching form is problematic only for the occasional old-fashioned priest.

If the matter was indeed purely a technical one — that is, a question involving, say, a statistical assessment of the relative strengths of the conflicting possibilities here — this might of course be a reasonable conclusion. More is at stake here, however, than simply a question of the extent of popular support for public liberalism. While the Board's decision is clearly troubling for Catholics who recognize the form of faith that Bishop Henry endorses, there is reason to argue that it might also be thought potentially troubling more generally, including for political liberals themselves. My concern here is that the norms and reasoning of cultural liberalism in general and as expressed by the CCSD is at their heart fundamentally unsatisfying, even vapid. Their adoption as sources of value for ethical or social choices, while of some help in constructing a Rawlsian overlapping consensus for public liberalism, is therefore more to be lamented than celebrated.

The emptiness of comprehensive liberalism as a substantive ethical (as opposed to simply political) doctrine is evident in any number of aspects of the CCSD's response to the gambling issue raised by Bishop Henry. The most patent of these is the Board's invocation of the aforementioned cliché of “healthy choices.” On the face of it, of course, these are unobjectionable ideals: who could have a problem with health or with choice? But while both are goods, the problem with the breezy use of the vocabulary of healthism by the CCSD is that it implies on their part an unreflective adoption of the cultural perspective implied by this set of values. Healthism is not simply an invocation of health and choice, but the endorsement of a prioritizing of one's time, mental space, and moral energy. Presumably, the adoption of this hypergood (to use Charles Taylor's (Reference Taylor1989, 19) evocative description of such overarching societal values) invites one to make use of these resources in aid of counting calories, perusing food packaging to identify the presence of currently unfashionable fats, worrying about undiagnosed diseases and unhealthy lifestyles, one's weight and appearance, and the like. None of these activities is unworthy per se, but clearly many thoughtful persons might be prompted to question their substantiveness as fundamental prioritizations of one's values.

While my critique of the CCSD's comprehensive liberalism here comes from my own perspective as a (Catholic) political liberal, I note that some of the most profound critiques of the cultural or ethical version of liberalism come of course from the ideology's most recent philosophical opponents, the communitarians. Charles Taylor, for example, has suggested that the erosion of the authority of traditional systems of value has brought with it a series of “malaises” in modern societies. Among these is an increasing emphasis by persons on the use of “instrumental reason” — “the kind of rationality we draw on when we calculate the most economical application of means to a given end” (Taylor Reference Taylor1991, 5). Other communitarians including Robert Bellah et al. (Reference Bellah1985, 143) and Alasdair MacIntyre and have criticized modern liberal societies for creating a background context in which claims of morality are understood in the terms of emotivism, as statements of feeling rather than substance. In turn, if “emotivism is true,” MacIntyre argues,

Such critical observations seem remarkably apposite in their application to the reasoning processes adopted by the CCSD in its dispute with Bishop Henry. In its response to Bishop Henry, for example, it is noteworthy that the Board did not directly respond to the Bishop's proclamations of the values of Catholicism in the Diocese of Calgary, but in fact pursued a lawyerly tactic of seeking a more sympathetic or at least more readily evadable source of authority to justify their actions. The Board looked behind their Bishop's authority and pointed to the more abstract and less challenging pastoral letter of the Bishops of Alberta and to the Catholic Catechism, emphasizing that neither condemned participation in gambling. At the same time, the Board largely evaded consideration of the Bishop's more precise articulation of the problem at issue — endangering and exploiting others through exposing them to gambling. The Board's emphasis on the question of whether persons act wrongly by gambling was arguably both evasive and surprisingly un-Catholic in its emphasis on an individualist notion of sin and obligation, an emphasis that fails to recognize that one may act condemnably by failing to recognize one's duties to others as well as by directly acting against textual proscriptions.

There is also what seems, at least from an external perspective, to be a certain amount of disengenuousness in the Board's approach to this issue. The Board's emphasis in its selection of concerns and consequences with ending gambling was, one might argue, almost wholly on those which aligned with its self-interested objective of preserving gambling-based fund raising. The Board's proclaimed concern about the consequences of the no gambling policy for schools in poor neighborhoods, for example, seems like a convenient nod to Catholic concerns about social justice even while largely evading questions of responsibility for exploiting those addicted to gambling. The policy of giving five per cent of the proceeds of gambling to addiction service charities similarly seems to be, as Bishop Henry suggested, mere lip service to morality. The Board's invocation of the potential losses for students from the no gambling policy smacks of the now clichéd “think of the children” argument to the passions. And the Board's lament that it is difficult for a Christian living in a pluralistic society to influence the values of others seems odd given that its members in fact chose to give up the one means that religious believers in pluralist societies do have to influence others — the force of good example.

In the larger sense, these forms of reasoning are evidence of the poverty of resources in cultural liberalism's conceptions of personal morality. To adopt the Board's lawyerly approach would seem in many instances to deprive oneself of the opportunity to honestly seek out an objective source by which to define (not rationalize) one's choices. To reason from an emphasis on what one loses by recognizing a moral standard is to fail to recognize the possibility that real morality may involve loss and self-denial and not simply self satisfaction. And to adopt public liberalism's norms as the source of one's personal ethical standards is to forego the possibility of subscribing to a system of value that challenges one by asking for more than what can simply be justified in neutral and rational terms. Neutrality and rationality are necessary and moral values for the state, but there is reason to lament when they become the primary values shaping the decisions of individuals and religious communities.

3. BISHOP HENRY AND THE ALBERTA HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

Is there then a solution to the Rawlsian dilemma if both the overlapping consensus of political liberalism and the sort of values associated with comprehensive liberalism (or politics-directing comprehensive Catholicism, for that matter) are not viable? Some inspiration in the search for an answer might be found in a third conflict involving Frederick Henry and the institutions of the Canadian state. The dispute here involved the Alberta Human Rights Commission, a quasi-judicial body of the provincial government charged with interpreting and applying the Alberta Human Rights, Citizenship, and Multiculturalism Act's prohibitions on discrimination. Unlike the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which provides rights only against governmental actions, the Human Rights Act governs relations (in the public sphere) between individuals and between individuals and private institutions.

Bishop Henry's engagement with the Human Rights Commission derived from a complaint arising out of his May 2005 pastoral letter to his Diocese entitled “On Same Sex Marriage” (Henry Reference Henry2005, 1). This was the missive in which the Bishop endorsed using the coercive powers of the state to suppress adultery, pornography, prostitution, and homosexuality. Two separate complaints were filed against Bishop Henry by Alberta citizens under s. 3 of the Human Rights Act, which mandated that “no person shall publish … any statement, publication, notice, sign, symbol, emblem or other representation that … is likely to expose a person or a class of persons to hatred or contempt” on the basis of their personal beliefs or characteristics of identity. The complainants argued that Bishop Henry's association of homosexuality with adultery, pornography, and prostitution was likely to encourage contempt for homosexuals, and that his endorsement of coercive action by the state to curtail homosexuality was an incitement to discrimination. The success of those claims would have entitled the Commission to mandate an appropriate remedy, which might have included among other things an order to the Bishop to cease further communication in this form as well as monetary damages.

In a series of interviews, public statements, and pastoral letters, the Bishop offered his response to the human rights action he was facing:

Bishop Henry went on to lament that

In a February 2006 pastoral letter in which he commended new Prime Minister Stephen Harper for saying, uncharacteristically of Canadian political leaders, “God Bless Canada” in his election night victory speech, Bishop Henry also made an indirect comment on the issue of freedom of religion:

The Bishop also commended in that letter the broad reading of the Charter right to freedom of religion offered in a leading case on the subject, R. v. Big M Drug Mart. Bishop Henry quoted Chief Justice Dickson's conclusion there that

While Bishop Henry's invocation of the Charter in his defence must have considerable initial appeal for any advocate of rights oriented liberalism, there is some potential irony in the Bishop's response. The theory of freedom of religion from Big M which Bishop Henry cited was enunciated in a case in which The Supreme Court struck down a federal sabbatarian closing law known as the Lord's Day Act. Among the explanations offered by the Supreme Court for their decision in Big M was that such laws were infringements on freedom of religion because they illegitimately subjected non-believers to the moral standards of believers. Besides the assertion Bishop Henry quotes, Justice Dickson also held in Big M that Sunday closing laws

Arguably, there might be thought to be a certain inconsistency in Bishop Henry's endorsing a theory of prime ministerial duties which mandates applying a Catholic theory of marriage to state laws on the subject while at the same time relying in his own defense on a theory of religious freedom that explicitly follows from the notion that the state must not impose the spiritual beliefs of some of the population on all of the population. Despite the Bishop's chagrin at his potential censure by the state, there is then certain symmetry of value between such an outcome and his own position. Bishop Henry's theory of prime ministerial duties and his endorsement of the use of the coercive power of the state in aid of suppressing homosexuality, pornography, and the like deny the existence of a line between church and state, between what he understands as an authoritative comprehensive system of moral belief and governmental policy applying to everyone in society.

What is more, it seems reasonable to suggest that the Bishop's peril here follows quite directly from an application of his own political, if not religious, philosophy to the question of the state's role in enforcing private values. When the Alberta Human Rights Commission interferes with free societal debate because that debate conflicts with the norms of equality, respect, and non-judgmentalism, it is seeking to enforce a comprehensive theory about individual choices (“healthy” ones perhaps?) about public speech, based on a particular theory about what the good citizen should or should not say. While such values are neutral and public when they are applied as mandates to the actions of government vis-à-vis citizens, they are not neutral when they are asserted as mandates for the individual ethics of debate in the public square. They are in fact a personal culturo-ethical liberalism of a sort not dissimilar to that which I argued informed the CCSD's position on school gambling. The Bishop's complaint may be that he does not like the content of the AHRC's theory, but his prior position on the proper role of the state suggests that he can have no complaint about the idea of a publicly enforced private or personal morality in the more abstract sense. The problem for Bishop Henry is that his own perspective sanctions the elimination of the line between state and popular public belief, and just at a time when that popular public belief is growing more and more hostile to the contrary comprehensive vision the Bishop is purveying.

The thought might be, then, that the Bishop's predicament as well as the very values he himself is invoking in his own defence suggests the desirability of a liberal solution. That solution might take one of two forms. The first and most direct is in the recognition of the background claims of the liberal state in a political liberalism based on the idea of the modus vivendi. The Bishop's dispute with the AHRC found him in a position where his own freedom of expression and religion were imperiled by an attempt to impose upon him the values of a contending comprehensive doctrine. There is, then, some incentive for him to recognize and endorse liberal rights and the value of toleration, at least so long as the current social fashion is for an absolutism of cultural liberalism rather than Christianity. The situation is, at least conceptually, not significantly different from that which Rawls notes in his discussion of the historic development of modus vivendi liberalism following the Reformation in Europe (Rawls Reference Rawls1993, xxvi). This is, as Judith Shklar (Reference Shklar1984, 5) has described it, the “liberalism of fear.”

There are, however, some significant problems with this solution. First, as Rawls has argued, any solution based on the “balance of forces” is contingent on the preservation of that balance. This sort of contingency would seem incompatible with a truly moral or just basis for public life. Presumably a moral solution is one that has a more enduring claim upon us than that which comes and goes with the latest array of force and counter-force. Besides, from the perspective of Canadian Catholics and other endorsers of spiritually-based systems of comprehensive value, some consideration must be made of the fact that, if anything, the weight of their side in this balance is waning rather than waxing.

What is needed, then, is a politically liberal solution, but one that rests neither on the morally problematic social contingency of the modus vivendi, nor on the sort of overlapping consensus for public liberalism, which Catholicism would seem to have difficulty furnishing. As I have said, my suggestion is that one possibility might be found in the moral idea of “reciprocity.” In its largest sense, the value of reciprocity suggests that one cannot fairly claim for oneself what one would not be prepared to grant to someone else. Relatedly, it might also be taken as suggesting that if one's current position of well-being has resulted because of goods, opportunities, arrangements, or accommodations made available to one in a position of weakness, one cannot with fairness deny similar goods to others when in a position of strength.

Two sources might be thought to direct the recognition of the value of reciprocity as a moral rather than contingent requirement in the case of Bishop Henry's comprehensive system of value. First, although I recognize that it might be thought a relatively simplistic assertion, the resources for recognizing the idea of reciprocity can be found in Christianity's fundamental source. The Golden Rule of the Sermon on the Mount is perhaps as terse a statement of the notion as can be envisioned: “so in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12). While it is of course inappropriate to suggest that Christ's simple statement stands without adumbration as an absolute statement of the Church's mandate here, clearly the Golden Rule invites Christians to take the idea or reciprocity seriously as a starting point. Indeed, Bishop Henry himself invoked a version of the reciprocity argument in his own favor in his criticism of the potential consequences of censure by the Human Rights Commission. He noted that

A more complex argument for reciprocity as a source by which the claims of a liberal polity might be recognized can be found in the universalist aspirations of Catholic morality. I note that among the defenses Bishop Henry employed in his response to the Human Rights complaint against him were the arguments that the censorship of his views was condemnable because it infringed on the values of “freedom of religion and the freedom of the right to speak.” Given that the Bishop was relying here on the values of freedom of religion and expression per se, rather than, say, on the right to promulgate “the one true faith,” one assumes that he was endorsing a value that he would contend others should recognize whether or not they are Catholics. That is, he was appealing to a value that we might fairly take as being proffered as binding on the holders of any and all other comprehensive doctrines in his society. In turn, to the extent that the Bishop and the Church understand morality as non-contingent and universal — not as a relative value dependent on irrelevancies of personality or circumstance — we must take the Bishop as endorsing the notion that the doctrines of freedom of religion and expression apply to his own faith as well. James Tully has in his work aptly captured this underlying logical connection between claims for rights, accommodation, and recognition by cultural groups and the necessity of such groups recognizing others' claims. As he notes in “Struggles over Recognition and Distribution,” for example,

In its most basic application to the case of Bishop Henry, the principle of reciprocity would suggest then that he cannot with moral coherency claim the benefits of freedoms of religion and expression while seeking to deprive others of their benefits or of the benefits of the related goods associated with other liberal recognitions of moral autonomy. He surely does so when he suggests that the teachings of the Catholic Church must be the source of Prime Minister Martin's obligations concerning public laws on same-sex marriage, or the state's concerning forms of expression or other individual choices.

It should also be noted, however, that the economy of the principle of reciprocity is such that it also provides to the Bishop's avail a consequent mirror image benefit. The recognition of homosexual equality in Canada quite clearly has arisen out of the dual contributions of the liberal Charter of Rights and from the benefits associated with free public discourse on what was once a forbidden topic. Just as the Bishop cannot fairly deprive others of free speech while attempting to claim that benefit for himself, so too would it be unfair for homosexual activists to be allowed to deprive traditional religious leaders of the goods associated with the free speech they themselves benefited from in the past before their cause was widely socially endorsed. Reciprocity applies against the claims of those who wish to integrate the public and private on behalf of comprehensive liberalism just as it does against those of other comprehensive systems of value.

There is also a longer term sense in which Canadian Catholics like Bishop Henry might be thought to be bound by the value of reciprocity to due respect for the church-state boundary line. Canada's current constitutional structure has its historic source in respect for or at least toleration of Catholicism. The particularities of Canada's version of federalism stem from a desire on the part of the fathers of Confederation to work out an amicable compromise between English Protestants and French Catholics. The province of Quebec, the center of Canada's historic French Catholic population, was as part of the Confederation deal, given a variety of constitutional powers that enabled it to protect and preserve its Catholic heritage. This included (as for all provinces) jurisdiction over education, a power that reserved to the government of Quebec the ability to ensure that the Catholic Church would for most of the province's history play a guiding role in Quebec's school system.Footnote ⁷ Presumably, a less fair minded or more bloody minded perspective on the part of Canada's anglophone Protestant leadership in the historic past might have led to a valuation of less religious diversity in the country or less religious freedom, either of which would have had disastrous consequences for the country's Catholic population.

What is more, the historic accommodation of religious difference in Canada also brought with it intra-provincial accommodations of religious minorities as well. The Constitution Act, 1867 provided (and indeed, for a number of Canadian provinces, still does) that the Christian religious minority in each Canadian province be entitled to preserve existing religious systems of schooling in place within the province at the time of Confederation. In Quebec, this meant that while public schools were Catholic schools, the province's Protestants were entitled to their own separate school boards alongside those of the Catholic majority. In most places in most other provinces, separate schools were provided for Catholic minorities in what were largely Protestant majority areas. In Alberta, this has allowed for a system of Catholic separate school boards like the CCSD which are fully funded by the provincial government.

The intriguing implication of this reality, then, is that Bishop Henry's jurisdictional claim of authority in his dispute with the CCSD is made possible only by virtue of historic arrangements, which have their genesis in the denial of the idea that the Canadian state could legitimately impose the religious values of one group upon another. The very mandate that the Bishop (rightly, I have argued) called upon in giving religious direction to the CCSD, then, would not exist but for the Canadian state's recognition of the sort of principle that Bishop Henry himself called into question in his condemnation of Paul Martin. Perhaps the Bishop would do well to consider here the applicability of St. Luke's observation — an appropriate one in the case of reciprocity — that “to whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required.”

4. SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: IS RECIPROCITY MERELY A MODUS VIVENDI?

My suggestion, then, is that reciprocity represents a moral requirement that should be recognized by Catholic religious leaders in their Church's response to liberalism of the political (although not comprehensive) type. While I hope the elaboration of this principle through a consideration of Bishop Frederick Henry's difficulties with his recalcitrant lay Catholics and the troubling Human Rights Commission provides some good illumination of the problem, it also raises one final potentially difficult question. If the recognition of liberal values such as toleration and state neutrality follows from travail, is it therefore also contingent upon such difficult circumstances? Is it, to use Rawls' term, a mere modus vivendi to be adopted only if the situation of the moment requires it?

While the nature of my arguments perhaps suggests that Catholic recognition of the value of liberal political institutions flows from the facts of modernization, I would emphasize that that need not be taken as suggesting that the acceptance itself should be understood as transitory and revocable, or prudential rather than moral. The principle is not that Catholics ought to accept political liberalism because there are too many non-Catholics to overcome. It is, rather, that Catholics ought to accept state neutrality, toleration, and the other concomitants of liberalism in circumstances in which there are identifiable dissenters because they would expect and desire believers of any comprehensive doctrine to do so were Catholics in the minority. If this is a persuasive claim, a reciprocity-based accounting for liberalism in the Catholic context is not dependent on the shifting relative weights of a society's belief systems. While it may thus be the sort of claim which is more likely to be recognized when in extremis rather than when in ascendancy, its moral validity does not depend on the recognizer himself being in that extremity.

This is, of course, not a particularly novel or difficult idea. Indeed, it might be expected that many of the moral ideals of comprehensive belief systems began life as the sort of forced recognitions I would urge on Bishop Henry here. This is an idea suggested by any number of philosophical considerations of moral reasoning. Alasdair MacIntyre's (Reference MacIntyre1988, 390) theory of communitarian value, for example, suggests that one of the large motivators for the revision and reconsideration of belief within “great traditions” is inter-traditional conflict. Our conflict here is, of course, between the great traditions of Bishop Henry's Catholicism and the emerging mores of cultural liberalism. Similarly, Nelson Goodman's ideal of “reflective equilibrium” suggests that we of necessity must work back and forth between our foundational principles and our considered judgments about their application to particular instances or cases, revising one or the other when we find them deeply inconsistent (Goodman Reference Goodman1955, 65; see also Rawls Reference Rawls1971, 20). Since the Bishop's foundational principles venture into virtual self-contradiction here in their application to different instances of the church-state divide, they presumably invite some sort of situation-based reconsideration of value.

Perhaps the clearest expression of the idea of a route from situational recognitions of value to ongoing moral principle is to be found in John Kilcullen's considerations of our own ideal of reciprocity. In Sincerity and Truth, Kilcullen contends that the post-Reformation development of liberal values like toleration followed the sort of trajectory I have in mind here:

The evolving and transactional character of the Bishop's engagements with those inside and outside his faith might also be taken as suggesting a route toward greater recognition of some post-liberal insights on relations between conflicting moral systems. I have in mind here in particular William Connolly's explorations of the ideals of “agonistic respect” and pluralism, values that by their very nature become most recognizable in the face of increases in inter-traditional conflict. As Connolly notes, agonistic respect expresses itself in “a social relation of respect for the opponent against whom you define yourself, even while you resist its imperatives and strive to delimit its spaces of hegemony” (Connolly Reference Connolly1993, 155). Pluralism is the acceptance that contacts and conflicts of this sort are the unavoidable ongoing reality of the world and the recognition that unitary alternatives are untenable (Connolly Reference Connolly2005, 4). What makes Connolly's endorsements of these goods particularly apt in the context of Bishop Henry's travails then is that they are not invocations of a simple relativistic disconnect from the world by religious believers or of the imposition of a disinterested liberal-based tolerance upon them. They suggest, rather, that the processes of inter-traditional conflict have the capacity to make us more aware of the moral quality of respect and recognition for the “other” without committing us to adopting what we perceive as the other's erroneous ethical and spiritual understandings.

Connolly offers us a variety of means by which we might recognize the necessity and value of agonistic respect. Two in particular might be seen in the Bishop's experiences. Connolly suggests, first, that the realities of pluralism can readily be recognized within virtually any system of belief regardless of its inherent content. This recognition is available to adherents not necessarily by way of interrogation of their specific doctrinal values, but in their recognition of the historic and contemporary diversity and disagreement expressed in internal debates within the faith about those doctrinal values. Henry's recalcitrant school board's contrariness on the Bishop's interpretation of Catholic doctrine on gambling exemplifies this, as does the board's ability to find a number of other sources of doctrinal interpretation — the Bishops of Alberta and the Catholic Catechism, for example — on this issue. Our recognition of this inherent pluralism does not commit us to a denial of some superior and right answer in moral disputes. But because the tenets of our faith are sometimes subject to contestation even from within, it does suggest that it is appropriate to acknowledge the potential legitimacy of disagreement and contestation from those outside of that tradition.

Connolly also suggests, as many do, that there is a significant potential for “evil” within the drive to unitary forms expressed in many faith systems. That evil is the orientation to the suppression of other faiths, through violence and other means. The Bishop's endorsement of a Catholic public policy on homosexual marriage and other matters affecting non-Catholic and Catholic Canadians alike is suggestive of his own faith's unitarianism; the potential censure of the Bishop's views on these matters by the Alberta Human Rights Commission might be thought suggestive of cultural liberalism's equivalent orientations to the evils of monolithicism. As Connolly observes, “the more relentless the drive to universalize an existential faith, the more its supporters experience otherwise tolerable differences to be forms of persecution demanding reprisal” (Connolly Reference Connolly2005, 28). Bishop Henry's travails give expression to both sides of this coin, and as such they suggest the moral value of greater mutual respect here.

MacIntyre's, Goodman's, Kilcullen's, and Connolly's perspectives all suggest then that exigency and conflict may ultimately produce a moral and not simply an expedient recognition of fundamental principles. Before closing, I wish to re-emphasize here that I think that the mandate of reciprocity as one of these fundamental principles appropriately informs not only Catholic responses to liberalism, but also liberal responses to Catholicism. Reciprocity denies the legitimacy of silencing those one disagrees with, whether or not one's cause is currently on the upswing of popularity. As such, the newly ascendant totalizing aspirations of cultural liberalism, like those embodied in efforts to suppress religious criticism of, for example, homosexuality, are as problematic from this perspective as contrary attempts by Catholic religious leaders to impose their Church's moral values on non-Catholics (including by endorsing unequal or oppressive treatment of homosexuals in the public realm). Of course, whether or not anti-free speech activists crusading on behalf of the values of cultural liberalism or religious leaders with particularist moral prescriptions will recognize these sorts of obligations is an open question. Political liberalism's fundamental precept that one does not have a right to coercively impose upon someone else even that which one knows to be the good is a challenging principle. It requires those recognizing it to distinguish between what is right and what can be fairly justified as right to others in drawing the line of state action. That complex idea often has trouble competing with the appeal of simpler moral theories which require of their adherents only a confidence in the moral absoluteness of their comprehensive system of value and their own entitlement to impose it upon others.