OTTAWA, January 2, 2002 (LSN.ca) – Archbishop Michael Peers, the head of the Anglican Church of Canada, warned in his New Year’s Day sermon at Ottawa’s Christ Church Cathedral that Canada’s move to eliminate all mention of religion from public life is dangerous. Archbishop Peers was reacting to the Canadian government’s official ceremony for the September 11 tragedy which purposely excluded all mention of religion in the name of pluralism. “This kind of thing would be not only a suppression of our pluralist reality, but also folly of the worst sort for our society,“he said.
The Ottawa Citizen reported that the archbishop recalled that prominent Canadians have suggested that what defines our country is “secularism, pluralism and democracy.”“Within that phrase, there is a powerful and potentially very serious conflict,” he said, noting that secularism is increasingly being defined as elimination of all religious references in public life, out of fear that religion will cause division. He warned that under communism, the suppression of religion has often proven to be literally a bloody failure. “Eventually that kind of suppression implodes on itself, because it is a broad denial of things that run far, far deeper than material life.”
See the Ottawa Citizen coverage from the National Post: https://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?f=/stories/20020102/1011759.html