MONTREAL, Quebec, June 10, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – After the high-profile defunding of a major pro-abortion partner of the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development & Peace (D&P), leading Canadian dissidents are decrying the Canadian bishops’ efforts to exercise greater oversight over their official development arm.
Large segments of D&P’s membership, especially in Quebec, are up in arms after the organization announced recently that they have defunded the Jesuit-run Miguel Austin Pro Centre. The Cardinal Archbishop of Mexico City had written to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops alerting them to the fact that the group promotes an ideology “against unborn life.”
In response to the defunding, leading dissident theologian Gregory Baum, who is best known for having rallied opposition to Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae in the 1960s, has penned a letter along with 41 other Quebec scholars slamming a new D&P policy requiring that its partners be approved by their local bishop.
This new policy was revealed by the CCCB in a May response to a media attack from another major dissident, Fr. Claude Lacaille. Fr. Lacaille is a prominent advocate in Quebec for overarching reforms, including the acceptance of homosexuality and introduction of women’s ordination.
While D&P must now clear its partners with the local bishop, the CCCB did indicate, however, that in “urgent situations” D&P would only have to consult the local conference of bishops or the country’s Caritas agency.
In Baum’s June 1st letter, published by a new French language blog run by D&P insiders to counter the effort to renew the organization, the scholars say D&P’s development work in the South is “severely compromised by the rise in Canada of a strong conservative current, both political and religious.”
Baum, a former priest who married a divorced former nun without having sought laicization, is infamous for his long opposition to the Catholic Church on issues such as contraception, homosexuality and priestly celibacy. He was a prominent activist for same-sex “marriage,” and was co-founder of the liberal Catholic New Times, which sought to undermine Catholic teaching from its inception in 1976.
In their letter, the scholars explain that they are adding their “collective voice” to those opposing changes to D&P’s policies that deny support to partners who are at odds with Catholic moral beliefs, and that require D&P’s partners to be approved by their local bishop.
They write that they are dismayed also by the fact that the “democratic character of the organization” would be replaced by the “direct control of the Conference of Catholic Bishops.”
Centre PRODH, they say, is the first “victim” of D&P’s new policy.
Last month, a contingent of francophone D&P members had also complained about the decision to cut Centre PRODH’s funding, and about the bishops’ increased oversight.
The defiant attitude against the bishop’s involvement in their official development arm is spreading to the laity at large. In a recent letter to D&P’s national council, Carleton student Kaitlyn Duthie-Kannikkatt wrote that she was “shocked and angry” after Archbishop Prendergast cancelled Fr. Arriaga’s talk in Ottawa, but expected that D&P “would stand by our partner and defend their important work despite opposition from members of the Church hierarchy.”
“This approach to global relationship – whereby if a Bishop in the South expresses unjust and unfounded concerns over the work of one of our partners, we are obliged to cut ties with that partner – runs counter to everything I have learned from Development and Peace about solidarity in the midst of struggle,” wrote Duthie Kannikkatt, who serves as D&P’s Eastern Ontario youth representative.
“We are living in fear of a backlash from the small but vocal Conservative contingent in the Church,” she added.
The CCCB set up a committee of bishops two years ago to guide D&P through a renewal after revelations that D&P was funding numerous groups promoting greater access to abortion in the Third World. In the fall of 2010, the CCCB announced that D&P had established an “exit strategy” for controversial partnerships.
These measures, and especially the defunding of Centre PRODH, came as a shock to much of D&P’s membership, who have become accustomed in the last four decades to operating as a democratic, largely non-specifically Catholic, member-run organization with minimal interference from the country’s bishops.
In a column this week, Kingston priest Fr. Raymond de Souza pointed out the contradiction that while D&P is practically “indistinguishable from any number of peace and justice NGOs working in the developing world,” and its supporters are striving actively to sideline the bishops from having any say in how their own organization runs, D&P nevertheless depends on access to Catholic parishes for its fundings.
Delegates at a recent francophone regional meeting of CCODP, he said, “made it clear that they want Canadian bishops to give them access to parish collections, and then shut up,” he wrote.
“There is a certain consistent logic at play here,” he observed. “CCODP is no more interested in the views of the bishops in Canada, where they raise money, than they are of the bishops in the countries where they spend it. That approach may earn them the support of social activists here and abroad, but it should not earn the support of Catholics.”