TORONTO, June 9, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — A Forum Poll has found that opposition among Ontario voters to publicly funded Catholic schools has dropped nine percent in three years.
In surveying 1,172 Ontario voters on their opinions of the Liberal government’s sex education curriculum and anti-bullying guidelines, Forum found that 47 percent agreed Catholic schools should be publicly funded, while 40 percent disagreed.
A 2013 Forum Poll found that 44 percent of respondents opposed a taxpayer funded Catholic school system.
At the same time, two-thirds of respondents, or 62 percent, disagreed that Catholic schools should be allowed not to implement the province’s anti-bullying guidelines because these discuss sexual identity.
And slightly less than half the respondents, 48 percent, agreed the province should withhold public funds from Catholic schools which choose not to implement anti-bullying guidelines, while 39 percent disagreed.
In a May 31 summary of the poll, Forum Research President Dr. Lorne Bozinoff likened Ontario’s public funding of Catholic schools to “an open constitutional sore. We keep picking at the scab, so it never heals.”
Added Bozinoff: “It is clear Catholic school boards who are resisting the province’s anti-bullying guidelines do not have the public on their side, and that could be damaging to their own interests in the long run.”
But Jack Fonseca, project manager with Campaign Life Coalition, disagreed, stating that the “exact opposite is true.”
Complying with Premier Kathleen Wynne’s “so-called ‘anti-bullying’ guidelines” will, in fact, damage the interests of Catholic schools in the long run, he argued.
“Let’s face the truth, these supposed ‘anti-bullying’ guidelines have nothing to do with preventing bullying,” and are far from innocuous, he told LifeSiteNews. “That’s a ruse. They’re about indoctrinating the next generation of Catholics to reject the Church’s teachings on marriage, family and human sexuality.”
So if the Catholic bishops and school boards allow students to be “inculcated with these anti-Catholic, secular doctrines, they’re guaranteeing that almost all of these same children will abandon the Catholic faith by the time they finish high school, or more likely, even sooner.”
Fonseca sees the drop in opposition to publicly funding Catholic schools as a “heartening” development.
It may signal that parents who have seen their rights attacked in the public system with the rollout the Liberal’s controversial sex-education curriculum this fall have come to regard Catholic schools as a “safe harbour” where their rights will be protected and where their children can “escape the harmful propaganda and indoctrination that public secular school boards don’t even bother hiding anymore.”
But “the problem as I see it” is that these parents “don’t realize that the Catholic Bishops’ education arm, the Institute for Catholic Education (ICE), has already bowed to the anti-Christian curriculum,” Fonseca told LifeSiteNews.
The “primary purpose of the separate school system is to form children in the image of Jesus Christ, and to inculcate within them the teachings, beliefs and doctrines of the Catholic Church,” he said.
The Ontario Catholic bishops and school boards must hold fast against the Liberal agenda.
If they don’t,“the damage these Catholic leaders cause in the long run won’t be limited to the separate school system. It will directly result in the shuttering of hundreds, perhaps thousands of parishes over the next 15 years,” warned Fonseca.
“This is a question not only of whether Catholic schools survive in Ontario, but whether the Catholic Church will cease to exist in Ontario.”
The Forum Poll also found that one in six parents either have (three percent) or would have (13 percent) withdrawn their children from public schools because of the sex-ed curriculum.