On Monday, March 13, at the age of 101, Monsignor Vincent Foy passed away peacefully in his room at Providence Villa in Toronto. He will be warmly remembered as a tireless advocate of the pro-life cause; as the headline of a recent Catholic Register profile put it, Foy was “pro-life before there was pro-life.” He was, in particular, an ardent defender of the Catholic Church’s teachings on birth control, famously affirmed in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which he championed to the last. Indeed, three years before his passing, he concluded a retrospective on his life by affirming that “the greatest evil in the Church today is the contraceptive mentality, which has left Canada and elsewhere with a suicidal birthrate.” He did so at a time when many Catholic leaders signed onto the Winnipeg Statement dissenting the Canadian Church from Humanae Vitae.
We, at The Interim, join Canadians across the country in expressing our gratitude for this hero of the pro-life cause and in celebrating Msgr. Foy’s wonderful life and enduring legacy. May this good priest find eternal rest with the Lord that he served so well.
