Quebec Evangelist claims innocence

Popular lay preacher Pierre Lacroix, married and the father of four children, was charged on Wednesday, September 23, with six counts of gross indecency and one count of attempted sodomy involving teen-age boys.  Mr. Lacroix’s daily, six afternoons a week, 15 minute TV show was cancelled immediately.

Only on the Saturday before, September 17, the 40-year-old Mr. Lacroix spoke at the Ottawa pro-life “Fill the Hill” rally, he warned Prime Minister Brian Mulroney not to take a pro-abortion stand.

Mr. Lacroix is a very popular speaker with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Quebec.  His television programme was aired on 14 stations around the province.  The Renewal movement selects its own leaders and speakers, independent of the Catholic hierarchy.

Unlike American “televangelists’ Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker and others, Lacroix lives simply in a small apartment in a house owned by his father.  His optimistic, basically good news message won him an immediate audience, according to Canadian Press (Globe, September 23, 1988).  He has flatly denied the charges and is convinced he will be able to prove his innocence in court.

Red Mass in Montreal

On September 17, 1988, Montreal’s Paul Cardinal Gregorie urged lawyers and judges to use their legal muscle to defend the life of the fetus and the traditional two-parent family.

The Cardinal spoke at the “Red Mass,” the customary Mass for lawyers and judges marking the start of the new judicial season after the summer break.  The R.C. Archbishop denounced a false concept of liberty and the new ways of doing things “in the name of progress, evolution and pragmatism.”

“When you look at them closely,” he said, “you see that wrapped up in new language and presented in the fashions of a new culture they thinly disguise the oldest types of egoism.”

Modern biology, he stated, leaves no room to believe that there is a pre-human stage of the embryo.  “A society where love and life are snuffed out, is a sick society, doomed to death,” he said.  (Montreal Gazette, September 8, 1988).

Conflict in Calgary

After years of resisting requests from the Calgary Birth Control Association (CBCA), for funding, Calgary’s United Way decided in June of this year to help fund a specific project of the organization at a cost of $41,542.  This has led to conflict within the community.

On Tuesday, September 20, the R.C. Bishop of Calgary, Paul O’Byrne, announced to the faithful that he and his advisors had decided not to pull out of community fund raising – for now.  The Bishop however, warned that if the CBCA is given membership, the Diocese of Calgary “will not continue membership in the United Way.”

Catholic diocese in Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton have withdrawn from their local United Way after similar conflicts.

Distinctions

The Calgary Herald of September 23 quotes from a joint statement by Bishop Paul O’Byrne and United Way president Jeanette Nicholls issued the previous Wednesday, September 21.  Here Bishop O’Byrne makes it clear how he regards the CBCA.  He states that granting full membership would “strike at the heart of the official Catholic membership in the United Way.  The CBCA is widely perceived to be an abortion counseling agency and this would severely compromise the conscience of Catholic supporters.

Meanwhile, the Bishop’s spokesman, Father Jack Kirley, director of Catholic Family Services, said the Bishop “has made a distinction between the giving of a donation by the United Way and actual membership.”

Pro-life

While the R.C. Bishop has expressed that he is very uncomfortable with the new arrangement, a number of Catholics have rejected his “distinctions” as unacceptable.

The fight against United Way membership for CBCA has been led for years by various Calgary pro-life organizations.  Support from official Catholic leaders has not always been forthcoming.

In the late seventies even staff members of the Catholic Family Services were doing abortion counseling.  The practice was countenanced for a while by the Directors on the grounds that they could not tell their non-Catholic staff what to do and also because opposition to abortion, they thought, flowed from an essentially Catholic point of view.  At the time it had to be made clear that abortion is neither a Catholic issue, nor an issue for Catholics only but a human rights issue.

But Calgary pro-lifers object not only to CBCA’s abortion counseling.  CBCA is Calgary’s Planned Parenthood local.  Its entire philosophy is anti-family, anti-child.  Members of Calgary’s Campaign Life Coalition carried a large “Justice for the Unborn” banner in protest at the United Way’s opening parade on September 22.  The Catholics among them do not agree with their Bishop’s approach, which they regard as “wish-washy.”

On September 26, they issued a press release which contained a letter addressed to Cardinal Josef Ratzinger in Rome.  In it they describe the diocesan decision as “temporizing” and a “compromise of Catholic principles” and interpret it as co-operating with abortion promoters “since the mutual participation in the funding program lends credibility to the abortionists and contraceptors and thereby, sways public opinion in their favour.”

After also pointing out that many contraceptives are ‘in their pharmacological action actually abortifacient drugs and devices,” the letter’s authors, Michael Malley and Bill Walton ask the Cardinal for a ruling on the question of “co-operation.”

One Catholic, Calgary Herald columnist Jim Davies expressed support for the CBCA and told his readers that the idea of withdrawing from the United Way made him angry and sad. (September 25)

Step up fight

Under the headline, “Bishops told to step up abortion fight,” the Western Catholic Reporter of Edmonton (October 3, 1988) reports that Pope John Paul II told a group of Canadian Bishops from the Maritimes the church must speak out against abortion.

The seven Bishops as well as the Abbot of Muenster in Saskatchewan were in Rome for their “ad limina” visit, made every five years to report on the status of dioceses.

Calling abortion “an unspeakable crime against human life,” the Pope said such an attack on life at its start “sets the stage for despising, negating and eliminating the life of adults and for attacking the life of society.”