Let us pray that at next year’s World Day of Prayer for Creation a mass of committed environmentalists from across Canada gather in Montreal’s Dominion Square to pray for God’s forgiveness of our ecological sins.

Such an action would surely carry out Pope Leo’s call on Sept. 1 that “now is the time to follow words with deeds” and, in the words of Laudato Sí, live “our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork …essential to a life of virtue.”

In addition, it would almost certainly be an act of Gospel-justified peaceful civil disobedience if, as expected, the current Quebec government proceeds with its appalling legislation to ban prayer in the province’s public spaces.

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What could manifest greater Christian virtue than to stand in prayer both for the earth and against such an odious denial of the fundamental human freedom to pray in plain sight?

Such a pernicious legal and spiritual assault is precisely what the CAQ government of Premier François Legault has announced it will launch during this session of Quebec’s National Assembly. 

It will purportedly be rammed through, despite an already growing chorus of opposition, by so-called Secularism Minister Jean François Roberge as part of the Coalition Avenir Québec government’s obsessive drive to expand secularism in what was historically Canada’s most Catholic province.

The plan is being widely called out as a targeting of the Muslim community, which has Quebec’s predominately white nationalist cohort in apoplexy over defiance of a ban on wearing religious symbols in schools. Premier Legault led the charge last December by musing aloud about the impropriety of public thoroughfares being blocked in front of Notre Dame Basilica by Muslim prayer during pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

“Seeing people on their knees praying…I don’t think that’s something we should see,” Legault said at the time, adding that prayer belongs only inside churches, synagogues and temples.

But in an op-ed for Montreal’s La Presse published on Monday, Montreal Archbishop Christian Lépine said the “very existence” of Catholic public traditions such as the Way of the Cross and the Corpus Christi procession would be “compromised” by banning prayer in the name of promoting the CAQ vision of universal secularism.

Lépine pointed out that even Pope Francis’ historic visit to Canada in 2022 would have been impossible if public prayer were made illegal.

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“Confusing the neutrality of the state with the neutralization of society would be a serious step backward,” the Archbishop wrote.

“In a democratic society like ours, diversity of beliefs is not something to be feared; it is welcome and contributes to the richness of Quebec, with its strong culture of dialogue and encounter.”

 That very sentiment was, in fact, expressed by Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella in the 2015 Loyolacase, which overturned a previous Quebec government’s bid to stop a Catholic school from teaching Catholic doctrine.

“A secular state’s proper role is to protect that space in which citizens of various beliefs can live together and live out their different identities,” Abella wrote. “A secular state respects religious differences; it does not seek to extinguish them.” 

Abella’s deeper point was that a secular state must be “religiously neutral,” meaning it can neither promote nor interfere with the carrying out of religious belief.

In other words, despite Premier Legault’s somewhat vague threats to use the Canadian Constitution’s override clause to protect legislation banning prayer, such a law would already run afoul of our Charter of Rights when it is proclaimed.

And while banning prayer is self-evidently of greatest concern to the prayerful, it must be kept in mind that such a law would violate not just religious freedom. It would shred freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and very likely Sec. 7 of the Charter guaranteeing life, liberty, security of the person in accordance with principles of fundamental justice.

Look at it this way: If Sec.7 can be used, as it was, to justify the killing of the unborn in the Morgentalerdecision, and the legalization of medicalized death as it was in the Carter assisted suicide case, it surely must protect the life, liberty, security of the person and right to fundamental justice of those who wish to peacefully pray in public.

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What better way to test that than to have peaceful protectors of Mother Nature massed in downtown Montreal next September praying for an end to the despoilation of the earth, and for cleansing the environment of the rabidly intolerant secularism being fostered by the current Quebec government?

The Lord be with them.