*Anyone who is remotely interested in the state of the Canadian university, and especially all the parents pondering where to send their children, and all the high school graduates wondering where to go next year, must read this recent essay by Professor Ron Srigley of the University of Prince Edward Island, on how truly corrupt these institutions have become, and this from a secular vantage point. I will have more to write on the university, something very near and dear to my heart, but in the meantime, read away, and let us know your thoughts.
*As a follow-up, there was a discussion on the purpose of the modern university by three current or former presidents on the Sunday Edition, with Michael Enright, with whom I disagree on many things, but who seems to grasp that there is something deeply wrong, and I would add even evil, about our institutions of higher learning former the future generation. The main problem, besides all the rank immorality, hypocrisy, hypocrisy and untruths bandied about campus, is that they know not what they are doing in education, for they have lost any deep sense of why they are doing it. Thus it goes when one has lost the ‘end’ or purpose, which can only be defined and captured by Catholic theology. But more to come.
*I suppose a ‘Happy Family Day’ is in order, although I have a certain resistance to a holiday crafted out of thin air by the likes of Dalton McGuinty. Do not get me wrong: I am all in support of families, who may need this day off. But another holiday at taxpayer expense for the already holiday-ed out public service unions? And a forced holiday imposed upon all the small businesses (the primary employers in our country), forced to give their employees a day off by governmental diktat, or forced to pay them time and a half? I cannot help but think this imposition is but a salve for the troubled Catholic conscience of Mr. McGuinty, many of whose policies did anything but support the traditional family. Recall, amongst numerous other examples, his attempt to foist pornographic sex-ed on the province’s children, foiled back then by public outcry, but now accomplished by his lesbian successor. But, oh well, the holiday is now here, and may all the families enjoy it.
*The BBC, whose acronym like the CBC could stand for anything the imagination wants, is airing a rag television piece claiming the former Holy Father, Saint John Paul II, ‘fell in love’ in his fifties while archbishop of Cracow. Nothing is alleged, but much suggested, that he crossed some kind of line, at least ‘interiorly’. Apparently, some letters have surfaced between the Karol Wojtyla and two female Polish academics that may have ‘delayed his beatification’.
*Here are my thoughts on this sad attempt to smear the Pope by the bigots at the BBC: First, the Pope over his long busy life wrote an untold number of letters, along with many other works, unsurpassed in their erudition and clarity. Second, that he wrote to fellow academics, male or female, is not surprising in the least. Third, the officials at the Vatican who scrutinized his life in great detail in the cause of his canonization would have found any whiff of aberrant behaviour. The BBC is fishing in waters where there are no fish. But they will go to great lengths, like their counterpart the CBC, to try to find some, or at least leave a trace in our minds that some are there, somewhere, somehow, in the depths…The fact that someone could actually be a saint, to have his passions and affections in order, who sought to fulfill God’s will, to love God and neighbour with a heroic devotion and intensity, does not seem occur to them. But then it does not occur to anyone limited to the horizons of this passing age. But I suppose it says something about the enduring legacy of the great Pontiff that the BBC still has its stilettos out, and can find so little after all this time to look. So, Saint John Paul , ora pro nobis!