With the media frenzy around the recent papal election pushed aside by more violent events, we seemed set to return to our wearily familiar tale of woe about organized religious life in Canada. Our churches are almost empty. The few who remain in the pews are so old, they’ve either fallen asleep or are just committed to keeping the nostalgia society alive. No compos mentis Canadian under 30 believes in anything beyond the evidence-based verities of a wholly secular culture, and would not be caught dead in a house of worship unless dragged there by parents for Great-Aunt Theodora’s funeral. Or so it is said. Curiously, though, a countermanding voice to this embedded narrative comes from no less a figure than our own Governor General, who warns against accepting as gospel the claim that young Canadians want no part of religious faith, and that Canada as a country has turned its back on God. In an interview for the new issue of Convivium magazine, David Johnston identifies himself as a man of deep and long-standing religious faith. “The role of religion has been important in my life and in my family’s life,” Johnston says. “In my search for truth in life, a faith-based answer has been very important to me. I am a person of faith.” The GG’s affirmation came as he represented Canada at the inaugural mass of Pope Francis. He is candid in his conversation with Convivium editor-in-chief Father Raymond J. de Souza that Canada should not deny its historic connection to religious faith. We would be weakened, he says, if we ceased making religious freedom central to our identity among the nations of the world. Historically, Johnston says, the Catholic Church of New France seeded a long Canadian tradition that has shaped us as a pluralistic nation. “Thank heaven that when a European war was fought on Canadian soil midway through the 18th century, in our unique Canadian way, we could find a pluralistic, tolerant solution and permit different traditions to continue in some degree of harmony. That’s the great promise we offer to the 21st century.” The new office of religious freedom within the department of foreign affairs is, he says, a harnessing of spiritual power to the pragmatic, diplomatic good of helping resolve fundamental problems across the globe. But it’s from within his own academic history — a student at Harvard, Cambridge and Queens; a dean, principal and president at Western, McGill and Waterloo respectively — that the Governor General most eloquently dismantles myths of faithless campus life. “I think the essential search for meaning in life is at least as present on university campuses today as when I was a student. That presents both a challenge and an opportunity as to how one relates to a younger generation who are looking for a compass for their lives,” he says. His answer to that challenge facing students is: “Be very careful about overthrowing what has made you the person you are, and as you examine new interpretations of truth, recognize that the values that have brought you here and that have made you the person you are, are very precious.” Johnston points out that the search for truth at the heart of religious faith is also “the very essence of the university,” noting the place of “veritas” in the motto of his alma mater, Harvard. “That was the question Pontius Pilate put to Jesus — what is truth? — and certainly Jesus had his own interpretation of truth,” he says. As the research director for a think-tank committed to renewing North American institutions by drawing on 2,000 years of Christian social teaching, I obviously have a bias toward that particular interpretation. Yet research we have done over the years at Cardus shows the inescapable social good that comes from having people of all religious traditions contributing to our common life. In truth, it also reveals with statistical starkness the pressures on organized religious faith in Canada. It’s encouraging to see that the Governor General agrees on the need to keep religious faith alive as a matter of public good in this country, and that he is willing to add his august voice to setting the story straight about its much-exaggerated demise across this land.

The OACS News Service covers an upcoming Cardus event with outgoing Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney. Quoted in the article is Executive Vice-President, Ray Pennings. To read the full article, click here.

Cardus' Calgary City Soul project is mentioned in The Globe and Mail. Lorna Dueck, host of Context with Lorna Dueck, talks about the ways in which religious institutions benefit their local communities. To read the full article, click here.

Editor-at-large for Maclean's Magazine, Peter Shawn Taylor mentions the Cardus Construction Competitiveness Monitor in The Record. To read the full article, click here.

Convivium Editor-in-Chief, Fr. Raymond J. de Souza met with Cardinal Marc Ouellet in Rome to discuss the appointment of Pope Francis. To read the full interview, click here.

The election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, as pope is happy news because it means the world's Roman Catholics will no longer be even temporarily leaderless. On a slightly more cantankerous personal level, it is also great news because it means the world's media will once again leave us alone. While we should, at one level, be grateful for journalistic interest in the events at the Vatican, precious little interest seems to have been shown in what is actually important to Catholics as religious believers. Perhaps someone should take me aside and suggest I give up being churlish for Lent. Alas, that would require a critical mass of people, even in Montreal where I live, who actually know that we are in Lent, a season of more than minor importance to Catholics. And that's the sticking point for me. Few seem to have wondered aloud why Roman Catholics remain interested in being Roman Catholics in Anno Domini 2013. Fewer still seem to have wondered not just why we pray for the Pope at every Mass, but why we go to Mass at all. We have been told – and in fairness I've contributed to this conversation myself – about the urgent need for to reform the Vatican bureaucracy. We've heard, again and again, about the crying need to change purportedly archaic rules around priestly ordination, teachings on divorce, strictures on same sex brother and sisters, the need to revitalize the failing European church with the growth and energy of the Church in the Southern Hemisphere whence Pope Francis comes. We've been staggered backward until we're punchdrunk by the interminable criticisms of the sexual abuse outrages – and they were authentic outrages against body and spirit – that some in the Roman Catholic Church failed to stop. But how often have we heard the question that is actually most relevant to the faithful, whether they are half-asleep in the back pews at Sunday Mass or have just assumed the title of Pope Francis: "Why are you a Catholic?" The straight answer to that simple question is what actually binds the world's 1.2 billion Catholics, on all continents, together. It is the answer that Pope Francis will need to keep constantly before him: ahead of reform of the Curia, out front and away from the incessant pressures to change Church teaching, beyond the reach of media outlets hungry to provide their audiences with mere spiritual entertainment. We are Catholics because we profess faith in the death and resurrection of Christ and in the establishment of his Church on earth. We have a new pope not because we like South American men in tall conical hats, but because we believe the pope is the Vicar of Christ on Earth. It is, self-evidently, perfectly acceptable and understandable for anyone, journalists included, to reject that belief and turn their lights on other topics. Call me cantankerous but I, for one, will appreciate the peace.

Convivium Editor-in-Chief, Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, and Publisher, Peter Stockland discuss the question "What do you look for from the Catholic Church and a new Pope?" on the CBC's Cross Country Checkup. Fr. de Souza can be heard at 10:24, and Peter Stockland at 37:19. To listen, click here.

At the long-awaited launch of the federal Office of Religious Freedom, I found myself, the child of a Dutch migrant, standing next to a gentleman from Pakistan, both of us surrounded by a multitude of faiths. As I looked around at the faith communities gathered at the Ahmadiyya Muslim centre in suburban Toronto, I saw Canada. Not Canada as the soft, colourful, romanticized ideal of multiculturalism, but Canada as a vibrant, functioning reality of genuine pluralism. And I saw something else. I saw suffering. Virtually every group on hand to welcome Andrew Bennett as Canada’s new ambassador-at-large for religious freedom is connected, in some way, to adherents elsewhere in the world who are made to suffer purely because of their religious beliefs. Suffering has become my shadow companion since last summer when my 15-year-old son drowned. Standing beside the gentleman from Pakistan, I could not help wondering how my suffering would increase if my son’s life had been taken from us not in a terrible accident, but from a bomb thrown through the window of our church, from blows suffered while imprisoned for reciting the wrong creed in a private apartment, from the myriad of means used daily outside Canada to harass and intimidate and, yes, exterminate religious believers. From that perspective, the name given to the new entity by the Conservative government is something of a misnomer. Ambassador Bennett’s large role will be the promotion of religious freedom. But before freedom can flourish, suffering must be staunched. Before it can be staunched, it must be itemized, publicized and vigorously, relentlessly condemned. Dr. Bennett is a man of principle.  He has the character and deep caring for humanity to suit the role of a diplomat.  (Full disclosure, Andrew and I are personal friends.) However, Ambassador Bennett “holds” the office of ambassador. He is not the office.  Ambassador Bennett will first need the commitment of his own department.  This will require a newfounded curiosity and care for religion and understanding of its place in our world.  As well, Bennett will need the support of the commons – and the House of Commons. Enter Canada. Proceeding from the charity that is at the heart of our country’s formative Judeo-Christian faith, we have achieved the reality of a vibrant, genuine pluralism and therefore have an international duty to speak out against the suffering that is inherent to religious oppression around the globe. We have found the way for Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, Muslims and all others to gather peaceably for a significant political event. If we do not speak for that spirit, who will? There is an attractive argument that says religious minorities are hardly the only victims of suffering, and therefore should not be privileged above women or homosexuals or child soldiers or the hungry or all others on the horrifying roster of victims of global inhumanity. The argument is attractive because it is, by and large, true. It is a mug’s game to abstractedly triage political responses to the world’s pain. Granting that, it is also true that where oppression arises, it invariably makes its earliest target the freedom to believe, to worship, to know God as one chooses. Prime Minister Harper put this well in his speech announcing Ambassador Bennett’s appointment: “Democracy cannot find fertile ground in any society where notions of the freedom of personal conscience and faith are not permitted.” The prime minister noted that Canada’s own Bill of Rights, the forerunner to our cherished Charter of Rights and Freedoms, emerged from former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s conviction that to be Canadian is to be free to worship, to stand for what is right, to oppose what is believed wrong, and to choose how one will be governed. Such freedom is, in Diefenbaker’s words, the heritage Canadians must pledge to uphold for each other and “for all mankind." Critics of the new Office of Religious Freedom tend to miss the “for all mankind” part. They miss it most frequently because they continue to inhabit a world where secularism has conquered all, spiritual life has been driven entirely into the private domain, and religious faith of all forms has been debunked as non-operative superstition. It’s a world that has nothing to do with the one that exists. In every corner of the world, including Canada, religious belief remains as vital as bread and water to the daily lives of millions. Canada’s key difference is that we are a genuinely pluralist country where a Dutch immigrant can stand beside a Christian from Pakistan watching a Ukrainian Catholic being welcomed by Buddhist monks in saffron robes and Muslim women in hijabs. If we balk at spending a mere $5 million from a $2.6 billion budget for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade to help make our peaceful state possible in the rest of the world, how willingly will we respond to other forms of global suffering? The answer will tell us what we really stand for as Canadians.