"Come All Ye Roman Catholics That Never Went To Mass"

A sordid episode, with a distinctly unpleasant American smell about it, in which Stephane Dion nevertheless handled things honestly, although naively and unconvincingly, and was also wrong: “You see, the Catholics can be relied on to vote Liberal, always, but the Protestants much less so. It’s very difficult to get them to vote for us. I am a Catholic.”

In the last federal election, according to pollster Ipsos Reid, it was only the Protestants who attend to their peculiar rituals every dang week who were demonstrably inclined (64 per cent) to vote Conservative, and the equally preoccupied Roman Catholics were also inclined (42 per cent) to vote Tory, outnumbering the Catholic weekly-mass-goers who voted Liberal (40 per cent).

But even setting aside the foolishly broad sweep of the "Catholics always vote Liberal" assertion, the hubbub raises two points: It illustrates how different we are from the Americans, and it also illustrates how similar we are to Americans in a way that we rarely concede.

Since they started electing their presidents in 1789, the Yanks have elected 43 presidents, allowing only one Roman Catholic (JFK) to do the job, and they killed him. We Canadians have elected 22 prime ministers since Confederation 141 years ago, and nine of them have been Roman Catholics - both Tories and Liberals.

Unlike Americans, Canadians never thought it necessary to erect a constitutional wall of separation between church and state, but generally, we've managed to do at least as good a job of keeping the two apart. Our Catholic prime ministers have tended to be at least nominally anti-clerical (going all the way back to Wilfrid Laurier) and unlike American presidents, all of our Protestant PMs have been, em, normal, until the current bloke. Stephen Harper is the first evangelical prime minister we've ever had, while the Yanks have elected an astonishing assortment of oddballs: Three presidents were from the "Disciples of Christ" church, Richard Nixon was a Quaker, and there was a Jay-Dub in the White House (Eisenhower, who didn't want anyone to know) and Congregationalists as well.

George W. Bush is an evangelical Christist, but evangelicalism is by no means an exclusively "right-wing" phenomenon in America. Jimmy Carter was an evangelical too, and he believed in UFOs for good measure. In Canada, Christian influence in politics is neither a recent nor an American trend. The most overt Christian influences in Canadian politics have come as much from the socialist left as the "Christian right," and it goes back aways. Among the founders of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (the forerunner of the social-democratic New Democratic Party), there were many Christian socialists and "social gospel" types, like the CCF's founding grandpappy himself, J.S. Woodsworth This tradition has persisted in the NDP, right up to Bill Blaikie, for instance.

Whether it comes from either the left or the right, I'm with Mr. Dedalus, who says to the priest, in James Joyce's Portrait of he Artist as a Young Man: " I'll pay your dues, Father, when you cease turning the House of God into a polling booth."

But then, I would say that. Having grown up in a devoutly Papish household, I share in a healthy aversion to anyone making speeches of any kind from the pulpit, preferring instead a safely half-literate priest engaging in sacramental ugubugu to his heart's delight, flouncing about with incense, mumbling to himself (Latin was the best), performing a weird conjuring trick with vague ritual-cannibalism associations, and otherwise shutting his big yapper. Notwithstanding my deep and abiding respect for Comrade Hitchens, whose antitheism I condone, there is no better cure for a hangover of a Sunday morning, let me tell you.