On the Ortho-convert list, someone posted a transcript of an article that was so crazy that I suspected it of being the kind of hoax that Christians e-mail to each other in perpetuity. But no, this one appears to be real: On July 20, a retired professor named Bob Ferguson proposed on Canadian public radio that religion there be regulated by the federal government. (It came by way of LifesiteNews.com, but here’s a link that contains a link to the original speech — I assume. It has a .ram suffix and I can’t open it myself.)

This would include all religious people — or RRPs (registered religious practitioners) as they would be designated once they had registered with the government — but Ferguson zeroes in on the Catholics as those most in need of being controlled by the state.

“Given the inertia of the Catholic Church, perhaps we could encourage reform by changing the environment in which all religions operate,” Ferguson began his commentary in measured tones yesterday. “Couldn’t we insist that human rights, employment and consumer legislation apply to them as it does other organizations? Then it would be illegal to require a particular marital status as a condition of employment or to exclude women from the priesthood. ”

Ferguson continued, “Of course the Vatican wouldn’t like the changes, but they would come to accept them in time as a fact of life in Canada. Indeed I suspect many clergy would welcome the external pressure.”

Certain of the more objectionable practices would be outlawed outright, like circumcision, and RRPs would be made to adhere to a “moral code” (pardon me?) that would force them to accept gay marriage and women in the priesthood, as well as making it a punishable offense to proclaim that one religion was true and another false.

I won’t even go on with this. The article, which just contains fragments of the speech, has enough incendiary material in it to make the gentlest soul want to book a flight to Ottawa just to seek this individual out in person so you could tell him off. I don’t repeat it here because I think that it will come to pass here, or come to pass in Canada in this generation. But things are still trending toward secular humanism in the modern world, and sometimes it takes something this far ahead of the levels of acceptability to get us to notice it. All the more reason, perhaps, why I go ahead and get a little worked up over current events and politics. For a serendipitous handful of reasons, we’ve got a bit of breathing space in America at present. The forces that have attacked Christianity for many decades have had to fall back and regroup. It’s wonderful. But I don’t see any reason to believe it’s permanent. Just as well for us to do what we can to build ourselves — individually and parish by parish — into the soldiers for Christ that St. Paul advised to armor up for battle.