The case of the Raelians and the Catholic school board

This was an interesting story to work on.

Here's the edited version of what I filed at the Catholic Register's site:

OTTAWA - A French Catholic school board in Northern Ontario has been ordered to compensate three members of a controversial religious group after an Ontario Human Rights Tribunal found the board guilty of discrimination.

On Dec. 15, the tribunal ordered the Conseil Scolaire Catholique Franco-Nord to pay unspecified compensation to Daniel, Michel and Sylvie Chabot, siblings who belong to the Raelian Movement and who operate the Academy of Pleasurology and Emotional Intelligence (APEI).

In 2007, APEI had contracted with the board to conduct a series of workshops on emotional intelligence. Chabot said the school broke the contract after someone discovered on the Internet that the Chabots are Raelians.

The Raelian Movement began in France in 1973 after a French journalist claimed to have encountered extraterrestrials known as Elohim, who claimed to be highly evolved human beings who had created life on Earth. The journalist subsequently changed his name to Rael and the movement boasts about 100,000 followers in several countries. In recent years they were in the news for attempting to clone a human.

School board chairman Ronald Demers said the tribunal had “passed judgment” and he doesn’t “necessarily agree” with it, but “the decision has been handed down and we will not be appealing it.”

But experts say the ruling may violate the religious freedom of the Catholic board.

“Canada is an exercise in living together with disagreement, not forced agreement,” said constitutional expert and law professor Iain Benson. “It is not the Roman Raelian Church — yet.

“Within religious matters, religious schools are pretty much sovereign,” he said. “Once there is a basic test to ensure that there is no religious ruse going on and what is really at issue is a doctrinal difference, then the tribunals should respect that.”

More here.

Note that I report Chabot was not only baptized and confirmed a Catholic, he was an altar server in Leeds, Quebec.

One of the things talking to him illustrated to me is how little we in the west understand faith claims any more and that even those who are exposed to Catholic faith claims misunderstand them.

For example, Chabot thinks emotional intelligence is a matter of pedagogy like math that can be separated from any faith claim and has nothing to do with the teaching of religious faith.

But if a Catholic believes that our happiness and our emotional intelligence springs from our understanding of ourselves as made in the image and likeness of God, loved by Him, and made to love Him and serve him, then I could understand how a Catholic board might have problems with a pedagogy that ignores this or talks about the pursuit of happiness independent of this.

It's hard to know exactly what the problem was here as the school board is not giving details on why they suspended the course.