Loyola Responds to the Ruling

The administration of Loyola High School wishes to make the following statement in the wake of the judgment of June 18, 2010 of the Quebec Superior Court.

We are pleased by the judgment rendered by the Court but would caution against seeing it as a Loyola victory or a government defeat. As a member of the academic community in Montreal since 1896, Loyola is proud to work daily alongside the government in promoting excellence for the students of Quebec. A proper understanding to the background to the case is important.

Loyola petitioned the Minister of Education, Recreation and Sport under a regulatory provision which allows a private educational institution to be exempted from a ministerial program provided that it teaches an equivalent program. With its request, Loyola presented the program it wished to offer, a program with the same two objectives as the Ethics and Religious Culture program - namely recognition of others and the pursuit of the common good - as well as content involving the study of the world's major religious traditions and of ethical questions in a manner presenting the full range of views on those issues. Loyola's program differed from the ministerial program in that it remained imbued with Jesuit pedagogical principles, which the "professional posture" required by the ministerial program would have forced it to abandon.

Loyola's request was denied on the ground that its program was not equivalent to the ministerial program because it was confessional in character. Loyola contested the decision in Quebec Superior Court with the assistance of lawyers from the firm Borden Ladner Gervais who acted pro bono.

On June 18, 2010, the Superior Court rendered its judgment regarding our request. The Court found that the decision to refuse our request was invalid because it assumed that a confessional program could not achieve the goals proposed by the ministry program.

We have always acknowledged the government's central role in seeking the common good and have desired to work with it in order to find constructive ways for confessional groups to work alongside all men and women of goodwill to build a better society for all. We have always understood our role in this matter as contributing to a public discussion on the role of confessional institutions in an increasingly secular society. As was made clear in the proceedings by Georges Leroux, philosopher and advocate of the ministerial program, who testified as the government's expert at trial, there is no reason to think that Loyola's Jesuit pedagogy cannot accomplish the goals of recognition of others and the pursuit of the common good. The Superior Court acknowledged that while it is in the government's purview to mandate a program that deals with this subject matter, it is not its place to exclude all other forms of achieving the same goals.

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