Banned and challenged books: Libraries take a stand

Spring of 1975: I was an idealistic, although in retrospect naive as to how power actually works in practice, 18-year-old advocate of intellectual freedom as Grade 12 wound down and I saw the increasing efforts of Ken Campbell and his ilk attempt to ban important literature in high school libraries and banish it from the curriculum. Campbell, a Baptist evangelical from Milton, Ontario, had founded a lobby group called Renaissance Canada a year earlier in 1974. While the library and English Department at Oshawa Catholic High School were in no way disposed to buckle under to such a censorship challenge, I saw the fight was real, especially in Peterborough and surrounding area, as downtown Pentecostals, not to mention Bible Belt evangelical adherents from Burleigh Falls to Buckhorn, on the southern edge of the Canadian Shield north of Peterborough, were making rumblings and by early 1976 would publicly launch the Peterborough Committee for Citizens on Decency as their campaign vehicle to ban Margaret Laurence ‘s The Diviners, published just two years earlier in 1974, taking their fight to the public in venues ranging from signing petitions in Peterborough churches to letters to the editor in newspapers, right up to appearing as delegations before trustees of what is now known as the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board. Laurence was living in Lakefield near Peterborough.

In 1968 the Ontario Ministry of Education had given local school boards the authority to determine which literary works would be used in English classes. In the winter of 1976, writes Sheila Turcon, an archivist in the Mills Memorial Library’s William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, “complaints were lodged at two Peterborough high schools against both The Diviners and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971). Both books should have been reviewed by a special committee which had been established two years earlier to review complaints against other books. However, only Laurence’s book was dealt with by the committee.

“The book had been opposed by Jim Telford, a board of education trustee and member of the Pentecostal community, and Rev. Sam Buick. They and their supporters told the Globe and Mail that the novel ‘reeked of sordidness.’ The review committee did not agree and gave its unanimous support for the retention of The Diviners.”

Buick at the time had pastored the Dublin Street Pentecostal Church in downtown Peterborough for three years since 1973.

“On April 22, 1976, the full board decided ten votes to six to keep the book on its approved textbook list,” Turcon said. “Despite this ruling, only Bob Buchanan from Lakefield Secondary School continued to teach it.”

In the end, the new Campbellites did not prevail, but the fight was very public, very protracted and very nasty.

It was in the months leading up to the emergence of the full backdrop in Peterborough, living  50 miles or so down the road to the southwest in Oshawa, I took it upon myself to form a group of high school students from the half dozen or so high schools in Oshawa at the time called the Students Against Arbitrary Censorship Committee (or S.A.A.C.C.) Not the most elegant name or acronym, but I hadn’t enjoyed the benefit of a Loyalist College advertising or marketing course at that point in my life. That would have to wait until the early 1980s when I studied print journalism. So there it was, the Catholic kid, from the faith that brought you the Index Llibrorum Prohibitorum, leading the freedom-to-read charge. Poor Sister Conrad Lauber, my erudite principal. No doubt my S.A.A.C.C. and later Grade 13 high school debating activities have been almost enough on their own to merit her a get-out-of-purgatory-free card, in the unlikely event she might some day need it, simply for enduring my campaigns and playing devil’s debating advocate under the school’s banner. And while my school, and Sister Conrad, stood up, however, uncomfortably at times for my free speech rights, not all Catholics by any means did. After one of my letters to the editor appeared in the op-ed section of the Catholic Register, a gentleman from Geraldton, Ontario took the trouble to write me a handwritten letter, sending it to my home address on Nipigon Street, telling me I was heading for hell. Anonymous telephone calls crisply conveyed similar messages. Pity my long suffering parents. Aside from The Diviners, some of the books Campbell wanted to ban 40 years ago, such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, have remained perennial favourites of censorship advocates, and still show up on banned and challenged book list challenges.

When I said earlier I was naive at 18 as to how power actually works in practice, it is because I thought things like common sense and logic would trump know-nothing ignorance in any given debate and decision, and those advocating banning a book might actually have bothered to read it first. That sort of thing. And I didn’t necessarily think this would be a life-long struggle between the forces of intellectual freedom and ignorance, not to put too fine a point on it. Of course, I was wrong on all counts. Hence the need 40 years on in the struggle to have annual events like “Banned Book Week” from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, spearheaded by sponsoring organizations such as the Chicago-based Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the National Association of College Stores and PEN American Center.

While I still feel just as strongly and passionately about intellectual freedom and taking a stand against book banners, I have also these many years on, learned to see the world, dare I say it, in many more shades of grey, than my young black-and-white 18-year-old idealist self. I may still disagree with book banners, but Campbell, who I never actually met, was something of an evangelical caricature for me as a teenager. I know real-life evangelicals now and count a fair number as good friends. They’re not all book banners. And being a Protestant (or Catholic for that matter) evangelical is not incompatible with being an intellectual. Who would have thought that at 18? Not me. And even those who would still ban books I wouldn’t, I’d be hard pressed not to concede that both the world is a nastier, trashier place in some ways than it was 40 years ago (probably the lament of every aging generation, I know) and that I really can’t always accurately judge people’s motives from the outside and what’s inside their hearts, a gift I seemed to have thought I possessed in my youth.

After spending upwards of 30 years working in print journalism, with the exception mainly of the five-year period between 1990 and 1995, when I redressed my youthful lackluster academic performance in university by returning first to Trent University in Peterborough to complete my Honours B.A. in History and then on to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, as an Ontario Graduate Scholar, for a couple of years to do a master’s degree in History, I had the opportunity to return in a small way earlier this year to academia working simply as a clerk at the University College of the North (UCN) new Thompson campus library here in Northern Manitoba. There is something so very Victorian in that word clerk that makes me want to pronounce it “clark,” as I imagine perhaps joining Charles Dickens over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, that particular concoction of Clementines, sugar, cloves, moderately sweet red wine and ruby port.

I am happy to note the “Mission of the University College of the North Libraries” explicitly affirms endorsing “the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which includes, along with the right to express thoughts publicly, the fundamental right of access of every person to all expressions of knowledge. The intellectual freedom fostered and protected by the enshrinement of these rights is basic to the proper functioning of the University and to the healthy development of Canadian society of which it is a part. The University College Libraries supports the principles of intellectual freedom as they are pertinent to all of its activities.”

The 10 books pictured here – Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover – are all found in our stacks for students, faculty, staff and community users to borrow and read. They are also books that have been banned or challenged, some perennially, in other places.  “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group,” says the American Library Association.  “A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.”

The American Library Association “promotes the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinions even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those viewpoints to all who wish to read them.”

You can discover the “top ten frequently challenged books lists of the 21st century” to date and the methodology used to make that determination by checking out the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association webpage http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10#toptenlists

The Banned Books Week website “drew more than 92,000 users and had more than 207,000 page views in 2014,” Publishers Weekly noted Sept. 18. “, Banned Books Week 2015 will, for the second consecutive year, focus on a single category – this time young adult books, which dominates the list of the 311 challenged books in 2014, led by Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (In 2014, graphic novels was the category of focus.) “There have been very serious flaps over why YA books have very dark themes,” noted Judy Platt, chair of the BBW co-ordinating committee and director of Free Expression Advocacy at AAP.”

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Michael Coren leaves the Roman Catholic Church – again

The Catholic blogosphere has been all atwitter in recent days over the defection of one of its highest profile Conservative writers, Canadian pundit Michael Coren, who was received on Sunday, April 19 into the Anglican Communion; to wit at the Cathedral Church of St. James on Church Street in Toronto, greeted outside by Rev. Canon Susan Bell, an honorary assistant at the cathedral and canon missioner for the Diocese of Toronto. St. James Cathedral is both a parish church ministering to the historic St. Lawrence neighbourhood and a cathedral church.

Coren, 56, was born in England and raised in a secular home, which he has described as “semi-culturally Jewish.” He says he became a Christian in 1984 and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1985 when he was 26. His wife, Bernadette, and four children are Catholic. They met in Toronto at a Chesterton conference held in 1986 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the death of the legendary Catholic apologist – and perhaps someday saint – Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton. Coren moved to Canada from Britain in 1987.

“I could not remain in a church that effectively excluded gay people,” Coren told Joseph Brean of Toronto’s National Post newspaper in a May 1 story headlined,”‘I felt a hypocrite’: Author Michael Coren on why he left the Catholic Church for Anglicanism.”  Coren went on to tell Brean, “That’s only one of the reasons, but for someone who had taken the Catholic position on same-sex marriage for so long, I’d never been comfortable with that even though I suppose I was regarded as being a stalwart in that position. But I’d moved on, and I felt a hypocrite. I felt a hypocrite being part of a church that described homosexual relations as being disordered and sinful. I just couldn’t be part of it anymore. I could not do that. I couldn’t look people in the eye and make the argument that is still so central to the Catholic Church, that same-sex attraction is acceptable but to act on it is sinful. I felt that the circle of love had to be broadened, not reduced.”

The Anglican Church of Canada into which Coren has been received is an autonomous national church within the Anglican Communion consisting of over 800,000 members on parish rolls. The Anglican Communion, representing those in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury, derives their forms of worship and the orders of their bishops, priests and deacons from the Reformation settlement in England. Anglicanism worldwide shares a common liturgical and theological tradition, catholic and reformed, which is expressed in local contexts in a wide variety of languages and customs. While each national or regional church within the communion is autonomous, the Archbishop of Canterbury is its spiritual head and the chief sign of its unity.

The first Anglicans in Canada were 16th century English explorers led by Martin Frobisher and his chaplain, the Rev. Robert Wolfall.

The Anglican Church did not become established in Canada, however, until the consecration of Charles Inglis as bishop of Nova Scotia in 1787. The head of the Anglican Church of Canada is the primate – Archbishop Fred Hiltz of the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

Personally, I’ve always found Michael Coren’s politics way too conservative for my taste, and his tone mean-spirited at times, although he showed evidence of mellowing in recent years, even while still a Catholic.

He penned a column on religious bookstores for the long-defunct Idler, a Canadian general interest magazine for intellectuals edited by David Warren, which was sort of a forerunner to The Walrus, for the November-December 1991 issue where he wrote: “The Evangelicals may be intolerant, small-minded, and repellent, but at least they hold a consistent set of beliefs.”

This is also not Coren’s first defection from the Catholic Church. He also left in 1994 to attend several evangelical churches, including Baptist, and also attended Anglican services, after he wrote a June 1993 Toronto Life profile on Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic, then archbishop of Toronto, in which he accurately quoted Ambrozic as using the words “frigging” and “bitch” and calling the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco “a conservative Roman Catholic and not a bad fellow.”

The Catholic Church “circled its wagons around Ambrozic” and Coren, who had been a Roman Catholic for about eight years, “was deluged with hate mail,” Toronto-based freelancer Ron Csillag, who joined Religion News Service in March 2002 and covers eastern Canada, noted in a Sept. 2, 2011 obituary story on Ambrozic in the Globe and Mail.

Eventually, Coren returned to the Catholic Church and became one of its chief polemicists with the publication of two books, Why Catholics Are Right in 2011, and The Future of Catholicism in 2013.

And now he’s gone. Again. Defected this time to the Anglican Communion.

While I may have found an earlier version of Coren mean-spirited at times and nasty in his conservative tone, much of the reaction in the Catholic blogosphere and media over the last week or so has been even more mean-spirited, nasty and personally vindictive than vintage late 1980s and 1990s Coren.

Michael Voris founder of Saint Michael’s Media in Ferndale, Michigan  a religious apostolate of on-demand video programs, including The Vortex, on the website ChurchMilitant.TV, was vitriolic and boorish, as is his custom, whenever the Catholic Pharisee is indignant and offended, which is pretty much daily. It’s not that Voris is wrong in his Catholic theology; he’s not, at least in the most legalistic sense. But it’s a good thing it was Jesus and not Voris who met the Samaritan woman at the well or wasn’t there when Jesus invited he who was without sin to cast the first stone at the adulterous woman. At best, Voris plays lip service to things like mercy.

Voris, a former third degree member of the Knights of Columbus, who left the fraternal order as a matter of conscience after three years as a knight in 2011 because he said the national or supreme and some state councils were “nothing more than a [insurance] business” with “no real sense of attachment to the teachings of the faith” may not think of himself as being without sin, but he needs no invitation to cast a stone – first, middle or last – anywhere, anytime. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, was metaphorically stoned by Voris not long ago for being grand marshal of New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day parade March 17, a parade in which the OUT@NBCUniversal was allowed to march and publicize its identity, the first time an LGBT advocacy group has been allowed to march in the annual parade.

To be fair to Voris, who is a very smart guy with a Sacrae Theologiae Baccalaureus from the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, or Angelicum, in Rome, some of his criticism of the Knights of Columbus, however stinging, has been right on the money. Such as last month when he went after the Indiana State Council of the Knights of Columbus for refusing to back a resolution:

(1) clearly and publicly declaring support for the teachings of the Catholic Church on marriage as described in the Catechism of the Catholic Church;

(2) adopt and administer a policy consistent with teachings of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to provide councils with guidance as regards the rental of or use of halls and other facilities owned by or affiliated with the Knights of Columbus; and

(3) take all necessary legal steps to defend these policies in accordance with the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Given the options to adopt the resolution, reject the resolution, vote no action on the resolution or refer the matter to Indiana state officers, the knights voted “no action.” The issue arose in late December last year after Knights of Columbus Council #934 in Madison, Indiana backpedaled on  their decision to not rent their hall to two lesbians, Alexandria Marie Shields and Taylor Butcher, for their wedding reception last month (ironically, the same weekend as the Indiana State Knights of Columbus convention).

In addressing Coren’s defection to Anglicanism, Voris had this to say on The Vortex May 5: “Michael Coren … has placed his immortal soul in deep jeopardy by renouncing the Catholic Church and joining a church founded by a man based on divorce and murder. Cut it up and make it attractive in whatever way you want, but that is what has happened here … the so-called worship offered up by King Henry’s church based on divorce and murder is fake worship because there is no Eucharist in that man-made religion.

“He later adds he began reading Anglican theologians. No such thing. There are no theologians outside of the Catholic Church – not legitimate ones, because they do not have the necessary graces to study in Catholic faith the things of God. They have nothing to offer because anything they offer begins with the supposition that the Catholic Church is not established by the Son of God … He says it doesn’t really matter what religion you belong to as long as you have a relationship with Jesus Christ.

“And there it is, perfectly summed up – the whole stinking rotten filth of Protestantism: that the person decides for himself.”

The real stink here is Voris’ tone. It is one thing to be combative and even a bit abrasive in one’s intellectual discourse; it is quite another to be the worst advertisement on Earth for the Catholic Church. Any non-Catholic – and even some practicing Catholics – seeing Voris’ 5:27 rant here at http://www.churchmilitant.com/video/episode/the-vortex-michael-coren, are likely going to wonder why it took Coren so long to leave the Catholic Church again – or why he came back in the first place (the Eucharist is what Coren said on that point).

Carl E. Olson, editor of Catholic World Report, an orthodox Catholic perspective online news magazine, who had been publishing a monthly column by Coren since September 2013, has written a much more measured response, which you can read here: http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/3851/michael_coren_goes_anglican_denounces_catholic_moral_teaching.aspx

Olson grew up in a devout Fundamentalist Protestant home in western Montana. After two years of art school, he attended Briercrest Bible College, an Evangelical Bible college in Saskatchewan, graduating with an associate’s degree in 1991. His wife, Heather, is a graduate of Multnomah Bible College in Portland, Oregon. They married in 1994 and entered the Catholic Church together in 1997.

Olson also later graduated from the University of Dallas, a private Catholic liberal arts school in Irving, Texas with a masters degree in theological studies in 2000.

Olson asks not unreasonably, “How far, then, should the circle of love be broadened? Does it bother Coren that the Catholic Church also considers adultery, polygamy, pornography, and incest to be serious sins? Is he bothered that polygamists and people in incestuous relationships are ‘effectively excluded’ by the Catholic Church? Where does he want to draw the line? And why?”

Olson, and others, including Dorothy Cummings McLean, a columnist for the Catholic Register in Toronto, have quite rightly criticized Coren for clandestinely taking professional Catholic writing and speaking fees for somewhere between a year and a year and a half while making his under-the-radar journey into to the Anglican Communion, long attending services before his formal reception April 19. Point well taken methinks. “As a Roman Catholic in communion with the Holy See, I do not believe that an Anglican – above all a secret one – can  speak authoritatively about ‘the Catholic Church,'” wrote  Cummings McLean in a May 7 article headlined, ” Professional Catholics must be professional and Catholic” found at: http://www.catholicregister.org/opinion/cummingsmclean

Lea Singh in her Culture Witness blog posted at http://leazsingh.blogspot.ca/2015/05/so-long-michael-coren-newest-member-of.html on May 3, “So Michael Coren has become Anglican. Not surprising at this point, considering his about-face in 2014 on the issue of homosexual relationships, but still a sad and disappointing twist in the life story of a man whose words and books inspired many Catholics in Canada and elsewhere.

“In particular, one revelation rather stunned me: that he has been quietly attending the Anglican church for about a year.

“What this really means to me is that Michael Coren knowingly misled his Catholic audience. He continued functioning publicly as a Catholic apologist, writing articles for Catholic publications and circulating on the Catholic speaking circuit, without disclosing this very pertinent bit of information that would surely have given many of his Catholic promoters serious pause. Did Coren see no conflict between his public role as an outspoken Catholic and his Sunday attendance at another church?”

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