We live in the age of identity politics, where political and cultural battle lines are drawn around who and what we are. But this is not so new. Forty years ago, Canada’s most powerful politician and its most famous academic were thinking together about media, message, image and identity.

MONTREAL - The priest who gave last rites to Pierre Elliott Trudeau and presided at the funeral of his son Michel has died at age 100.

Just before Christmas, 1967, then-justice minister Pierre Trudeau famously said: “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”

The next big battle facing Catholics is over euthanasia. Already a few preliminary salvos have been fired.

For example, an “expert panel” on euthanasia set up by the Royal Society of Canada recently reported: “The underlying premise — namely that all human beings are possessed of dignity in virtue of a special relationship to a God — is incapable of being used as a basis of public policy proven in the context of a democratic, multicultural and multi-faith society that must cleave to the strictures of public reason in ethical deliberation.”