The latest threat to the pro-life voice are plans to no longer provide charity status to anti-abortion organizations. One of these is Crisis Pregnancy Centres (CPCs) which counsel women of life-affirming options available to them during pregnancy and offer support throughout their pregnancy and beyond. Without charitable status, which enables CPCs to provide tax receipts to donors, many of these organizations will die. It seems the government will stop at nothing until the very values that guide the pro-life movement are gone.

All this makes me worry, what is next? Are churches going to have to promote abortion or lose their charitable status?

You may or may not agree with me. However, I sincerely hope that as a person who respects human life from conception to natural death, my right to express my points of view will be respected and protected. I fear that soon that even that basic right will be taken away.

Colleen Reed,

Kenosee Lake, Sask.

Principle violated

Re: Pro-lifers condemn ‘terrible’ court ruling (Nov. 7):

A central teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) is the principle of non-contradiction. It states that two things that contradict each other cannot both be true at the same time. The rejection of coherent pro-life Catholics as applicants for funding under the Canada Summer Jobs program violates the principle of non-contradiction. Canada cannot be a democracy and at the same time confer official lower status on an identifiable group of citizens.

Lise Anglin,

Toronto

Meaningful life

Re: How to live a meaningful life (Bishop Robert Barron, Nov. 7):

Bishop Barron’s definition of meaning  in the context of the conversation’s theme, the crisis of meaning in our culture, made me reflect. “To live a meaningful life is to be in a purposive relationship to value, and to live a religiously meaningful life is to be in a purposive relationship to the the summum bonum, or the supreme value.” 

Naturally in his definition of relationship it is expected to work both ways. A relationship certainly has a purpose, but it is not the overriding point. I beg to disagree with his definition because a meaningful relationship is focused on the relationship itself not on its purpose. For a relationship that focuses on the purpose loses the enjoyment of it. It will become dry and impersonal.  

A meaningful life is a life lived in the Spirit of God.

Rufino Ty,

Brampton, Ont. 

Protect rights

Each provincial government needs to be encouraged to create legislation that ensures doctors, nurses and pharmacists have their conscience rights protected. Despite limited conscience protection in federal legislation (Bill C-14) and freedom of conscience enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, there are still provinces where conscience rights are at risk. No doctor, nurse or pharmacist should have to refer or perform abortions, assisted suicide or euthanasia if they don’t want to. Real medicine heals, not kills. 

Dean Clark,

Langley, B.C.