CLC Blog

Children Leaving School by Benjamin Vautier (1829-1898) 

 

It doesn't take long for a casual get-together with other Catholic parents to turn into a conversation about the state of Catholic education. It might begin with the usual family updates or discussions about the kids’ extracurriculars, a debate over the Sienna versus the Odyssey, or musings about the latest Matt Fradd interview, but sooner or later, we find ourselves talking about how fed up we've become with the indoctrination taking place in our schools. 

Often, these social gatherings (at least among the dads) turn into strategy sessions as we plot a radical escape from the city to protect our children and the creation of our own schools and communities away from it all.  

You know what I’m talking about: A utopian society where a few dozen families share the same values, our children attend a genuinely Catholic school, the parish stands at the heart of the town square, and daily life is shaped by our Catholic traditions. We'd work the land, bake our own bread, and eat organic, grass-fed beef every day. More importantly, our children would find spouses from other God-fearing families.  

The town of Ave Maria, near Naples, Florida, often comes up - God bless Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, who had a vision and carried it out.  

While most of us don’t have the financial means to create another Ave Maria, we all share the same temptation to escape the world and create our own Catholic settlements.   

Why is that? Is the grass greener on the other side? Maybe that’s a part of it.  

Maybe we’ve watched too many Instagram videos romanticizing a rustic, farm-to-table, traditional life? 

Or maybe, and just maybe, we’re all experiencing a real breaking point.  

It’s hardly surprising that student enrollment in Ontario’s public and separate school systems has been declining year after year. In my own circles, many parents have already opted out of the public education system, turning instead to homeschooling or private alternatives.  

Catholic parents are frustrated - frustrated with the Catholic institutions that were entrusted with providing our children a formal education while reinforcing the faith and values we strive to instill at home.  

We're frustrated that, for decades now, our schools, school boards, and teachers’ colleges have become hotbeds of sexual immorality and gender ideology, incompatible with our Catholic values, putting our children’s souls and bodies at risk of irreversible damage.  

We’re also disappointed by the deteriorating quality of education. And it’s hardly surprising when, almost every other day, another assembly, special programming day, awareness campaign, or ideological initiative takes up valuable classroom time, pushing aside the teaching of core subjects. 

Lastly, we’re heartbroken by the lack of spiritual leadership, barring a few recent courageous moments when pastoral authority was exercised. There is a real sense of abandonment among young Catholic families, a reality that bishops continue to ignore. Our Catholic leaders have abdicated their responsibility to safeguard Catholic education, effectively waving the white flag and surrendering control over curricula, codes of conduct, and educator formation to activists and ideologues whose only goal is to eradicate Church teaching from our Catholic schools.

While I often catch myself dreaming about withdrawal from society and creating a bubble that my children can grow up in, I know full well that the mission of the Church isn't to escape and hide from the world. Catholics are called to be in the world, but not of the world, and faithful Christian families are the antidote to this broken world. Saint John Paul II referred to the family as the cell of society, the first school of love. The family unit has a social mission to transform our society. We all know the saying - Strong families create strong communities; strong communities create strong nations.  

So yes, strategizing about creating our own Catholic towns can give us a certain emotional high, if only for a moment. But the truth is, while our Catholic schools are significantly compromised, I believe they can still be restored, saved, and redeemed. It is our duty as Catholic parents to fight for them, and to pull our spiritual leaders back onto the front lines, where they belong, standing shoulder to shoulder with the very parents who faithfully fill their pews, volunteer in their parishes, and support the Church with their time and their wallets.  

And there's reason for renewed hope in this mission to restore our Catholic schools.   

For those of us increasingly tempted to withdraw, the recent municipal elections offer an important reminder to remain engaged. Campaign Life Coalition endorsed more than 200 municipal candidates, and almost 40% of them won, some by overwhelming margins. 

These election results are even more remarkable considering the immense challenges Catholic families have faced over the past several years. To understand just how significant they are, it's worth revisiting some of the events that brought us to this point. 

While many argue that the seeds of corruption were planted in our publicly funded Catholic schools decades ago - the case can be made that the decline started when the funding started - three developments over the last 15 years significantly brought Catholic education closer to the point of no return: the passage of Bill 13, Accepting Schools Act, in 2012, which mandated Catholic schools permit Gay-Straight Alliances; the introduction of an updated sex education curriculum in 2015 by the Kathleen Wynne Liberal government; and finally, the Toronto Catholic District School Board’s (TDCSB) decision in 2019 to add “gender identity” and “gender expression” as protected grounds in its Code of Conduct. Together, these developments marked a significant shift in the direction of Catholic education and opened the floodgates to gender ideology, creating confusion and an outright rejection of the Church’s teaching on sexual morality in Catholic schools across the province. 

Throughout this tumultuous period, Campaign Life Coalition, Parents as First Educators, and other parental rights organizations continued to sound the alarm and push back, sadly without affirmation or meaningful public support from the Church's institutional leadership.  

The Stop the New Sex-Ed Agenda Party was established, running candidates in provincial elections to raise awareness and amplify the voices of concerned parents. During the 2018 Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership race, the issue of parental rights and the age-appropriateness of the hypersexualized curriculum was also brought to the forefront. Tanya Granic Allen, an unapologetically Catholic social conservative mother of five, became a central figure in that race, ultimately emerging as its kingmaker and forcing Doug Ford to pledge that he would scrap Wynne's sex-ed curriculum—a promise he would later break as Premier. 

But standing up came at a cost. Parents who sought to opt their children out of certain lessons were publicly demonized and, in some cases, drawn into lengthy and costly court cases. Faithful trustee Michael Del Grande, who opposed the inclusion of the terms "gender identity" and "gender expression" in the TDCSB code of conduct, endured numerous complaints, investigations, and an exhausting legal ordeal that spanned over seven years and cost more than half a million dollars - he ultimately lost. Other trustees who dared to challenge these policies faced sanctions from their own colleagues and other legal battles.  

Meanwhile, parents were increasingly confronted with changes in their children's schools that went far beyond anti-bullying policies, but rather, were exactly the kinds of developments that the aforementioned organizations had warned would come. 

The much-touted “Catholic lens” promised by the Institute for Catholic Education (ICE), and the Archdiocese of Toronto was and continues to be a dismal failure - resulting in a selective interpretation of Church teaching at best, and an outright repudiation by those who hate the Church and Her teachings at worst.  

In one of many shocking instances, a handful of TCDSB trustees interrupted, silenced, and berated a delegate during a November 2020 board meeting for quoting directly from section 2357 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. They dismissed the Church’s teaching on chastity and homosexual acts as “dangerous” and “inappropriate.” These were the same trustees who swore an oath to the Archbishop to "be faithful to the teachings of the Church."   

Soon enough, board staff were given the green light to publicly celebrate their gender dysphoria and various sexual orientations in and outside the classroom, including participating in Toronto’s annual "Pride" Parade and other local "Pride" events. The parade itself consistently features sexually explicit displays, public nudity, and simulated sexual acts. 

Professional development sessions for principals, teachers, chaplains, and other board staff increasingly became platforms for promoting "sexual orientation and gender identity" (SOGI) in schools. During one such session, TCDSB staff received instruction from an equity resource teacher who publicly describes herself as a "racialized, queer, trans, Catholic, non-binary, neurodivergent, disabled, immigrant and settler." 

This was not limited to the Greater Toronto Area. A third-party LGBT consulting group publicly boasts of having delivered more than 30 workshops, training sessions, and keynote presentations across several Ontario Catholic school boards. The consulting group was co-founded by a biological woman who identifies as a transgender man and a former teacher and current staff member with the Ontario English Catholic Teacher's Association (OECTA). 

In our classrooms, Scripture passages were printed against rainbow backgrounds, while "Pride" themed posters bearing slogans such as “God loves everyone,” “Love is love,” and “Love has no gender” were displayed throughout school hallways and front foyers. In one disturbing instance, a “Love has no age” poster made its way into a Catholic elementary school. 

Love wasn’t defined as willing the good of the other but was instead reduced to doing whatever makes someone feel good, with whomever they please. These were the messages our children were exposed to, in as early as kindergarten.  

In elementary schools, children came home with worksheets using terms like "pregnant person" and checklists inviting them to identify as male, female, or “other.” In another case, a little girl came home crying to her parents because she didn’t know if she was a girl or a boy. Apparently, a teacher played a game where students were asked to go to one side of the room if they felt like a boy, and the other side of the room if they felt like a girl.  

Most troubling, some school administrations began facilitating the social transitioning of students without their parents' knowledge, creating deep long-lasting wounds and divisions within families. In some cases, these experiments extended beyond social changes to include puberty blockers, medical interventions, and procedures with irreversible and life-changing consequences to children's bodies and future fertility. 

When all these changes took hold, and it became ever clearer that Catholic schools were Catholic only in name, and that the souls of our children were increasingly in danger, parents, grandparents, and other concerned citizens from various faith backgrounds had just about enough!  

Across the province, and the country, a grassroots resistance was revived “Million Man Marches” were organized and parents protested outside school board offices; peaceful pray-ins were held outside Archdiocesan offices; thousands of parents withdrew their children from school on CLC’s national walk-out day on June 1 in response to "Pride" month assemblies, flag raising ceremonies, guest speakers, and other LGBT-affirming activities; and faithful trustees, who were in the minority on their respective boards, continued to speak up, even in the face of enormous legal pressure and aggressive opposition from their associations and the teachers' unions.  

This grassroots parental resistance paid off. 

In 2023, the York Catholic District School Board held the line and voted against flying the “Pride” flag outside the board office with a close 6-4 vote. This was a galvanizing moment. To this day, "Pride" flags are restricted outside board and school property. 

More recently, across multiple meetings in 2024 and 2025, the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board (DPCDSB) came to adopt a neutral flag policy, prohibiting "Pride" flags on board flagpoles and inside schools.  This development was particularly momentous because, at one point, at a committee meeting, the "Pride" flag enjoyed support from 9 of the board's 11 trustees. With time, every trustee but one ended up voting against this symbol, which has sadly become deeply entrenched in our culture and even within our Catholic dioceses. (For example, a "Pride" flag flies right next to the Diocese of Hamilton's Christ the King Cathedral every June.) 

The province's second-largest Catholic school board, with more than 70,000 K-12 students and around 10,000 staff, had done the unthinkable - they reversed an existing pro "Pride" flag policy despite immense pressure from the LGBT lobby and legacy media.  

There is no doubt that years of parental complaints helped, but what ultimately sealed the deal was the intervention of the Archbishop of Toronto, Cardinal Francis Leo. At the behest of parents, the Cardinal exercised his moral authority and urged trustees to embrace the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the ultimate symbol of inclusion and love, rather than conform to secular symbols and political trends. In addition to publishing a statement, Cardinal Leo sent a member of the clergy to delegate on his behalf at a heated board meeting in January of 2025. More than 150 parents watched from the gallery, praying and giving praise to God that Church leaders were finally standing with them in a visible, public way. Parents were no longer fighting alone. 

Although union representatives and board staff wearing they/them buttons were left defeated that cold January night, efforts to overturn the policy continued. A year later, at a special board meeting, a union-backed trustee introduced a motion to reverse the policy. Once again, the Cardinal sent a courageous priest to speak on his behalf, urging trustees to uphold the policy. Not a single trustee was willing to second the motion, and it died. 

While the Cardinal's involvement proved decisive, none of this would have been possible without the bold and faithful voice of one elected trustee, Paula Dametto-Giovannozzi, who, despite facing backlash from peers, remained faithful to her oath as a Catholic school trustee, giving concerned families a voice in the boardroom. 

This is why municipal elections matter, and why October 26^th was such a historic night for the future of Catholic Education in Ontario.  

In addition to electing a clear majority of allied trustees to the DPCDSB, the highly motivated parents' movement also elected strong majorities of faithful trustees to the Halton Catholic District School Board (HCDSB) and the Waterloo Catholic District School Board (WCDSB). The latter felt like an absolute miracle, considering how determined the previous board was to continue the LGBT indoctrination in classrooms. 

Courageous incumbent trustees, who in many cases have been holding the line almost single-handedly for many years, are finally surrounded by like-minded trustees who are ready to get to work in restoring our Catholic Schools.  

Another significant result was the shift of power within the school board that started it all: the Toronto Catholic District School Board. The board is now more evenly split between those who oppose indoctrination in schools and those who continue to promote it with diabolic fervour.  

The tide is finally beginning to turn and now is not the time to ease off the gas.  

The recent elections have given us a renewed opportunity, and we must seize it. Let us stand behind the newly elected and re-elected faithful trustees who have selflessly stepped forward to defend Catholic education. Let us support them as they work to restore the Catholic identity of our schools, put education ahead of indoctrination, and bring virtue and Truth, back into our Catholic schools.  

What does this mean for us parents? Well, for starters, when I get together with other Catholic parents, we’ll put our utopian dreams of setting up perfect little Catholic towns on hold, and instead we’ll roll up our sleeves and work collectively to reclaim the institutions we already have.  

Practically speaking, we need to keep showing up to school board meetings when it matters. We’ll need to double down on our efforts to contact our trustees and let the good ones know that we’ll have their backs when the unions, the media, and the LGBT activists come after them. At the same time, we need to hold the bad guys’ feet to the fire, but also approach them charitably, hoping that they will acknowledge their wrongdoings and do what’s right going forward.  

God-fearing parents, now is not the time to escape. We can’t abandon our Catholic schools. We need to fight for them, restore them, and make them worthy of the name they bear. We have more faithful trustees than ever before standing alongside us, including a much-needed voice in Cardinal Leo. Let's get to work!