DURING A meeting last week with bishops from Ontario, Pope Benedict XVI issued one of his toughest warnings against secularism, singling out Canada for pursuing permissive policies on gay marriage and abortion "in the name of tolerance" and "freedom of choice". The Pope made the remarks last Saturday during an audience with the bishops from Ontario at his Castel Gandolfo summer residence. In a Vatican first, they were also broadcast worldwide on Vatican Radio.

Prefacing his criticism with praise for Canada's "generous and practical commitment to justice and peace", Benedict went on to express dismay at how "certain values detached from their moral roots and full significance found in Christ have evolved in the most disturbing of ways" in Canadian society.

He decried as "folly" its recent redefinition of marriage to include same-sex unions, as well as "the daily destruction of unborn children"  through abortion on demand. Such impediments to the spread of Christ's Kingdom, the Pope told the bishops, were prompted by "the exclusion of God from the public sphere".

The bishops, who oversee the 14 dioceses of Canada's most populous province, were in Rome for 11 days of ad limina consultations with Vatican officials that ended on Monday.

Earlier in the meeting, they presented their concerns over proposals to authorise voluntary euthanasia and the ongoing ramifications of legalising same-sex marriage, which Canadian MPs are set to debate when they reconvene in Ottawa next week. Speaking on behalf of the Ontario Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Richard Smith of Pembroke said they were working alongside the lay faithful to defend the sanctity of life and the traditional definition of marriage.

Benedict supplied them with heavyweight support for those tasks. He admonished at length Christian politicians who "sacrifice the unity of faith and sanction the disintegration of reason and the principles of natural ethics by yielding to ephemeral social trends and the spurious demands of opinion polls". The bishops should tell them, he added, "that our Christian faith, far from being an impediment to dialogue, is a bridge, precisely because it brings together reason and culture".

The Pope also cautioned teachers in Ontario's publicly funded Catholic school system not to stray from Catholic doctrine. He called moral relativism "a particularly insidious obstacle to education today" that was introducing "a lowering of the standards of excellence, a timidity before the category of the good, and a relentless but senseless pursuit of novelty parading as the realisation of freedom".

The statement came as a response to increasing friction between the bishops and the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association, whose left-leaning public stances have long chagrined the bishops and, reportedly, Benedict himself.

Last month, the schoolteachers' union offered a workshop for members on "effective strategies to create safe, caring and inclusive environments within schools for lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirited [a term for people saying they have both male and female spirits] and transgendered students".

In Rome, Ottawa Archbishop Marcel Gervais came away enthused by the new papacy's way of doing business. Speaking to the Catholic News Service, he described its attitude as one of "we're here to serve you".

Back in Canada, however, women's groups, gay-rights supporters and advocates of Church-State separation characterised the input as unwelcome meddling.

One letter-writer to the Toronto Star, Canada's largest-circulation newspaper, likened the Vatican to the Taliban and said that the Government ought not to grant "another powerful faith institution leave to inappropriately wield its influence over our own public policies".

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