Court rules high school can teach Catholicism

Loyola High School, a private Jesuit Catholic school in Montreal, has won the right to apply for an exemption to a provincial regulation that requires it to teach a world religion course without preference for any particular religion.

Since 2008, the Quebec ministry of education has denied the school the right to teach students about “the Catholic nature of the school” or to teach Catholicism within the framework of the ethics and religious culture course.

The Supreme Court last week ruled by a 4-3 margin that “requiring Loyola’s teachers to take a neutral posture even about Catholicism means that the state is telling them how to teach the very religion that animates Loyola’s identity”.