Families remain crucial for new evangelization, says Michele Boulva
OTTAWA (CCN)
For Michele Boulva, director of the Catholic Organization for Life and Family (COLF), families play a crucial role in the new evangelization and in the renewal of society.
Boulva, who will be stepping down in December after almost 13 years at the helm, said COLF’s mission has been to equip families to live out their vocation in the world, regardless of how the political landscape changes.
And change it has. When Boulva, a former journalist, joined COLF, the debate on the redefinition of marriage was in full swing, followed by the legalization of same-sex “marriages” in 2005.
All major political parties have done nothing to end taxpayer-funded abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy; euthanasia and assisted suicide are now treated as “rights” and part of health care; and real Charter-protected rights such as religious freedom and conscience rights are under attack as never before.
In addition, federal transgender Bill C-16, protecting gender identity and expression and subjective notions of human sexuality in the human rights code, is before the Parliament.
“I don’t think anyone expected things to go downhill so quickly on so many different dossiers,” said Boulva in an interview in her office at the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ headquarters in Ottawa.
But these societal changes are no excuse to abandon the public square, she said. “I think Christ calls us to answer our baptismal call to be involved in society as lay men and women.”
“We need to be everywhere decisions are made to propose our perspective based on the Gospel,” she said. “Because society is allergic to any mention of the Gospel, we are better off proposing our views based on natural law.”
But families also need shoring up and proper faith formation in order to “confront challenges that contradict the Catholic faith,” she said.
Through its publications, yearly seminars, website, and public statements, COLF has tackled all the hot-button issues with solid Catholic teaching. However Boulva hopes a stress on evangelizing the family and promoting its role “as a protagonist of the new evangelization” continues after she has gone.
As transhumanism and gender ideology loom, St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body provides an antidote. Gender ideology “proposes a radically different vision of the human person that refuses reality,” she said. “It’s a rejection of the reality of your body.”
In the Theology of the Body there’s a “Christian anthropology of men and women created in the image of God that families need, to form their children in a proper understanding of God’s view on human life, on human love, and the importance of masculinity and femininity, of mothers and fathers,” she said.
Canada’s “new normal” makes it easy to be discouraged as Catholics who are “more and more at odds with the dominant culture,” she said. “People who follow Christ and try to live out the Gospel are sidelined, and more and more criticized.”
“We need to remember the Church was built on the blood of martyrs, starting first with the martyrdom of Christ,” she said. “The first Christians were a tiny number, and it took them only 300 years to evangelize the pagan Roman world.”
“Today, as the first Christians of the Third Millennium, we are many, many, more, and we have powerful means of communication to evangelize our neo-pagan society,” she said. “We need to get our inspiration from our first brothers and sisters in the faith and be daring, merciful, and loving to all people we meet.”
An autonomous lay-run organization, COLF is co-sponsored by the CCCB and the Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus. There are two bishops and two Knights on its board, as well as five lay representatives “from different walks of life,” Boulva said. “We have always worked in close collaboration with the bishops and in communion with the universal Church.”
Though many dioceses, parishes, and associations use COLF’s materials on everything from euthanasia to families’ role in creating saints, Boulva said she hopes even better means will be developed to get these materials out to the faithful.
“Families form the basic cell of society and of the Church,” she said. “No wonder Satan is trying to destroy families and marriage, because we know spouses are called to reflect God’s Trinitarian love.”
When Boulva joined COLF as a francophone co-director in March 2004, she joined the anglophone co-director, Jennifer Leddy, in its mission to “build a culture of life and a civilization of love by promoting respect for human life and the essential role of the family.”
After Leddy’s departure that year, COLF’s board decided to continue with one bilingual director. A search is underway to find a replacement for Boulva, who will return to Montreal to be closer to family, in the New Year.
Boulva said she plans to “refocus” rather than “retire,” since she plans to remain active, volunteering for groups like Living with Dignity, a grassroots organization opposed to euthanasia, and perhaps writing some children’s books on Theology of the Body.
