Massimo Introvigne
(ZENIT News – Bitter Winter / Rome 12.10.2025).- “We can wish someone merry Christmas. We can sing Christmas songs. This is nothing but tradition. But we shouldn’t make any references to the birth of baby Jesus,” declared Secularism Minister of Quebec, Jean‑François Roberge, referring to schools and kindergartens in his province. “When we wish someone merry Christmas, we can think of Santa Claus and his elves, but nothing Catholic.”
It is a remarkable statement: a government official prescribing not only what citizens may say, but what they may think when they say it. Quebec’s secularism project has now reached the point where Christmas is permitted only as kitsch, stripped of its theological core. Santa is welcome; Christ is contraband.
The new legislation, Bill 9, introduced on November 28, expands the controversial 2019 Bill 21. Here are some of its provisions. Banning public prayers in streets and parks unless municipalities grant authorization. Outlawing prayer rooms in universities and CEGEPs, because, as Roberge put it, “universities are not temples.” Extending bans on religious symbols to daycare workers, with only a “legacy clause” for those already employed. Restricting religious meals in public institutions—no more exclusively halal or kosher menus, even if you are a Jewish hospital or a Muslim school. Banning religious symbols for students, staff, and even visiting parents across the education system. And, of course, invoking the notwithstanding clause to shield the law from Charter challenges.
Religious schools can continue to exist but will be excluded from public funds unless they accept to eliminate teaching of religion during regular hours of instruction, and apply the same ban on religious symbols for teaching staff that exists in the public system. This means that in a school owned and staffed by nuns, they should not dress as nuns.
This is not secularism as neutrality. It is secularism as prohibition, enforced by constitutional override.
Quebec’s secularism crusade is often justified by invoking France. But France’s model, widely criticized for the problems of religious liberty it creates, was born of a century-long struggle with Catholic dominance. Quebec’s situation is different: the Catholic Church’s grip was broken in the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. What remains today is not clerical tyranny but pluralism—Muslim students praying on campus, Jewish communities requesting kosher meals, Sikhs wearing turbans.
Bill 21 already banned teachers, judges, and police officers from wearing religious symbols. Bill 9 now extends the logic to toddlers’ daycare workers and students in universities. The state is not neutral; it is actively hostile to visible religion.
Despite claims of “equal rules for all,” the law disproportionately affects minorities. Muslim women in daycare jobs, Jewish students needing kosher food, Sikh men wearing turbans—all find themselves policed in ways that majority Catholics, who can still sing “Silent Night” in schools so long as they don’t mention Jesus, do not.
Civil liberties groups call it “political opportunism” designed to distract from housing shortages and health‑care disputes.
A government that insists religion must not dictate public life now dictates the terms of religious expression itself. Citizens may pray only with permits, eat only state‑approved meals, and celebrate Christmas only as elf‑infused consumerism.
Secularism, once meant to protect freedom of conscience, has become a new orthodoxy—complete with blasphemy rules. The “neutral” state now tells believers what they may wear, eat, say, and even imagine.
Quebec’s Bill 9 goes from neutrality to neutering, disciplining religion into silence. It replaces pluralism with a bureaucratic catechism: Santa yes, Jesus no; prayer yes, but only with a permit.
In the end, the law reveals less about faith than about fear. Fear of diversity, fear of visible religion, fear that Quebec’s identity cannot withstand pluralism. But a society that insists on elves without Jesus, prayer without public space, and neutrality enforced by constitutional override is not confident—it is anxious. And anxious states, history teaches us, make poor guardians of freedom and human rights.
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