By Dennis Gruending

Some family members of Alphonse Gerwing, who died in November 2007, say they will return his Order of Canada medal. His nephew and a sister have said that a similar award made to Dr. Henry Morgentaler tarnishes the one given to their relative. Al Gerwing was one of my high school teachers and remained a friend and mentor until his death from cancer at age 84. I believe that these family members are being presumptuous in wanting to return the award that Al received.

Many of us, if we were lucky, had one teacher who recognized something in us that we did not see in ourselves and who challenged us to set goals and pursue dreams that would otherwise have languished. Al was that one teacher for me. I grew up in rural Saskatchewan and for three years attended St. Peter’s College, a boy’s high school at a Benedictine monastery near Humboldt, Saskatchewan. Al taught us English literature and did it extremely well. He was not actually a monk but had offered his services so that the monastery could spare someone else to serve in a Brazilian mission. Al was also the driving force behind a series of musical performances at our school, including Pirates of Penzance and The Sound of Music. He chose as his cast boys with the best voices and he recruited girls from a high school academy down the road, as well as people from the local community – many of who had not previously recognized their own talent.

Al was later to leave the school and he taught in a number of towns in rural Saskatchewan and Alberta before he retired. When he visited the Benedictine mission in Brazil, he was immensely moved by the poverty of the people. That drove him to work tirelessly on behalf of social justice for the rest of his life. One of his continuing efforts was raising money to help Brazilian street children. He established the Alphonse Gerwing Foundation to ensure that his work would live after him. He received the Order of Canada in 1989 for his humanitarian work and it was a recognition that was well deserved.

I last saw Al in July 2007 when my wife and I visited with him in Lake Lenore, Saskatchewan, the small town where he had been born and to which he retired. He wrote to us not long after to say that he was ill and hoped that God would take him soon, preferably in his sleep. He died a few months later.

I don’t know how it was decided that Al’s Order of Canada medal should be returned. Al never married so there was no immediate family to make such a decision, but at least one relative has expressed his displeasure with what has happened. Jim Gerwing, a former Benedictine monk at the monastery near Humboldt, wrote a letter to The Globe and Mail on July 23. “The Order of Canada was not given to the Gerwing family,” he said, “and they have absolutely no right to return it simply because they disagree with the fact that Henry Morgentaler is also a recipient. Canada should not accept the return of such an honour unless it is explicitly written into the deceased person’s will.”

The Gerwings are a large family of staunch Catholics and likely that provided their motive to return the medal. The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops was sharply critical of Dr. Morgentaler’s receiving the award and various individual bishops have called upon people to make their displeasure known to the Governor-General, who is nominally in charge of the selection. Several recipients have returned their medals. One wonders how they can all be so judgemental about a woman’s right to choose when the church continues to insist that it is sinful for people to plan the size of their families by using what the Catholic hierarchy describes as “artificial” methods of birth control, including condoms and the pill. As recently as July 25, the Vatican responded dismissively to an open letter from 50 Roman Catholic groups who said the Church’s ban on contraception has been “catastrophic” and should be lifted.

I don’t know what, if anything, Al Gerwing would have said about Dr. Morgentaler’s receiving the Order of Canada. When I was a candidate for political office and later a Member of Parliament, Al talked to me about abortion. We were not able to agree entirely, but we did agree that it is essential to support women and families in every way possible – including the provision of adequate child care, housing, increased minimum wages and improved maternity and paternity leaves. Al continued to be a modest financial donor to my campaigns, even though he had by then given away most of his money, including that in his RRSPs. We remained dear friends to the end.

By Dennis Gruending

Bill Janzen, the respected face and voice of the Mennonite Central Committee Canada office in Ottawa, is retiring at the end of July after 33 years. Janzen has been a quiet but significant presence, working with politicians of all stripes, with civil servants and with a variety of church and secular organizations on a range of issues, including refugee and immigration policy, war and peace, food and famine. Lloyd Axworthy, Canada’s former minister of foreign affairs, said in an e-mail interview, “In the years I worked with Bill Janzen, he was always a source of good advice based upon a sound set of values which provided assistance for countless people around the world.” Bill Blaikie, the longest serving MP in the House of Commons and a United Church minister, says, “I always found Bill to be a voice of calm, reflective reason in the Ottawa tempest. He is one of the best examples I can think of for Christian witness and advocacy in the political process.”

Asked what he has found most satisfying about his work, Janzen points to a number of projects. “In the fall of 1978 a civil servant named Gord Barnett and I drafted and negotiated Canada’s first master agreement for the private sponsorship of refugees, although I should add that after it was signed I was less involved in the actual work with refugees.” The agreement was widely used to provide sponsorships for Indochinese boat people in 1979 and other refugees in subsequent years. Janzen also mentions his involvement with inter-church and secular coalitions, including Project Ploughshares, Kairos, the Canadian Council for International Cooperation, the Commission on Justice and Peace of the Canadian Council of Churches, and the Social Action Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

Janzen refers as well to a letter that he drafted on behalf of MCC Canada in 2002, urging then Prime Minister Chretien to stay the course in refusing Canadian support for a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. “People in Iraq and in the region are very worried, as are many in Canada,” the letter said. “The present situation is certainly not ideal but, in our view, a war would make things much worse. We pray that God will give you wisdom and courage as you deal with this and other issues that face our country and our world.”
Janzen says, “The ideas in that letter contributed to the broader inter-church voice on that issue and when Jean Chretien decided not to support that invasion, he said the voice of the faith community had been significant in his decision.”

Janzen mentions his advocacy in helping Low-German speaking Mennonites whose families had emigrated to Latin American to recover their Canadian citizenship. “This is a long and involved story but in 1976, after I submitted a substantial appeal, the government agreed to interpret one discretionary provision in the Citizenship Act in a broader way. In my opinion some 75,000 of those Mennonites, and an untold number of other people, now have Canadian citizenship as a result.”

About 80 friends and colleagues gathered at the Ottawa Mennonite Church in June to pay tribute to Janzen. One of those to speak was Bert Lobe, who has a long association with the international and North American work of the Mennonite Central Committee. Lobe grew up near Janzen’s home community of Blumenheim, a small Mennonite village north of Saskatoon. Lobe said that Janzen, one of 11 children, was a good athlete who excelled as a fastball pitcher and hockey player.

Janzen went on to post-secondary studies at the Canadian Mennonite Bible College in Winnipeg, the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, where he received a PhD in political science. He turned his thesis into a book titled Limits on Liberty, which was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1990. In it he describes conflicts that occurred with Canadian governments when some Mennonites, Hutterites and Doukhobors attempted to live communally and apart from the rest of society. A second book, Sam Martin Went to Prison, tells the story of Martin and other conscientious objectors who chose to go to jail rather than serving in the Canadian military during the Second World War. “Thanks for that book,” Lobe said to Janzen. “We still use it in our schools.”

The words most often used at the Ottawa event to acknowledge Janzen were integrity, trust, competence and respect for others. Lobe gave the final word to Janzen’s elderly parents, who still live at Blumenheim. “Just pat him on the shoulder,” his father Abram told Lobe, “and say well done.”  Janzen now plans to focus attention on writing that he has been too busy to complete.