By Dennis Gruending

Catholics have a rich body of social teaching but their universities don’t teach it, their priests don’t preach it, and many people in the pews either do not know about it or are indifferent, says Joe Gunn, a long-time Catholic activist. Gunn spoke to the Faith and Public Life class at the Ottawa Lay School of Theology on February 16th. He spent seven years serving refugees throughout Central America and on NGO projects. He was later director of the Social Affairs office for the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. Gunn has also worked widely in ecumenical coalitions and is now executive director of Citizens for Public Justice, a faith-based group based in Ottawa.

Alberta oil sands 

Gunn began his remarks by talking about a pastoral letter issued in January 2009 by Most Rev. Luc Bouchard, the Bishop of St. Paul, a Catholic diocese in Alberta that is home to much of the province’s rapid energy development. The letter is called The Integrity of Creation and the Athabasca Oil Sands, and in it the bishop writes, “I am forced to conclude that the integrity of creation in the Athabasca Oil Sands is clearly being sacrificed for economic gain…and constitutes a serious moral problem.” Gunn says that while the letter originated from a Catholic bishop, it has implications for everyone. “The bishop was taking Catholic social teaching and applying it to the questions of everyday life in his community.”

Gunn adds that the principles underlying Bishop Bouchard’s letter were thoroughly researched and carefully based upon Catholic theological principles, papal statements on social doctrine, upon pastoral letters on ecology from bishops around the world, and on previous statements made by Canada’s Catholic bishops. The response, as judged by letters to the editor in newspapers, ranged from indifference to contempt. “Tell the bishop to mind his own business,” said one letter. “He should focus on trying to make the church relevant again rather than trying to make government policy.”  Another stated, “Yes, he is entitled to his opinion … point taken, now back to church, eh?”

Papal encyclicals  

Gunn says that modern Catholic social teaching dates back to 1891 when Pope Leo XIII issued a papal document (encyclical) called Rerum Novarum, which, translated from its Latin title, means Of New Things. Gunn says that Pope Leo was responding to the industrial revolution in Europe, when people left the countryside to live in crowded cities where they worked long hours in dreary factories and lived in poor and unsanitary conditions. Traditional communities were breaking down and the church was fearful about losing its influence with the new working class. “The pope talked about a just wage for workers and about their right to join unions, and the church also began to shift its allegiances from monarchies toward liberal democracies.”

Gunn says that a second major encyclical prepared by Pope Pius XI in 1931 “defended private property but insisted that the right to property carried social obligations.” The document was also driven by the church’s fear and loathing of communism and of socialism. The church promoted the liberal state and supported moderate reform, although it attempted to direct that reform through Catholic organizations – trade unions, youth groups, family movements, even Catholic-inspired Christian democratic political parties. The Second Vatican Council, which was convened by Pope John XXIII in 1961, opened the church to greater dialogue with the world and with other Christian faiths and world religions.

Gunn says that another great change began to occur in the 1960s and 70s. Pope Paul VI wrote an encyclical called Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples), which talked about the growing need to respond to the needs of the global south. Gunn says this spurred Catholics in Canada to set up an international aid agency (Development and Peace) at a time when other Canadian churches were establishing similar organizations. But by the 1970s the paradigm was shifting again. “We began to understand that we had to do more than be generous. We were called to be in solidarity with the poor and their movements for justice. Liberation theology explicitly maintains that the victims must be the transformers who take social change into their own hands.”

Ecumenical coalitions 

Gunn says that in these years that Canada’s Catholic bishops produced good statements on a variety of issues, including hunger, northern development and unemployment. He says people in Canadian churches also began to work together in ecumenical coalitions.  The extent and depth of that work represents a uniquely Canadian contribution to the international church. He laments that the churches have, in recent years, drastically reduced their financial support for the coalitions. “They are under-resourced and under-staffed and the cuts made in 2008 alone were abominable.” Gunn says that as a result “Christians are consistently punching below their weight in advocacy in Ottawa. We are unable to show that our action campaigns are having an impact comparable to the weight of the Christian population of the country.”

Gunn says, finally, that Christian churches are being confronted by a new dynamic. “For a long time Christianity was a religion centred in Europe, then North America — but soon a majority of Christians will live elsewhere. What will we do when Christians elsewhere point to our wealth compared to their poverty, or about how our wasteful energy consumption is leading to ecological crisis?” Gunn adds that another important dialogue will have to occur among the world’s major religions if we are to live in peace rather than perpetual conflict.

By Dennis Gruending

You cannot be a person of faith without being political, says Paul Dewar, the New Democratic Party MP for Ottawa Centre. Dewar spoke to the Faith and Public Life class at the Ottawa Lay School of Theology on February 9th.  “Faith and politics are congruent and we have no option but to be political if we are going to live the gospel. We have to constantly question what the Christian message is, and we can never stop trying to change the way things are in society.” Dewar says that for him the word “political” includes electoral politics but also transcends it. “Our response to faith must be lived out in community,” he says. “Faith is something that we must do and not only think about.”

Dewar talked about how he grew up in a Catholic household in Ottawa in the post-Vatican II era in the 1960s. “My parents were both deeply involved in their church and they extended that into the community. Their faith, their community and their attempt to live the gospel were all of one woven cloth.” Dewar says that their parish priest, a member of the Basilian order, was also a valuable member of the community. “He was quiet and intelligent and able to work with others.” Through him, Dewar became involved in Alleluia House, a project inspired by Jean Vanier (who later created L’Arche) to have a community for people who were developmentally delayed. “These people were not unusual to me, they were my neighbours,” adds Dewar.

Dewar says that his parents’ participation in the Catholic Family Movement in the 1960s “levered their social action.” Initially it was Dewar’s father Ken who was the more political member of the family, but it was his mother Marion, a public health nurse, who eventually ran for public office. “She was involved in the church and extended that into the community and she got into public life in that way.” Marion Dewar became the mayor of Ottawa in 1978 and later served as an NDP Member of Parliament. “I was raised in the Catholic church but in the social democratic faith as well,” Dewar says, “but I would say that it was a 75-25 per cent quotient of faith over politics that influenced who I am.”

He says that it was not easy for Catholics of his parent’s generation to be social democrats (members of the CCF and later the New Democratic Party) because of opposition from many Catholic bishops. Dewar referred a book called Catholics and Canadian Socialism, written by former priest and academic Gregory Baum. In it Baum documents how bishops in Quebec and Saskatchewan in the 1930s and 40s forbade Catholics to support the CCF. The bishops’ in their criticism failed to draw a distinction between communism and the democratic socialism of people like J.S. Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas, who ironically were also religious ministers.

The bishops’ campaign was not entirely successful, Dewar says. “There were agrarian radicals like Joe Burton in Humboldt, Saskatchewan who challenged the church by running for the CCF. We also had Catholic labour people and activists in places such as Antigonish, Nova Scotia doing the same thing. The bishops neither welcomed nor expected debate on these matters but some people began to challenge the church and the Vatican.”

Dewar says that as he grew older and attended university he took a break from the church. “But it never left me. I kept reading and thinking and questioning.” At one point his mother introduced him to the mayor of Managua and following completion of his first university degree Dewar spent six months working in Nicaragua. “I was influenced by what I saw happening in the Christian community there. I saw how poor people who had been in a paternalistic relationship with the church used liberation theology to understand what the gospel was all about. They discovered that social justice and the sharing of resources was what Christ was talking about. I had never seen this manifested to such a degree. It was when I came back from Nicaragua that I came back to the church.”

Dewar became a teacher and later became involved in his union. He was vice-president of the Ottawa Carleton Elementary School Teachers’ Federation and helped establish the teachers’ Humanity Fund, providing donations to projects in developing countries. He was elected to the House of Commons in 2006 and again in 2008. He was asked following his presentation at the Lay School if he talks publicly about his religion in political settings. “Not often,” he replied. “I am prepared to talk openly about faith in settings such as this class, but when speaking in a political capacity I am reluctant to do so because I fear I could be misunderstood, and I do not want to use religion to score political points.”

Dewar says his mother was an example to him in this way as well. “Many people who attended my mother’s funeral and an associated event at Ottawa city hall were surprised to hear about the depth of her faith. She was profoundly spiritual but she was also aware of where faith belonged. She did not place her Catholic faith in the forefront in her public life, and she was also very open to all faiths and religions.”

By Dennis Gruending

The exercise of citizenship as ministry is rooted in the Biblical calling to do justice, says Kathy Vandergrift, an Ottawa-based Christian activist who has worked both within government and outside of it on behalf of religiously based and non-governmental organizations. She and William Janzen, long time director of the Mennonite Central Committee Canada’s Ottawa office, spoke to our Ottawa Lay School of Theology Faith and Public Life class on February 2. Vandergrift organized her thoughts under the rubric of what she called the Four P’s.

Principled engagement

Christians are called to principled engagement in public life. That engagement demands more, Vandergrift says, than just “working from the bleachers and voting every four years.” Principled engagement is more than mere action – it contains a qualitative dimension as well. “Elected politicians expect you to be self-interested and we are often conditioned in that way too. Look at coverage of the recent budget. Everybody responds on the basis of what is in it for them,” Vandergrift says. She adds that Christians can have a “profound advantage” if they choose to engage in a different way – on the basis of justice and not self-interest. But she warned against approaching politicians with pat solutions based on Biblical verses. “The Bible is not a political science manual. We have to be principled but not preachy.”

Practical

“I am a strong believer in incrementalism,” says Vandergrift. “It is important just to put an issue on the public agenda and keep it there. For example, it is hard to get children onto the agenda now, hard to promote solidarity with Aboriginal peoples and with refugees.” Vandergift says that it is important for Christian advocates to pick just a few issues and to campaign for policy changes on them. “I also like to present positive policy alternatives,” she says.

Prophetic voice

“If we want to provide a faith witness we should choose issues that lead to catalytic change,” says Vandergrift. “Such a moment exists now [during a time of economic crisis]. Our witness will make people uncomfortable – but in this way Christians can actually redeem the field of politics.”

Persistent and strategic

“Working for justice is like playing chess,” Vandergrift says. “We have to be strategic. Sometimes pawns can topple kings.” It is not enough, she says, to expound on what is right or wrong, or even to write fine position papers on issues. “We need a strategy on how we are going to promote our issues.” She talked about four current issues that demand our attention:

Creation care: “It needs a lot of work.”

Christian approaches to human rights: “We have to lift up the social and economic rights of people who are disadvantaged.”

Justice rather than charity for the vulnerable: Vandergrift says, for example, that food banks were created decades ago as a temporary response to hunger but now they have become a mainstay. Food banks are an example of charity but the existence of hunger in our communities is a question of justice.

Dealing with a diversity of faiths and cultures: These issues will grow as Canada becomes even more multi-religious and multi-cultural, Vandergrift says. “We have seen some of this over the so-called accommodation debate in Quebec.” The question became how much, if any, accommodation should be made, to take but one example, for female Muslim students who wear headscarves in schools or in sports events.

Vandergrift also commented on the situation in Bountiful, B.C. where polygamous men take young girls as wives.  “When the issue is framed as a debate between religious freedom and polygamy,” she says “the abuse of children’s rights is ignored. That should be of concern to people of faith, but because it is a question of religious freedom, we are afraid to engage in the issue and its implications. Perhaps the time has come when people of faith need to pay closer attention to the relationship between religious freedom and other issues in Canada.”

William Janzen, in his remarks, said that Mennonites in Canada have held a theology that makes them different from many other faiths in their dealing with government. He says that opening of an MCC office in Ottawa in the 1970s was a pivotal point for Mennonites. “Prior to that we mostly lived within our own communities. What we wanted from government was to have our own land and schools, and to be allowed to be conscientious objectors in times of war. We were hesitant to participate in the task of governing the larger society.”

Janzen says that when Mennonites did decide to begin advocating to government they thought it best to speak out of their own experience. “We would speak about what we had learned, but we would stop short of telling government what to do.” One of those areas of experience was work on behalf of refugees. Many Mennonites had been refugees, particularly after the Russian revolution and the World Wars, and the Mennonite Central Committee was actually founded to support refugee work. Janzen says this experience was valuable when MCC helped to negotiate a master agreement with the Canadian government to sponsor so-called Boat People from Southeast Asia in the late 1970s.

Janzen also points to the Canadian Food Grains Bank, which he said arose from a desire by Mennonite farmers in Canada to send food abroad to people who were hungry. The CFGB now receives support from numerous Canadian churches and religiously based organizations.

Janzen says that the traditional Anabaptist belief in pacifism has also helped to inform MCC’s witness. “We came to believe that we had something to say to the government about war and peace.” He believes, for example, that work done by his office (and by other churches) played some role in convincing then Prime Minister Jean Chretien to refuse American entreaties for Canada to become involved in Iraq.

Janzen adds, “In general, I have not approached the government with a view that it should not use force at all, even as a last resort. But I do have a high respect for the argument that once you do rule out military force, it is then that you become creative in looking at the options.”

By Dennis Gruending

The class in Faith and Public Life that I am leading this winter for the Ottawa Lay School of Theology met for its third session on January 26. I provided a quick survey on the political impact that faith and organized religion have had on Canadian society. I offered three brief points by way of introduction. First, that Christian faith is deeply embedded in Canadian history. Secondly, Catholicism has been a prominent force for centuries and it remains so, but to a diminished extent. Thirdly, among Protestant groups there has been a competition between conservatives and progressives over who should wield the greatest influence in Canadian public life. For much of the 20th century the mainline Protestants were more influential. In recent decades, religious conservatives and evangelicals have made gains. Their influence with the current Harper government is but one example.

Religious faith, the early years

Beginning in the early 1600s, religiously motivated leaders such as Samuel de Champlain, along with Catholic priests and religious sisters, were key to the French colonization of North America. We have only to think of the Grey Nuns hospitals and Catholic schools and universities, not to mention Catholic missionary efforts of the Jesuits and others.

The Protestant presence in Canada gained momentum as the British secured a foothold in the Atlantic Provinces in the 1700s, and especially after the fall of Canada to the British in the Seven Years War, which ended in 1763. A flood of United Empire Loyalists streamed into Canada during and after the American revolutionary war in the years 1775-83. These migrations, and others from both the U.S. and Europe, attracted people from many faiths, including itinerant Protestant preachers who staged popular revivalist meetings. These evangelical influences also run deeply in Canada.

The Catholic Church played the (unofficial) role of state church in Quebec until the 1960s when, of necessity, it began to accept a much more modest role. The hierarchy interfered regularly in politics. The bishops were opposed to the Liberals who they believed to be kissing cousins of the revolutionaries in France, and so in Quebec the church supported the Conservatives. A local priest said this during a by-election campaign in 1876: “Do not forget that the bishops of this province assure you that liberalism resembles a serpent in the earthly paradise which creeps close to men in order to bring abut the fall of the human race.” Bishop Ignace Bourget of Montreal made this comment in 1878: “No Catholic is allowed to call himself a liberal, even a moderate liberal.”

Wilfrid Laurier was elected to the Quebec provincial assembly in 1871 and the House of Commons in 1874. He was a marvellously gifted politician but the bishops attacked him with a vengeance because he was a Liberal. In the longer term Laurier was more than their match. During his time most Quebecois became Liberal supporters.

Catholicism and Protestantism were both changed greatly by the settlement of the Canadian West. Immigration added people of many Protestant denominations and sects, as well as Catholics from a variety of European backgrounds other than French. Christianity developed along sectarian lines, with Catholics competing with Protestants, and a variety of Protestant faiths competing with Catholics and with one another. This was true, for example, of missionary activity toward Aboriginal peoples in Western and Northern Canada. Religion, on this competitive basis, remained a strong presence throughout the 19th century and into the 20th.

Modernity versus fundamentals

The 20th century dawned with Catholics forming a solid majority in Quebec and a minority throughout the rest of Canada, where they were not very influential in political terms. Protestants were a minority in Quebec and the majority elsewhere, but they were divided. In English Canada, it was the mainline Protestants who constituted the political class.

There has, however, been an abiding chasm among Protestants since the early years of the 20th century – and to some extent it continues to this day. Mainline Protestants came to embrace modernism and liberal ideas – for example, an attempt to reconcile Christianity with the rationalist and scientific thought that arose from the Enlightenment. They came to practice “high criticism” of the Bible, teaching that it could be interpreted critically, just as any other document. They believed, for example, that such a reading allowed the Biblical story of creation to coexist with scientific theories of human evolution. The acrimonious debate about evolution became a flashpoint, which led to a bitter division between liberal and fundamentalist Christians.

Mainline Protestants embraced the social gospel, which rested on the premise that Christianity must seek to realize the kingdom of God in this world. This agenda led them to promote reforms leading to Canada’s universal health and social programs. Fundamentalists and evangelicals, however, believed in a personal conversion to Jesus Christ as the only means to salvation.

Competing visions: Douglas and Manning

These competing tendencies can be personified in Tommy Douglas and Ernest Manning, two preachers who became premiers. Douglas was a Baptist pastor in Weyburn, Saskatchewan and responded to the Great Depression by becoming involved with the Farm-Labour Party and later the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). The social gospel tradition had its practitioners in people such as Douglas, Woodsworth and Stanley Knowles, all propelled into politics through religious conviction. That tradition lives on today in people such as former MP Bill Blaikie and Saskatchewan’s former premier Lorne Calvert, both United Church ministers.

Ernest Manning was raised on a Saskatchewan farm and experienced a religious conversion while listening to the radio broadcasts of “Bible Bill” Aberhart from Alberta. Young Manning presented himself to Aberhart in Calgary and soon became his mentor’s right hand man. Aberhart decided to insert religion directly into politics and became the Social Credit premier of Alberta in 1935. When he died in 1943, Manning succeeded him. Throughout his years as premier, Manning continued to appear as a lay preacher on the religious radio program that he had inherited from Aberhart. On occasion Manning recruited his son Preston to stand in for him on the show.

Ernest Manning ruled Alberta from the right, particularly after the discovery of oil in the 1950s. He grudgingly introduced welfare measures such as building homes for the aged, but believed none of that would be necessary if people in society were shouldering their Christian duties to care for one another. In Saskatchewan, Douglas ruled from the left and his party introduced North America’s first state medical care insurance program in 1962. When Ottawa proposed Medicare for all Canadian provinces later in the decade, Manning was opposed. Manning’s political tradition has been carried by his son Preston, who led the Reform party, by Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper, who are also evangelical Christians.

Evangelical revival

Despite Ernest Manning’s political prominence, most evangelical Christians responded to the modernist-traditionalist debate early in the 20th century by retreating into their own communities of faith. By the 1960s they had moved from the margins of Canadian society toward its centre. They were increasingly well educated and prosperous but retained their old religion.

Pierre Trudeau became a symbol of all that many of them found wrong with society. Trudeau liberalized laws regarding divorce, abortion, homosexuality and the dissemination of birth control information (promoting birth control was illegal well into the 1960s). What appeared to many to be an overdue modernization of Canadian legislation was to others a sign that Canada had formally ceased to be a “Christian” nation. The 1970s and 80s saw the emergence of a growing network that supported an evangelical worldview. The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) opened an office in Ottawa under the leadership of Reverend Brian Stiller, a Pentecostal minister. The EFC began to lobby governments on the issues such as opposition to abortion, Sunday shopping and opposition to gay rights.

When Preston Manning and the Reform Party came along in the 1980s, they resonated well with Evangelical Protestants. Political scientist David Laycock has studied the rise of the Reform and Canadian Alliance parties. “With their evangelical Christian leaders,” Laycock writes, “Reform and the Alliance have also appealed to social and moral conservatives uncomfortable with what they have seen as an over-secularized society. Such voters have worried about the threats both to the traditional family and to citizens’ sense of personal responsibility that they attribute to the modern Canadian welfare state.”
By the 1990s Canadian evangelicals have arrived on the public scene, and they brought their worldview and a growing political sophistication along with them.

Catholics shift right

Catholics support, since the time of Laurier, was the main reason why Liberals remained in power for most of the 20th century. New immigrants also supported the Liberals overwhelmingly and in many cases, especially after World War II, those immigrants were Catholics from Italy, Portugal, and other countries. But there has been a shift to the right among Canadian Catholics, arising to a great extent, from the deliberate emphasis that Pope John Paul II and his successor Benedict XVI placed upon issues such as same sex marriage, homosexuality, abortion and family planning. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops decided in 2004 that individual bishops could refuse communion to any politician who supported a pro-choice position. Same sex marriage was later added to that list. Some Canadian bishops have also attempted to force politicians into line with church teaching. Three New Democratic Party MPs were denied full participation in their church because of their party’s policy in support of same-sex marriage legislation.  These recent attempts to guide and punish politicians are reminiscent of the attempts made by the Catholic bishops in Quebec to coerce Laurier in the 19th century.

During the liberalization that followed Second Vatican Council, Catholics in Canada participated in coalitions with mainline Protestants on a range of social justice initiatives at the national level, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Those efforts have largely been replaced by a growing partnership with religious conservatives on so-called family issues. For example, the Catholic bishops and the Evangelical Fellowship have gone to the courts as joint intervenors in cases regarding same sex marriage.

A religiously conservative alliance

A religiously conservative political alliance has begun to manifest itself in Canada at both the leadership and grassroots levels. These trends have been building for years but until recently have gone largely unnoticed. The prime minister and other Conservative politicians have courted evangelicals, as well as conservative Catholic and Jewish voters to build a coalition of religious support. Despite these trends, there is no way to predict the future. Churches and religious organizations are not monolithic in their thinking and action. Evangelicals, for example, debate whether their agenda should remain narrowly focused on personal and moral issues, or if they should begin to emphasize issues such as climate change and poverty. The Catholic Church is divided along ethnic and ideological lines and contains many people who do not agree with the increasing focus of the hierarchy on moral conservatism. Progressive Christians — in Protestant, Catholic, and evangelical congregations — have been marginalized in recent years and are now struggling to have their voices heard by politicians and the Canadian public.

Some questions

This description of how faith and politics have intersected in Canadian history is interesting on purely historical grounds, but it also raises some immediate questions. I posed them to the class in our first week. Have religions and religious organizations been a generally positive force in our country, or have they too often attempted to conserve and preserve that which needs changing?  Do faith and religious organizations have a prominent role to play in politics — or are these decisions best left to a secular democracy? If faith and faith groups do have a role to play, what should that role be? For example, should the Catholic Church refuse full participation to elected politics to those who do not accept the church’s official position on questions such as same sex marriage? These are not frivolous questions and for that reason it is well worth considering the links between religion and pubic life.

For the next five weeks in our class, we will hear from guests with special experience and knowledge in the history of Catholic social teaching, the Protestant social gospel, and the evangelical experience in Canada. We will hear, as well, from Member of Parliament Paul Dewar, and from William Janzen and Kathy Vandergrift, who have worked as advocates on behalf of religious organizations to government. If you wish to respond to what I have written, please use the Comments section provided below.