By Dennis Gruending

My wife Martha and I spent two weeks recently in Italy, where we paid several visits to St. Peter’s Square and Basilica, the Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel. There were crowds throughout the day but I read in a guidebook that if one arrived at 9:45 a.m. at the visitor centre found off to the side of the square, there was a guided tour on offer for free. So it was that we fell under the influence and tutelage of an older middle-aged British woman named Penelope on a tour that transported me in a wink to my years as a primary school student being taught the Jesus and I catechism by Ursuline sisters. “Who made the world?” the sisters would ask us, reading from the small book containing questions, answers, Biblical stories and brightly displayed images of angels, saints and Christ on the cross. “God made the world,” we answered in unison. “Who is God?” came the second question. “God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things,” said the book – but we had already been coached in the answers and the sisters expected us to know them.  This little book was a child’s abridged version of the famous Baltimore Catechism, a compilation in 1885 of 1400 questions and answers that were used to guide the Catholic faithful until the 1960s.

When I first saw Penelope I thought that she, too, might well be a religious sister. She wore a sensible black suit and even more sensible flat-heeled shoes but her blue-framed glasses and matching scarf did hint at some fashion vanity. She told us as we began that she is a mother of four and a grandmother who has lived in Italy for decades and has volunteered to lead Vatican tours for more than 25 years. By now the square was beginning to fill up with visitors queuing in long lines to pass through the scanners before entering the cavernous church. We were only four in our small group, which included a young Jewish couple from Israel.

The square

Penelope, after a few preliminaries, led us into St. Peter’s Square — actually it is not a square but rather a large an oval space in front of the basilica and framed by a set of elliptical colonnades. This day it contained thousands of grey chairs that had seated pilgrims attending Pope Benedict XVI’s audience of the previous day. Penelope said the outdoor space can accommodate 35,000 people and the basilica’s interior can hold 15,000. It was remarkable, she said, how every one of the people attending the outdoor audience would leave convinced that the pope had looked into their heart, knew them by name and had spoken, individually, to each of them. She pointed across the square to a brownish brick building of about five storeys that rises behind the colonnade. The pope’s bedroom was to be found behind the window at the building’s extremity, she said, and his study was one window over. “Look, he has his window open this morning,” she said. “He must want some breeze.”  She said that everyone had loved Pope John Paul II and that there was some apprehension when Joseph Ratzinger was elected by the other cardinals as the successor. She did not say so but Ratzinger had long been called the pope’s Rottweiler, and had served as John Paul’s enforcer of orthodoxy among those priests and theologians, particularly liberation theologians, who were considered to be wayward.  “Cardinal Ratzinger had such a reputation and we were concerned,” Penelope admitted, “but we needn’t have been. He has turned out to be just delightful and he’s so gentle.”

My wife had during this explanation been looking up at the figures of 140 saints, all of them male as far as she could tell, perched on the top of Bernini’s colonnades encircling the square. “Women aren’t very well represented among the saints,” she said. Penelope paused for some time and then said, “That’s not quite true.” She went on to explain that someone had actually brought this dearth of women in the square to the attention of Pope John Paul, who was extremely devoted to the Virgin Mary. She said that as a result he had a mosaic in Mary’s honour placed into the outer wall of the Sistine Chapel. Penelope pointed up to it but it was difficult to make out at that distance. Then she used her cell phone to call ahead so that we could jump the queue of tourists and pilgrims that had been forming since early in the morning. Some were praying the rosary as they inched their way forward in the line; others were wearing blue or yellow caps or bandanas so that they would not become separated from their group. Two brown-habited sisters leading a tour were holding aloft yellow sunflowers made of paper and wire as a way to keep their pilgrims together. Penelope ushered us past security and through a portico and showed us a panel in one of the basilica’s huge bronze doors depicting St. Peter being crucified upside down. Penelope said that Peter asked to be placed that way because he believed he was not worthy of being crucified head up as Christ had been. She pointed to another panel in the same door featuring St. Paul, who is being martyred by having his head chopped off.

The basilica

Once into the massive basilica, Penelope started us at the back by pointing to Michelangelo’s famous pieta, a sculpture of Mary holding her son when he was taken down from the cross. It was too crowded to get close but I had read that the pieta is now behind protective glass after a visitor damaged it with an axe in 1972. The building is immense and one feels inconsequential within it – which must have been the purpose after all. That is not Penelope’s reaction: “The idea behind building the basilica was to step into the church and believe that you are as close to heaven as it is possible to be,” she said.  The interior measures 187 metres (the length of almost two football fields) by 137 metres at the widest point. Michelangelo’s dome rises to 120 metres above the floor and is 42 metres across at its base. I noticed that metal discs have been inserted into the marble floor to mark the size of other large Catholic churches and basilicas relative to St. Peter’s. The entire length of St. Patrick’s Basilica in New York City, for example, is only one-third that of St. Peter’s. I am perplexed that the Church would deface its greatest shrine in order to indicate the size of other, smaller cathedrals. That is much like Toronto and Shanghai jockeying for bragging rights to the tallest freestanding tower, but inappropriate one would think for a church. When later I mentioned this to a friend of mine, a former priest, he said: “The building of St. Peter’s was all about power, the projection of power and the imperial papacy.”

Penelope criss-crossed the basilica with us in tow showing us a baptismal font here and a sculpture or a painting there. An altar dedicated to Pope John Paul XXIII had a crowd before it and we had to wait to have a closer look. Penelope told us approvingly how the pope had in 1962 convened the Second Vatican Council, throwing open the doors and windows of the church to the winds of reform. “This has resulted in all sorts of talks with other Christian churches and world religions, including the Jews,” she said – her first acknowledgment to the heritage of two of our group’s four members.  “This is all for the best,” she said, “but mind, there is only one truth.” She described how Pope John’s body was on display in a glass casket under the altar and, indeed, upon closer examination we saw the late pontiff, his face covered by a black death mask that looked to be made of wax and which accentuates his aquiline nose. Penelope told us that the body has remained perfectly intact (it has not decomposed) since John’s death in 1963, a sign of sanctity that has hastened his canonization on the way to sainthood.

John Paul’s tomb

John XXIII’s glass coffin is not far from the basilica’s main altar, which is covered by Bernini’s majestic bronze canopy and where only a pope can say mass. The bronze was stripped from the Pantheon, a temple build by the Romans in 125 A.D. Michelangelo copied its dome when he built the one at St. Peter’s. There are seventy oil lamps ranged at the front of the papal altar where two staircases lead down into the crypts containing the tombs of countless popes, including that of John Paul II. Penelope said that people are not allowed entry to the crypts from the altar but that we could get there by going out of the church and taking a separate entrance. “But why suffer the crowds,” she said, “when you can have John Paul all to yourself?” She explained how the Vatican’s website allows one to watch a web camera that is constantly trained on John Paul’s tomb. “It is always crowded during the day and you can’t see very much, but if you go on at night when the crypt is closed you will find that you are quite alone with him, ” Penelope said. I tried the site after returning to Canada and the camera works, keeping a lonely and silent vigil throughout the night.

Next Penelope led us to another altar but asked that we not go beyond its curtained barrier. She explained that during the papacy of John Paul II his staff found him wandering through the basilica early one morning. He told them that the church had become too much of a museum and that he wanted an altar dedicated to the celebration of masses throughout the day. There was one occurring now and it was being said in Latin. Penelope, in her earlier description of Vatican Council, had praised the fact that since the 1960s Catholics in any country have been able to have the mass said in their own language so that they can better understand it. Now she took a different tack. “The mass here is most often said in Latin because it is a universal language,” she said. Again, I was transported back to a time when the good sisters trained altar boys by drilling us in the pronunciation of Latin prayers said during the mass. We did learn to pronounce them correctly but had little or no idea about what we were saying.

Our Father

We had told Penelope that we could only spend an hour with her because we had to get to the airport. Now, near the end of the tour, she began to rummage through her rather large purse and produced five glossy postcard-sized pictures of Pope John Paul II clad in white robes and kissing a large crucifix that he held in his hands. She claimed to have postcards of Pope Benedict, too, but said that she couldn’t find them today. During our tour, I had seen her pull cards from her purse and hand them to anyone she encountered in a wheelchair. Now she handed a card to each of us, telling us to turn it over. “This is the Pater Noster, she said, pointing to the prayer printed on the back. “It’s the Our Father in Latin. I think it is such a wonderful prayer. Now, I want you to repeat after me: ‘Pater Noster, qui es in caelis…’”

By Dennis Gruending

The relationship between Preston Manning and Stephen Harper goes back a long way and has had its share of turbulence. Harper turned up on March 12 to give a speech at an Ottawa conference of Manning’s Centre for Building Democracy. Manning and his wife Sandra created the organization in 2006 to act as a training ground for conservatives to win in politics. The March event included an array of politicians, operatives from the Fraser Institute and other right wing think tanks, the religious right, and  sympathetic columnists who write for the The Globe and Mail, Canwest newspaper chain, Macleans and others. Harper’s speech was unadvertised and occurred behind closed doors, and his office would not release information about it after the fact. One of the invited journalists taped the speech off of a loudspeaker and other people in attendance, including the Western Standard online magazine, reported tidbits of the speech on their blogs and Twitter sites. In any event, it was quite a coup for Manning to be able to deliver the country’s prime minister as featured guest and speaker to small gathering of mid-ranking conservatives.

Publicly at least Manning plays the good and loyal soldier to the younger man who donned Manning’s  leadership mantle and succeeded where he could not in uniting the right. Manning hired Harper back in 1987 to work for the Reform Party but Harper was to betray his mentor on numerous occasions. Manning was still recovering from those wounds as recently as 2002, when he wrote a book called Think Big: My Adventures in Life and Democracy. In it, he describes Harper as elitist and disloyal, an opportunist and a quitter.

Manning hires Harper

In 1987, Manning recruited Harper, then a University of Calgary economics student, to become Reform’s chief policy officer. Harper played a major role in drafting Reform’s 1988 election platform. He also ran in that year’s election and lost. Reform did not win any seats but Deborah Grey soon became the party’s first MP in a by-election and Harper became her legislative assistant in Ottawa.

In 1992, Harper clashed with Manning over the Charlottetown Accord. Manning writes in his book that he expected to oppose the accord but that first he wanted to consult the Reform Party membership. Harper and his close associate Tom Flanagan, a University of Calgary professor who doubled as a key Reform policy advisor, demanded that Manning announce his opposition immediately. “It would not be the first time that Tom and Stephen and I would differ on the extent to which we should involve the grassroots of the party in decision making,” Manning writes. He says that both Harper and Flanagan exhibited a “dislike and mistrust” of Reform’s populist dimension. “At this point, I did not fully appreciate that while Stephen was a strong Reformer with respect to our economic, fiscal and constitutional positions, he had serious reservations about Reform’s and my belief in the value of grassroots consultation and participation in key decisions. . .”

In July 1993, Manning and other Reformers were engaged in a two-day meeting to plan for the upcoming federal election. He had another contretemps with Harper and Flanagan, which he describes as “a dark cloud” hanging over the session. He says that Harper and Flanagan wanted to run a campaign focusing resources and activity on Western Canada. Manning wanted to run a national campaign and says that is what Reform Party members had resolved to do at their previous convention. These disagreements also centred upon Rick Anderson, Manning’s choice for campaign director. Harper was adamantly opposed to the appointment. Manning writes that Harper had never forgiven Anderson, then an Ottawa-based communications consultant, for supporting the Charlottetown Accord. But Manning believes Harper’s antipathy to Anderson had a deeper origin. “Stephen had difficulty accepting that there might be a few other people (not many, perhaps, but a few) who were as smart as he was with respect to policy and strategy. And Stephen, at this point, was not really prepared to be a team player or team builder.”

Harper quits Manning

Harper had already quit as Reform’s chief policy officer by 1992, but remained a candidate in the next election. Manning writes: “He withdrew from the national campaign effort to work almost exclusively on his personal campaign for election in Calgary West.” Manning adds that the loss of a key player “was a blow to our overall campaign effort, and it put more of a burden on those who had to fill the gap left by his withdrawal.” Reform won 52 seats in 1993 and Harper was elected in Calgary West. Several months later, in April 1994, he and some other caucus members went public with criticisms about Manning’s use of a personal expense account provided by the Reform Party for its leader. Manning used some of the money to enhance his wardrobe and his appearance. (As Prime Minister, Harper has had a make-up artist and image consultant, apparently on the public payroll). In his book, Manning was still smarting over what he called Harper’s “machinations.” He says that he expected attacks from his political opponents, “but the ones that affected us most as a family, were the ones that came from internal sources.” Manning says that Harper attacked Sandra Manning as well as her husband, then “professed not to know what all the fuss was about, saying that he was being ‘unfairly accused’”.

In 1996, Manning and other Reformers were laying the groundwork for another election when Harper let the side down again. “Stephen Harper had gloomily concluded that we were gong nowhere and would likely lose badly in the next election,” Manning writes. “Rather than pitching in to help turn things around, Stephen again chose to withdraw. This was now the third time that Stephen had vacated the field prior to a big battle – the first time when he retreated from our Charlottetown Accord campaign, and the second time when he withdrew from the 1993 national election campaign to concentrate solely on his own riding.”

Harper chose to resign his seat as an MP in January 1997, six months prior to the federal election held in that year. Manning writes: “The media predictably interpreted this as yet another sign that Reform was in decline, which made it even more difficult to energize the pre-election campaign.” Harper was soon named as vice-president, and later president of the secretive and right wing National Citizens’ Coalition. When the election campaign moved into full swing in May 1997, Manning says, Reform came under public attack “from within”. He says Harper, Flanagan and others told journalists that the party would fail and that Manning was a liability. Of Harper and the others, Manning writes: “Why people who professed to be supportive of the principles of Reform would provide comments disparaging its election efforts, at the very time when grassroots Reformers were working their hearts out to make the campaign launch a success, was beyond me.”

Harper returns

Officially, Harper sat on the political sidelines between 1997 and 2002, decrying any interest in coming back. Manning was later defeated by Stockwell Day in the leadership race for the new Canadian Alliance party. Day flopped as a leader and in 2002 Harper defeated him in yet another leadership race. Harper then contested a bye-election in Calgary Southwest. Ironically, the seat was vacant because of the retirement of Preston Manning.

Ottawa-based journalist Lloyd Mackey, a long time confidant of Preston Manning’s has written that Manning had acted as a spiritual mentor to Harper as well as his one-time benefactor. If that description is accurate, Harper’s multiple betrayals must have been particularly hurtful to Manning. In the interest of what he perceives as the greater conservative good, Manning has obviously chosen to set aside all the attacks and slights of his former protégé, but it is difficult to believe that he has forgotten them.

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

 Peter Harder was at the centre of government decision-making in Canada for more than 30 years prior to leaving the civil service in March 2007 to become the senior policy advisor in an Ottawa-based law firm. He served as a deputy minister in various government departments and worked for five prime ministers. Mr. Harder spoke to participants in our Faith and Public Life course at the Ottawa Lay School of Theology on January 19th. It was an address rich in its knowledge and conviction but in its subtlety as well. Rather than analyzing or parsing remarks (the kind of thing that I do often in this space) I will, after brief introductory remarks, let Mr. Harder speak for himself by lifting (with his permission) extensive quotes from his address.

Harder began by saying that issues of faith and public life are all around us. “Virtually every newscast, whether we acknowledge it or not, is in some form, a variation of ‘faith and public life’. Elections around the globe, revolutionary movements, decisions by governments, actions of civil society, even the marketplace — all speak to this interaction.”

He spoke briefly about being born into a Mennonite community – he now attends a United Church. “I owe much to my Mennonite roots.  They are the community that formed me, the home which nurtured my thinking — the values of community, caring, honesty and integrity, family and work, that has been essential to my career, as they are to an authentic life. As we shift between the spiritual and secular worlds, between community and formal organizations, between professional and religious values, we come to understand more fully how each nurtures the other. I have learned that I must walk both ways across the bridge.”

As a student at the University of Waterloo, he said, he encountered the writing of Bonhoeffer, Gish, Bruegeman and Reinhold Niebuhr, who would stir in him an appetite for public life informed by faith.

“The strongest intellectual influence on me was Niebuhr, the great American theologian who identified, more clearly than any other writer of the last hundred years, the lessons to be learned from the appalling slaughters of the 20th century.  His central thesis can be stated succinctly: human beings cannot find their ultimate fulfillment in the political realm, and yet there can be no real salvation apart from a life of political commitment. As a student, I wrote out the following quotation from Niebuhr, ‘Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.’ These words came to me when I signed the memorial book at the great holocaust memorial in Jerusalem as deputy foreign minister, and thirty-three years after first reading them that quote still sits on my desk.

My time on the Hill only made me appreciate more the work our parliamentarians do on our behalf.  I learned some lessons then, that have stayed with me ever since. First, politics is a rough game, but it is played by surprisingly decent people.  I say ‘surprisingly’ because it is so easy to superimpose our own cynicism about politics onto the people who actually work at politics full-time. Our Members of Parliament — be they ministers or backbenchers — are, by and large, not cynical.  They believe in what they are doing, and they believe it is worth doing well.  Part of doing it well is making the daily compromises and deals that are the stuff of political life; cynics call this ‘selling out’ but it is actually the heart and soul of democracy.

Second, our MPs are surprisingly representative of Canada.  Despite all the stereotyping, the reality is far more reassuring. Our MPs are like us, and getting more like us every day as more women enter politics and Canadian pluralism increasingly reflects itself in public life. Third, our MPs work hard — long hours punctuated by lengthy trips home for the weekend where they run from mall openings to baptisms to bar mitzvahs, meeting the folks and, perhaps once again surprisingly for the cynics, listening to the folks as well, and then bringing those voices back to the national debate.

Beyond the political theatrics, beyond the hard work of democracy, there are other attributes — call them second-order attributes that are woven into the fabric of our democracy. Attributes like restraint, or more accurately, self-restraint. There is the democratic spirit of inquiry and curiosity, of taking positions and standing your ground. Add to the list patience, persistence and passion, not to mention tolerance and tenacity. We are talking about what the philosophers would call civic virtue. It is an important idea, the understanding that democratic governance is far more than a matter of technique; a vibrant and healthy political community needs the active participation of its citizens, and that participation must be grounded in civic virtues that contribute to the maintenance of an active public sphere. It may not be faith-based, but it does build political community. By that I mean more than simply an assembly of people living within a common geographic space.

A community, must hold certain things in common. As a general proposition, the more tightly-knit a community, the easier it will be for that community to agree on issues that affect all its members. This is quite distinct from personal faith. How far can we dilute that sense of commonly-held things before the very idea of community begins to fall apart?  What about a group of people where very little is held in common.  Is that a real community, or just some kind of loose association? This has become one of the most critical issues in the world.

In some countries, fractures occur along racial or ethnic or religious or economic lines; in other cases, it is a fatal collision between the forces of modernity and tradition.  In all cases, there are not enough things held in common to overcome the divisions that separate, and the result is chaos and catastrophe.

More than any other country, Canada has gone down the multicultural path with eyes wide open.  We have overcome a number of difficulties, and will undoubtedly face many more in the future.  We have made mistakes, and there have been false starts and wrong steps. But I also think we have probably done better than any other country to continually remake ourselves, to expand our notions of what it means to be a good Canadian, to meet demands for inclusion and resist calls for exclusion.

More than any other country, we have taken up the challenge of shaping our political community to the emerging realities of the future. The single biggest political challenge of the 21st Century will be the effort to knit together political communities out of diverse populations that draw on very different traditions and hold very different beliefs. Look around the world, and reflect on how unusual it is that Jews vote for Sikhs to represent their interests, that Muslims vote for Jews, that Christians vote for Buddhists. And yet there are still parts of the developed world where it is almost unthinkable for a Protestant to vote for a Catholic.

This brings me to my final point, the need for greater public integrity.  And here, frankly, I’ve learned a tremendous amount from His Highness, the Aga Khan, Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims, and someone I’ve had the privilege of knowing for over eighteen years. In his convocation address at Columbia University last year, His Highness spoke to this issue with his customary eloquence.  He observed that expanding the number of people who share social power is only half the battle. The critical question is how such power is used.  How can we inspire people to reach beyond rampant materialism, self-indulgent individualism, and unprincipled relativism?

The Aga Khan goes on to suggest that one answer is to focus on personal prerogatives and individual rights. This could include a passion for justice, the quest for equality and civic culture of which I spoke earlier.  But he points out that the right of individuals to look for a better quality of life within their own life-spans — and to build toward a better life for their children  — these are personal aspirations which must become public values.  This sense of public integrity, His Highness argues, will be difficult to nurture over time without a strong religious underpinning. In the Islamic tradition, the conduct of one’s worldly life in inseparably intertwined with the concerns of one’s spiritual life — you cannot talk about integrity without also talking about faith.

From that perspective, I would put high among our priorities, both within and outside the Islamic world, the need to renew our spiritual traditions. To be sure, religious freedom is a critical value in a pluralistic society. But if freedom of religion deteriorates into freedom from religion — then I fear we will soon be lost on a bleak and barren landscape — with no compass or roadmap, no sense of ultimate direction. I fully understand the West’s historic commitment to separating the secular from the religious. But for many non-Westerners, including most Muslims, the realms of faith and of worldly affairs cannot be antithetical.  If ‘modernism’ lacks a spiritual dimension, it will look like materialism. And if the modernizing influence of the West is insistently and exclusively a secularising influence, then much of the Islamic world will be somewhat distanced from it.

A central element in any religious outlook (says the Aga Khan) is a sense of human limitation, recognition of our own creaturehood — a posture of profound humility before the Divine.  In that sensibility lies our best protection against divisive dogmatism and our best hope for creative pluralism. For me, the Imam of the Ismaili community has pretty well summed up my Mennonite/United Church faith and public life.

Over the past 29 years, I’ve had the pleasure of working for leaders of the opposition and one deputy prime minister. And as deputy minister, I’ve served five prime ministers and twelve ministers in five departments.  More importantly, I’ve worked beside thousands of public servants seeking to build a better Canada, a more just world and, if not the Kingdom of God, at least a bit of the new Jerusalem.”

Note: If you have any comments to make about Mr. Harder’s presentation, please write them into the Comments section below.