Boys' night out taps into faith

MP's relax, share their stories of how faith lead them to Ottawa

By DEBORAH GYAPONG
Canadian Catholic News
Ottawa

On a snowy February evening, four members of Parliament gathered in a country pub outside Ottawa to discuss how their religious faith called them to public life.

Three credited their Roman Catholic faith at the Theology on Tap organized by the local Carleton-Mississippi Mills NDP riding association.

NDP MP Tony Martin (Sault-Ste. Marie) told 30 people at Carp's Swan Pub he was a product of Vatican II's call to justice and involvement in the world.

Inspired as well by Tommy Douglas and the social gospel movement, Martin worked for his diocese before entering political life, initially as an Ontario MPP.

He said it was hard to find a balance and used to feel like he was "leaving his "political coat on a hanger" when he went to work for the Church, and "leaving his Church coat on the hanger" when he entered the provincial legislature.

Search for solutions

In Sault Ste. Marie, he and the pastor of his church started a soup kitchen. That led him to ask why poverty existed and to search for structural solutions.

His Catholic faith also inspired his passion for the environment. When he used to camp on the shores of Lake Superior , he said God seemed to be speaking to him through the lapping of the waves, the wind in the trees.

He says he uses three criteria for making decisions that he can live with. First, he examines the views of his constituents. Second, he looks at the way the New Democratic Party develops its policies and third, he uses his personal faith.

He has chosen to take a position on same-sex marriage that is opposite to that of the Church and a large number of his constituents, but he said he's comfortable with the NDP stance.

NDP MP Joe Comartin (Windsor-Tecumsah) said he hadn't had the same trouble as Martin had in "melding" his faith life with his political life.

He grew up in a large family in a strong Irish Catholic community where the Church was an integral part of life.

His father died when Comartin was one year old, so his mother instilled in him the importance spirituality plays in developing a code of conduct.

"She made it clear that if you had the skills and the talent you gave back," he said.

Though he was an agnostic for a while during his 20s, Comartin said that after Vatican II he tried to sort out what would give him moral guidance for the rest of his life.

He admits that sometimes positions he's taken have been in conflict to Church teaching, recalling the sway of liberation theology that viewed the Church as among the oppressors of the poor.

"My beliefs have remained strong and remain a basis for me, despite the turmoil," he said.

"There is a basic goodness in Christ and I suppose I don't have a lot of heroes, but Christ is a hero for me," Comartin said.

"When we've had to make a moral decision, I ask myself what would Christ do? I get an answer," he said.

NDP MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay), like Martin, worked for the Church prior to coming into public life. He also travelled with a punk rock band. Growing up Catholic, the son of a Scottish Cape Breton Catholic mother and a Scottish Presbyterian father, he said the Presbyterians taught him about the underlying dignity of the human person.

For Angus, there was no middle ground when it came to God: if the Gospel was false, he wanted to "get on with his life.

"I had a deep feeling that either the Gospel is true or it's a crock," he said.

He and his wife decided to test the Gospel by taking in homeless people. They bought a house in downtown Toronto, and someone gave them $14,000 "no questions asked."

Angus said that in that first year of taking in homeless people, he and his wife were robbed 10 times and a former Guatemalan military man threatened to murder him.

"Every time we were robbed, the money would miraculously appear."

It was through taking part in an effort to prevent a massive dump in Northern Ontario that he realized his vocation to politics.

He said he'd never felt such a sense of faith as he did while taking part on the blockage with First Nations people and Northern Ontario farmers, even though they had no idea they would eventually win the fight.

Speaking about the NDP, Angus said, "We're supposed to be the atheist party, but we have a percentage of churchgoers that's higher than in the American Bible Belt."

David Kilgour found prayer

The lone Liberal and only non-Catholic, Liberal MP David Kilgour (Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont) grew up Anglican in Winnipeg.

When his father developed lung cancer, Kilgour started attending a prayer meeting to pray for his father.

This group had a profound impact on Kilgour's faith. He said its members came from all walks of life.

"There were people there who had no teeth because of drugs," he said. Yet he was able to see the powerful transformative effect of the Gospel.

He married a Presbyterian and now attends a Presbyterian church.

Kilgour brought a paper outlining the reasons why he will not support same-sex marriage, but decided to hand out the paper rather than read it.

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