KAIROS is there
Regarding the June 10 article, “Less whining; more action needed to open government ears to church views ,” among those featured in Michael’s Swan’s article is Walter McLean, a retired minister with the Presbyterian Church in Canada and a former federal cabinet minister. According to Swan, McLean singles out KAIROS : Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives: “He decried the petition and postcard campaigns of KAIROS … as empty theatrics which belie a lack of follow-up or real engagement with the political process.”
Interestingly, the same issue of The Register carries a story by Deborah Gyapong which illustrates KAIROS hard at work with the “real engagement with the political process” that McLean advocates. Backing the strong campaigns of two of its members, the United Church of Canada and the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace, as well as others, KAIROS organized a sustained lobby on Parliament Hill for corporate accountability for human rights and environmental concerns in the overseas operations of Canadian mining companies.
With the participation of church leaders and six key partners from the Global South, the lobby included a press conference, a well-attended breakfast meeting for parliamentarians, meetings at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the Canadian International Development Agency, meetings with individual members of Parliament from every political party, including Helena Guergis, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and International Development.
KAIROS can always do better. We regularly assess the effectiveness of our strategies for change. But we must never dismiss the deep and sustained engagement that we as grassroots activists, staff and church leadership already undertake with our partners in Canada and overseas.
Paul Hansen
Board Chair
KAIROS: Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives
Toronto, Ont.
Holy Name excellent
In the article on Holy Name of Mary Secondary School (June 17), Michael Swan pointed out that the school has a reputation for high academic achievement. This past spring, in its assessment of both private and publicly funded schools, the Fraser Institute ranked Holy Name of Mary as the top school in Mississauga and the fourth highest school in the entire province.
Unlike students at St. Michael’s College School, Holy Name of Mary students do not write an academic entrance exam. Nonetheless, on the 2006 Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT), 99 per cent of Holy Name of Mary’s students, including English as a Second Language students and those with learning exceptionalities, were successful.
Such accomplishments have been achieved by publicly funded students, nurtured by dedicated employees of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board. In contradiction to the quoted comments made by the mother of a student, I guess at Holy Name of Mary you get what you don’t pay for, that is except through your tax support of the Catholic school system.
Year after year Holy Name of Mary students win prestigious awards at the national, provincial and local levels. Again and again, these young women give testimony to what publicly funded education can achieve.
But more important, Holy Name of Mary is an example of what publicly funded Catholic education can accomplish. Holy Name of Mary alumni are leaders in the Catholic community.
On June 4, the administration and finance committee of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board committed “in principle” to the continuing existence of this Catholic girls’ school with its 43-year-old legacy. Many hope that publicly funded students can continue to live out the school’s motto, “to act justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with our God,” for at least another 40 years.
Terry Murphy
Teacher and Department Head
Holy Name of Mary High School
Mississauga, Ont.
Filling the pews
I have a single question in response to Mary-Joan Hale’s excellent May 6 letter entitled “We ignore half.” Would the changes she suggests in her letter fill the pews on Sunday? In other words, would the addition of female priests and married male priests keep the flock from scattering — keep the current “mostly senior” churchgoers attending and draw those apathetic Catholics out to Mass?
She is not the first or the last to make these suggestions, which I do not imply are bad, but they have been proposed as solutions to the problems of closing churches and a disengaged faith community. An increase in clergy, in any form, will do little to slow the decline in Mass attendance. The flock is not scattering because there are too few clergy, or that the churches are too full.
If a problem is not resolved by a given solution then it is not the right solution for the problem. Resolve first to fill the Catholic Church, every Sunday, every Mass, with passionate faithful, then there may just be the leverage to propose changes such as those proposed by Mary-Joan Hale.
Grace Buchmayer
Ottawa, Ont.
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