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Michael Swan

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Syrian democracy a dream

December 1, 2012

The Armenian Orthodox Primate of Damascus sees little hope the Syrian civil war will end with a democratic regime in power and questions Western support for rebel groups.

Church coalition demands action on climate change

December 1, 2012

As Environment Minister Peter Kent prepared to head to Doha, Qatar, to represent Canada at United Nations-sponsored climate talks, Canada’s Catholic bishops and the Canadian Council of Churches prodded him to do more to prevent a warmer, less livable planet.

Palliative sedation opens whole new ethical can of worms

December 1, 2012

Midazolam, administered under the tongue, can put a stop to seizures. It also puts a stop to thinking, awareness, all perception of self, the world, pain, anguish and fear.

Deal getting closer in strike at St. Michael's College

November 21, 2012

UPDATED 22/11/12 TORONTO - As University of St. Michael's College contract lecturers, teaching assistants and continuing education instructors prepare for their second week on strike, union leaders and university administration both say a deal is getting closer. "Students are feeling an impact," said Celtic Mythology lecturer Daniel Brielmaier, speaking for CUPE Local 3902 Unit 4. "We don't like that they're feeling it." Papers aren't getting marked, some classes have been cancelled and others are bogging down without the 38 sessional lecturers, teaching assistants and part-time instructors who teach at St. Michael's, said Brielmaier. St. Mike's administration claims the strike hasn't been felt by very many students. "Some courses are being taught; some are being rescheduled. The effect is relatively small at this point," said Robert Edgett, the executive director of alumni affairs and development who is acting as media liaison for the Catholic college at the University of Toronto. "But our concern continues to be for students. We want to be sure that their term and exams are held. That's why we're working so hard to come to some resolution." A rally in front of the Kelly Library at noon Nov. 21 attracted about 60 students and union activists in support of the contract teachers. Talks were scheduled to continue Thursday afternoon after being put off a day while the administration worked out a new offer. The union, which represents academic staff on contracts of less than 12 months, has been pushing for a greater degree of job security. The mostly younger academics want a right of first refusal if their course is being offered again. The system of repeat short-term contracts with no assurance of future work has been hardest on theology lecturers, many of whom have been teaching the same course for years but never know whether they will work again next year, said Brielmaier. "We're not going to negotiate or talk about the terms of the negotiation in public," said Edgett. "We're going to leave that to the bargaining table." The union members claim to have Pope Benedict XVI on their side, citing his thoughts in the encyclical Caritas in Veritate on the right to secure and meaningful work. The administration is confident the two sides will quickly find a solution. "I hope we'll beat the NHL," said Edgett. "We just want to get a contract and go back to teaching," said Local 3902 chair Abe Nasirzadeh.

Toronto refugee conference to take the next step forward

November 18, 2012

TORONTO - Three years ago Catholic commitment to refugees took a major step forward with a national conference of Catholic refugee offices. It’s time to take another step forward, Office for Refugees Archdiocese of Toronto director Martin Mark said. ORAT will host a four-day national gathering of refugee ministries at the Toronto Crowne Plaza Airport Hotel Dec. 3 to 6. Mark predicts more than double the 70 delegates to the last refugee conference in 2010 will attend “With One Voice — We Are the Hope.” While three years ago the focus was on organizing parishes to help Iraqi refugees, many of them Christian, this time around the refugee ministries will be finding ways to defend the civic sponsorship program as the federal government constantly adjusts its regulations and procedures for sponsoring refugees. Recently Citizenship and Immigration Canada issued new forms that recognized refugees are expected to fill out if they wish to come to Canada. The guide for how to fill out the forms runs over 50 pages, said Mark. The Canadian government is also making its refugee forms available only over the Internet. Not many people in refugee camps have access to the Internet and the traumatized and desperate may find a form with a 50-page guide daunting, Mark said. The history of Catholic sponsorship of refugees has been through emotional waves of boom and bust, beginning with an outpouring of parish-based generosity more than 30 years ago when the plight of Vietnamese boat people inspired Canada’s civic refugee sponsorship system. As the boats faded from the south Pacific seas, Catholic sponsorship waned. The crisis in Iraq which sent two million refugees into Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and elsewhere revived Catholic interest in sponsorship in 2006. With the upcoming conference, Mark hopes to ensure the sustainability of a national network of Catholic sponsorship agencies. While there is still a major problem of unsettled Iraqi refugees, more than half the world’s 42 million refugees are in Africa and there are many opportunities for parishes to contribute to solutions — and not all of them will tax a parish’s budget, Mark said. There are 600 refugees in Ghana, in a UNHCR camp outside of the capital Accra. With a concerted effort, Canadian Catholic refugee sponsors could close that camp, said Mark. The conference will begin with Mass celebrated with Cardinal Thomas Collins. To participate in the conference, call Patricia Cross at (905) 889-5724 or e-mail her at [email protected].

Religion, science must unite to save environment

November 18, 2012

TORONTO - The difference between right and wrong could be the difference between life and extinction as Earth’s climate continues to spiral out of control, a Yale University professor of forestry and religious studies told a Toronto audience Nov. 9. Mary Evelyn Tucker is the director of Yale’s Forum on Religion and Ecology and was a frequent collaborator with the late Passionist father of ecotheology Fr. Thomas Berry. Speaking on “Future Generations and the Ethics of Climate Change” at the invitation of the University of St. Michael’s College’s Elliott Allen Institute for Theology and Ecology, Tucker made the case for an alliance between the worlds of religion and science. While science is more comfortable with descriptive than prescriptive words about nature and cautious scientists have been reluctant to tell politicians what to do, religion has only very recently begun to address the environmental crisis and ecotheology is still rarely spoken of in seminaries. However, the state of the world’s natural systems demands the best thinking of both religion and science, said Tucker. “We have to say continually that religion is necessary but not sufficient. We have to develop partners in science, in law, in policy,” she said. “We need humility. We don’t have all the answers because we were late in coming to this.” Even if there has been a widening gap between science and religion in the modern era, the world now needs the “deep spiritual resources” of world religions that have dedicated millennia to thinking about right, wrong and the common good. Religion has the ability to teach humanity to value nature as the source of life, rather than a collection of resources to be fed into the gross domestic product of nations, she said. “We have to see environmental degradation as an ethical issue,” she said. “Until now degradation has been seen as the inevitable cost of economic growth.” The beginnings of an ethics that addresses climate change would be a serious look at distributive justice, according to Tucker. There are already winners and losers around the globe as sea levels rise, droughts devastate farm land and more violent storms create climate refugees from New Jersey to Bangladesh. But distributive justice should also mean extending the reach of human rights to future generations who will have to live in the environment this generation leaves them. While an ethic of rights might set minimum standards, drawing lines which must not be crossed, a true environmental ethic would concern itself with much more than the minimum. As nature always seeks flourishing, so should our ethics. Our ethics should be based on a clear-eyed view of human beings as a “small but indispensable part of a 14-billion-year evolution,” she said. “We need an ethic that is culturally aware but also universally compelling.”

Bishops ‘silent’ on social justice

November 17, 2012

A “culture of silence” and deference to “political conservatism” has infected the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), charges the head of the Jesuit-founded Centre Justice et Foi (Justice and Faith) in Montreal. In an open letter to CCCB president Archbishop Richard Smith, Elisabeth Garant said the elimination of the CCCB’s post of senior advisor for social justice, delaying and blunting the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace’s fall education campaign, inviting Immigration and Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney to a private meeting and not criticizing refugee policy reforms amount to a “serious step back away from the rich Church tradition of social justice.” Garant’s letter will be on the agenda of the next CCCB executive committee meeting Nov. 27-28. Until then, the conference has chosen to make no comment. Garant served five years as a member of the CCCB’s Commission on Justice and Peace. She accuses the bishops of cozying up to the Conservative government because, she said, the CCCB has not engaged the Canadian government on an issue of social justice since December 2010. At that time, Kenney dismissed a letter from the bishops’ justice and peace commission as another in “a long tradition of ideological bureaucrats who work for the bishops’ conference producing political letters signed by pastors who may not have specialized knowledge in certain areas of policy.” “From that moment we observe a silence,” said Garant. “Why are we silent on things that are not our personal issues but that we think for the common good we need to talk about?” She also questions the CCCB for laying off social justice advisor Francois Poitras in order to help get its finances in order. CCCB General Secretary Msgr. Patrick Powers has said layoffs were necessary. “We have had to rethink the way we do things, to do more and to cost less,” he told Canadian Catholic News. “When Msgr. Powers said that this responsibility (for social justice) will be spread among other lay people at the conference, I don’t know any of them who have the experience or the competence to deal with social justice,” she said. Garant also disputes the CCCB’s explanation behind the delay of the Development and Peace fall campaign. In a joint letter, the CCCB and Development and Peace explained that the campaign was delayed and modified because “concern was expressed that elements of the original materials could be a source of division among bishops, priests, parishioners and donors.” “They are saying they do that for the sake of some faithful who will be hurt,” said Garant. “There’s no real proof of what they are talking about.” Garant has yet to receive acknowledgment of her letter from the CCCB or Smith. Smith was in Rome in early November. Though the Centre Justice et Foi has autonomy, it remains a Jesuit apostolate with the full confidence of Canada’s French-speaking Jesuit fathers, said Garant.

Institutional chaplains to be licensed

November 16, 2012

Toronto - On the journey from a hospital bed back home, a patient may be visited by licensed doctors, licensed nurses, licensed psychologists, licensed pharmacists, licensed physiotherapists and a chaplain. This is scheduled to change some time in 2014, when chaplains in Ontario hospitals, jails and other institutions will be licensed and held accountable to a professional college — just like doctors, pharmacists and nurses. “People who work in spiritual care are really touching very deep, vulnerable places in people,” said Christine O’Brien, spiritual care trainee at Bridgepoint Health in Toronto. “There should be some regulation about training. It shouldn’t be simply that I have a nice background and I’m a nice person. There’s too much involved in what actually happens in patient care.” The provincial government isn’t trying to regulate religion or oversee prayer, said Joyce Rowlands, the registrar of the Transitional Council of the College of Registered Psychotherapists and Registered Mental Health Therapists of Ontario. “There are people in the province who are pastoral counsellors or spiritual care therapists, as some call themselves, who actively have wanted to be part of this process and become members of the new college,” Rowlands told The Catholic Register. Chaplains, particularly those employed by hospitals, will want to be part of the college because hospitals will begin to make membership the minimum standard for working in their spiritual care departments. A 1991 law specifically rules out prayer and ritual as a form of therapy that the government needs to regulate. But anyone who enters into a specifically therapeutic relationship with people who suffer serious emotional, cognitive or psychological issues will need to be part of the new college when it’s up and running. Chaplains employed by the Church to provide sacramental ministry, anything from delivering communion to hearing confessions, will be exempt. O’Brien is taking a 12-week, intensive Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program at Bridgepoint, a major rehabilitation hospital in Toronto. O’Brien already has a Master of Divinity degree from Toronto’s University of St. Michael’s College and will need four such units of CPE training plus a course on the legal responsibilities and limits of caregivers before she qualifies to be licensed by the new college. While the college can’t dictate who the hospitals hire, nobody in the field believes hospitals will hire chaplains who aren’t members of the college. In the early going, working under a supervisor, O’Brien sees how her work fits into a team of professionals working toward healing for patients. “We’re talking about talking with patients who are in a vulnerable state, because they are ill, about issues of meaning and purpose in their lives,” she said. “About perhaps whether they believe in an afterlife. Are they feeling judgment? Are they terribly frightened because they think of their mortality? Their doctor doesn’t want to talk about their mortality and all those issues. These are spiritual issues.” Catholic clergy and volunteers who visit Bridgepoint are also part of the bigger, healing picture. Even though O’Brien is Catholic she can’t do her job and deliver communion to all the Catholic patients. Neither can she say Mass or hear confessions. But she can help people to see their lives in a broader spiritual context — an insight that will make Mass and sacraments less isolated events and more part of the fabric of life as patients heal. But making chaplains into therapists might not be such a good idea, says Jesuit Father Desmond Buhager, Regis College lecturer in family therapy and pastoral counselling. “It could be conceived of as a medicalization of the role of chaplain,” he said. “They’re part of a health care team, but we don’t start calling social workers occupational therapists. They simply aren’t. So why try to glom them (chaplains) together with psychotherapists? They’re not mental health workers... They’re chaplains.” How people are held accountable matters, said Buhage. Spiritual care staffers, especially at hospitals, will find themselves part of a College of Psychotherapy and Registered Mental Health Therapist. The problem is they’re not psychotherapists, Buhager said. “The idea of levelling everything to making chaplains all of a sudden psychotherapists or requiring them to be mental health therapists is inappropriate,” said Buhager, himself a registered psychotherapist in the United States. “It’s weird. Excuse me. We (psychotherapists) did five or six or seven years of training as therapists with specific course curriculum and clinical hours of supervision simply to be treated the same as people who have done a few CPE units? Doesn’t sound right.” The act which mandates the college was passed at Queen’s Park in 2007. It is one of five new health care colleges being created in Ontario. But the 2007 act can’t be proclaimed into law until regulations are in place. Trying to figure out how to regulate psychotherapy has been a huge challenge and the transitional council long ago abandoned hopes it would make an April 2013 deadline for establishing the new college. “We spent two years trying to figure out, who are we regulating? What is the difference between these two titles (psychotherapist and registered mental health therapist)? What kinds of training and education does this very diverse spectrum of practitioners have? What should the requirements of registration be?” said Rowlands. Psychotherapists will be required to complete 360 hours of supervised clinical training in a program that requires an undergraduate degree. RMHTs will more typically have community college training and 180 hours of supervised clinical work. For spiritual care the usual standard is four units of CPE leading to specialist certification plus a Master of Divinity, Master of Theological Studies or equivalent degree. Some psychotherapists have pushed for more stringent requirements — namely a masters degree in psychotherapy or a related counselling discipline, plus time spent in supervised clinical work. The problem with that is there’s only one masters psychotherapy degree in all of Ontario — Wilfrid Laurier University’s MA in theology with a specialization in spiritual care and psychotherapy. It also leaves out Jungian, Gestalt and other kinds of therapists who train in independent institutes that don’t award a masters degree. However the work is labelled and licensed, O’Brien is convinced it’s necessary work. “It’s a grace. It’s a satisfaction. Grace is in knowing that somehow I’ve been able to journey along even in a small way with this person who is in great need,” she said.

Out of the Holodomor rises a stronger Church

November 11, 2012

Few Ukrainians are thankful for Josef Stalin. In 1932-33 the Soviet dictator starved about six million Ukrainians to death in a planned genocidal famine known as the Holodomor. But the new bishop for Ukrainian Catholics in France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands has one good thing to say about Uncle Joe. “Stalin aided the future missions by deporting people to Siberia, to Kazakhstan, to different corners of the vast expanse of the Soviet Union. There now, through descendants of the political prisoners and deportees, the Greek Catholic Church is slowly developing its mission — which of course is open to all people of good will who might be attracted to the Church,” Bishop Borys Gudziak said as he passed through Toronto on a tour of Ukrainian communities in North America. It’s a bit like thanking Satan for making Christ’s incarnation and resurrection necessary. The Byzantine Rite Catholic Church in Ukraine survived three generations of often horrific martyrdom. For this Church to survive at all is one of the great accomplishments of the 20th century, said the Harvard-educated historian. “Ukrainians are a post-traumatic people. They’ve had a toxic degree of trauma in the 20th century,” he said. “Seventeen million Ukrainians were killed in the 20th century.” For three generations Ukraine was under occupation, kept in line by the highest concentration of KGB agents, informants and collaborators in the Soviet Union. “People lived in fear,” said Gudziak. “Fear is never something that really opens people up. You sort of close in on yourself.” But a closed-in, self-absorbed, defensive Church is not what the Syracuse, N.Y.-born son of immigrants has found in Ukraine. Within Ukraine, the Greek Catholics have become a beacon on a hill proclaiming openness and democracy, decrying corruption and authoritarianism. Particularly under Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, they have demanded a different future for their country. “The Greek Catholic Church today is a Church of the martyrs. At the same time it’s a Church that’s favoured by intellectuals, young people, urbane businessmen and women who want Ukrainian society to change — rule of law to become the style of the country,” he said. “Since the Greek Catholic Church did not compromise with the regime, it emerged from the catacombs with incredible, relatively speaking, moral authority.” As rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv for the past 12 years, Gudziak has built this tiny university into a democratic island of free and open debate. Officers of the SBU, Ukraine’s security service, came visiting in 2010. They asked Gudziak to keep his students away from protesting a newly authoritarian government with ties to Moscow. Gudziak not only refused, he told everybody about the visit. “The Church is actually quite free in Ukraine, limited only by its imagination. The Ukrainian Catholic University is itself witness to this,” said Ukrainian-Canadian Jesuit Father David Nazar in an e-mail to The Catholic Register. Nazar describes Gudziak as a “high-end dreamer.” For Gudziak, being Christian means sharing those dreams. To follow a God who in Christ seeks the human means offering a fully human experience of God to the world without preconditions. “Jesus really brings to us a call to a radical openness. It’s a going to the other,” he said. “My hope is that the radical deprivations Christians endured and in many ways still face in the former Soviet Union will be a place where the faith is forged.” That martyrdom and oppression should be the forge for openness, charity, joy and hope is unexpected, and perhaps too much to ask. But over the past 25 years Gudziak’s Church has been witness to miracles. “The intoxicating and exhilarating but often overwhelming change in society for the Church is now only in some ways settling, if you can say that any culture has settled in the first decades of the 21st century,” Gudziak said. Gudziak will be enthroned as Apostolic Exarch at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris Dec. 2.

Youth survive streets to find hope

November 10, 2012

“Put on the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11), he might as well have been talking directly to Covenant House president and CEO Kevin Ryan. Ryan may be a 45-year-old lawyer and former civil servant, but he doesn’t go to work in the morning. He goes to war. “The stakes are very high. This is a street war,” Ryan told The Catholic Register. “We’re fighting against the bullies and the bullets and the predators and the pornographers and the pervs and the guns and the gangs… We lose kids. We lose them to the streets. We lose them to despair. We lose them to suicide. But we win more kids by far.” Ryan’s report from the frontlines of Covenant House’s war for children has been catalogued in Almost Home, Ryan’s best selling book. Almost Home has hit number five on the Washington Post non-fiction list. It’s creeping up the Publisher’s Weekly rankings for trade paperbacks. It’s number two on Amazon’s list of Canadian international and world politics titles. Co-authored with former New York Times staff writer Tina Kelley, Almost Home tells the story of six Covenant House kids, one of them Canadian and another who spent years on the streets of Toronto and Vancouver. They aren’t Chicken Soup for the Soul stories. Murial meets Covenant House Vancouver as a prostitute who had three different pimps by the time she was 20, an addict who had been getting high from the age of 12 and still living with the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome. Meagan was thrown out of her family home as a teenager because she is gay. Paulie was beaten over and over by his father, but found refuge in drugs. “They don’t see virtue in their lives. The message they’ve gotten over and over and over is, ‘You’re broken, you’re defective, you’re unwanted,’ ” said Ryan. There aren’t necessarily happy endings to such stories. But these are stories people need to hear because lives are at stake, said Ryan. Between 20 and 40 per cent of homeless youth attempt suicide. It is a leading cause of their deaths. Covenant House Toronto reports that homeless youth are 11 times more likely to die young than the rest of the population. Toronto’s Covenant House, like the 20 other Covenant Houses in North and Central America, does a lot of things for homeless kids. It provides shelter, helps kids finish school, helps them reconnect with family when possible, find housing, find mentors, point the way to jobs. It also helps kids find the mental health care they need. “They are often as traumatized as men who are returning from war,” said Ryan. If teen suicide is now a national issue, Covenant House is in a position to give Canada some national advice: Kids need love. “It requires love,” said Ryan. “But it also requires that we be love in the world in a responsible and effective way. That requires more than a sentimental hug and a warm meal. It means making sure that our kids have the attention and clinical care they need to transcend the darkness that overshadows their lives.” Ryan claims to be shocked by the success of Almost Home. “These are stories about young people who have pulled themselves up, climbed out of the darkness, in some instances from violence and trafficking and drug abuse, and found hope in their lives.”