Jim Hughes confessed to us that his life as the godfather of Canada’s pro-life movement began in a state of disbelief.

Hughes died May 18 after more than 50 years of fighting the good fight against abortion and its dark shadow twin, medical assistance in dying. But as he told The Catholic Register in a 2024 interview for our Lives Lived for Life magazine, he became involved in the pro-life cause after being jolted into awareness that unborn children were being killed in the womb.

A busy businessman at the time, he initially failed to grasp the full consequence of the federal Liberal government’s 1969 legalization of abortion.

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“Surely they can’t mean killing children?” he asked his wife.

Yes, she answered, they most assuredly meant exactly that. So was born the beginnings of what would become Campaign Life Coalition, first among equals of Canada’s dauntless pro-life groups. As our associate editor Quinton Amundson writes this week, millions of aborted Canadian babies later, the spirit and resolve that Hughes helped unleash remains undiminished one iota.

It was on full-throated display May 14 when thousands gathered again on Parliament Hill for the annual March for Life where current Campaign Life leader Jeff Gunnarson foreshadowed Hughes’ imminent end of life with the plainspoken words: “Jim is in hospital. He’s not doing well.”

Prayer followed, as it should now for the repose of the soul of a man who dedicated the majority of his adult life to campaigning to save the lives of children he would never know.

Hughes was not without his critics even within the pro-life movement, which should come as no surprise given that he lived his life at the forefront of the most legally, politically, emotionally and spiritually wrought debate in our history.  He, and by extension Campaign Life, were faulted by allies for rejecting a Conservative government’s compromise attempt in the early 1990s to at least regulate abortion again. CLC’s steadfast “no exceptions” position was blamed, rightly or wrongly, for the demise of so-called Bill C-43 on a tie vote in the Senate.

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But Hughes, as was his wont, was unwavering in his belief that we cannot allow a little bit of evil just because it has democratic approval or a given government’s assurance that it’s the best possible bad choice. 

There’s a quality of the heroic in such staunchness even if both words traditionally make Canadians squirm. It’s a quality most evident, paradoxically, in the absence of vainglory, much less power mongering, in Hughes’ founding and long leadership of Campaign Life.

He committed himself to the pro-life cause at least in part out of shock at the cold, hard reality of what his government, his country, was willing to normalize. To yield ground, to give in, to strike a tactical bargain with the devil he abruptly recognized, would be more than the mere sacrifice of a political ideal. It would violate the Catholic faith that was the eucharistic centre of his life.

A perhaps unintentional gift is that the annual March for Life, beyond asserting continuity of the pro-life message, is doubtless the largest regular demonstration of Catholic solidarity in the country. 

Yes, it’s officially ecumenical. No, there’s no Mass (that happens, in a church packed to the rafters, earlier). But where is there a greater yearly outdoor celebration of the Roman Church in Canada? Bonus: It happens on Parliament Hill under the noses, as organizers delight in reminding the crowd, of politicians who persist in treating the culture of death as an inviolable social good.

The legacy speaks to the heroism of faith Hughes embodied – understanding that phrase in the sense Sr. Mary-Ellen Francoeur expresses in our Verbatim column this week honouring “peacebuilder” Lynn Adamson. Sr. Francoeur’s organization, Pax Christi, and Campaign Life can be superficially seen as polar political opposites. Yet from the deepest well of faith, in the life of Holy Mother Church, both embody what Sister calls “the search for nonviolent solutions” that “reminds us the quest for justice and peace never ends and is the responsibility of each one of us.”

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Guided by our living out of the Faith, we will have different end points for that search, different markers or touchstones along the way. What counts is commitment to search so we find our way to the promises of Christ.

Caught by surprise, Jim Hughes made that commitment for life. May his soul rest in the peace that passes all understanding.