Canada’s bishops have rejected allegations that the Catholic aid agency Development and Peace (D&P) provides money to organizations or projects in Mexico that promote abortion. The bishops created D&P in 1967 to support projects in poor countries and to undertake development education in Canada and two bishops sit on D&P’s board. The string of accusations began on March 11 when a web-based publication called Lifesite News claimed that D&P “is funding groups in Mexico that are pressuring the Mexican government to legalize abortion.”  LifeSite carried more than 45 articles on the topic between March and June of 2009. In April the CCCB announced that two Canadian bishops would lead an inquiry to Mexico to investigate the Lifesite allegations. The seven-person group also included the CCCB general secretary, an official from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and three people from D&P. The delegation met with representatives of the Mexican bishops’ conference and with groups that had been accused by Lifesite of promoting abortion.

On June 29, the CCCB released its report. In an accompanying statement, CCCB president Archbishop James Weisgerber summarized the inquiry’s key finding in the following manner: “The Committee of Inquiry has determined that the projects funded by Development and Peace did not promote abortion, and that the five Mexican organizations do not support abortion … the allegations by LifeSiteNews.com against Development and Peace are unfounded.” Weisgerber added that while the inquiry cleared the organization, the bishops would have “a full discussion” regarding D&P’s policies and practices at the CCCB’s annual meeting in October 2009.

D&P, in a statement issued on March 20, had denied Lifesite’s allegations but said that its Mexican partners were involved in a nation-wide consultation on the human rights situation, and were contributors (along with 100 other organizations) to an omnibus document on human rights issues. Other civil society groups participating in the exercise brought forward concerns that did relate to family planning even though that was not the focus of D&P’s partner groups. Lifesite seized on the existence of this document and other information it claimed to have as the basis for its allegations. The CCCB, in its report, said that the Mexican organizations assisted by D&P were “imprudent in signing the report in question”, but that their major preoccupation was to work for human rights. The bishops said that D&P should be “more vigilant” in analyzing requests from possible partners. The bishops also suggested that while their relationship with D&P is a good one, the organization should consult more closely with the bishops, particularly the two who sit on its board of directors.

Lifesite says report a “whitewash”

LifeSite responded defiantly on its website to the inquiry report: “This story is not over,” LifeSite said. “Many bishops have withheld funding from D&P over this and the CCCB report has not yet changed that, and we suspect that it won’t. Because it is a whitewash, the report will cause even greater scandal.” Lifesite’s web publication is a creation of the Campaign Life Coalition, which describes itself as the “political wing of the pro-life movement in Canada.” Lifesite staff share an office with Campaign Life in Toronto but Lifesite also lists a Pittsburgh address for itself and a many of its articles deal with American matters. LifeSite also said the inquiry team assembled by the bishops was not competent to investigate the allegations and that D&P personnel who accompanied the group “led the bishops in their investigations”. The bishops indicated in their report, however, that the D&P personnel organized travel and other arrangements but had no hand in writing the report.

The bishops’ report also appealed to the people behind Lifesite to “establish an open and fruitful dialogue” with the bishops and other Catholic groups. “Negative actions of this kind,” the report says, “encourage suspicion, scandal and division in the Church.” Finally, the CCCB report urged Canadian bishops, and the leadership of social justice and pro-life groups “to recognize there is a continuum and integrity to all human life issues  . . .  there is an urgency to all that threatens the dignity and sacredness of human life, including violence, hunger, poverty and oppression.” This was an appeal to everyone, including bishops, not to be selective in choosing any one issue as being of ultimate importance, as Lifesite continues to do with its emphasis on abortion and contraception and its willfully ignoring issues relating to poverty and human rights.

Lifesite’s continuing attacks have placed both D&P and the bishops on the defensive.  The signal from the CCCB is that the bishops will place D&P under the microscope. There is nothing unusual about this since the CCCB has long made it a practice to focus attention on one or two of its departments or agencies at the bishops’ annual meeting – but it will likely be doing so this year in the face of continuing negative attacks on D&P by Lifesite and its supporters. Lifesite has been emboldened by the belief that it has succeeded in creating division among the bishops. The CCCB has also placed itself into a position of requesting dialogue with an organization that many bishops have long considered to be on the church’s extremist fringe, and one that has no official status as a Catholic organization.

Archbishop Weisgerber, in a June 19 interview with Salt + Light television, expressed his frustration that the bishops’ integrity and their teaching authority was being challenged by a group of mostly unknown and self-appointed people from Lifesite. “There’s a big issue there,” Weisgerber said. “It seems that there is a tendency on the part of some people to trust allegations on websites more than they trust the bishops.”

More than a Catholic matter

The controversy may appear to be an internal Catholic matter (it has received virtually no coverage in the mainstream media) but it has broader implications. The nature of Lifesite’s attacks could well hamper the way in which D&P conducts is development work in poor countries. Lifesite insists that agencies described as Catholic should be prohibited from being involved in projects related to family planning of any kind, including contraception – and that Catholic groups be prohibited from associating with other organizations who are so involved. Such a policy, if enacted, would prevent Catholic groups from working for justice in many circumstances. This would be a victory for the Catholic right and would signal a return to a form of triumphalism that was supposedly discarded by Vatican II in the 1960s. Accepting this protocol would also set back the cause of women’s rights by decades and place Catholic organizations in the company of some of the world’s most religiously fundamentalist regimes.

It is worth noting, as well, that Lifesite strongly supported George W. Bush’s decision to refuse American support for international aid programs that dealt in any way with abortion or contraception. Bush was providing payback to the religious right for its political support. Lifesite has been particularly hostile toward President Barack Obama who moved quickly after his 2008 election to strike down Bush’s prohibition.

There are a growing number of areas in contemporary society where the religious right is having a negative impact on international development, and Lifesite’s attack upon D&P for its work in poor countries is one such example.

Part 2 of 2
Part 1

July5 , 2009
Used by permission of Dennis Gruending, Pulpit and Politics. All rights reserved.

The Religious Right, Stephen Harper and The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada

Gary Goodyear’s suggestion that evolution was a theological issue of faith got several bloggers, including myself, interested in the growing influence of the religious right in Canadian politics. At the time of the comments, bloggers hit the roof. The issue died down very quickly, though – now there are just a bunch of leftists, atheists and agnostics quietly simmering and waiting for some other Conservative MP to make a misguided remark so that they can blow up again.

In the meantime, therefore, I thought I’d stir the pot again – and simultaneously extend my Following the Money series in new directions. The occasion for these remarks are a pair of op-eds which appeared in major newspapers last week, each written by Andrea Mrozek of the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada: “Marriage Benefits Us All” in the National Post (since syndicated throughout the Asper network, e.g. in the Windsor Star and the Calgary Herald). Incidentally, Mrozek also writes at the conservative group blog ProWomanProLife, which, despite the name, doesn’t always seem overly pro-woman. But whatever. Both of these articles argue in favour of the traditional family – one against divorce, the other against gay marriage.

Mrozek works for the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, an Ottawa-based think tank, and in fairness, her pieces are a far cry from the work that the IMFC used to do. That’s because, a year and a half ago, the organization officially stopped its lobbying program on gay marriage. Director David Quist, at the time, suggested that there were few gay marriages going on and that the issue was done and dead, so his little advocacy group was moving on to other issues. The fact that polygamy is now in the Canadian courts, thanks to the fundamentalist Mormons out in B.C., presumably gave them the window they wanted to jump back into the fray.

So, who is the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, anyways? The connections it holds are intriguing and disturbing: American family groups, Canadian right-wing think tanks, and – wait for it – the Conservative Party of Canada, right up to the level of Stephen Harper:

The IMFC is the offspring of the American-controlled pro-family, anti-gay marriage lobby group, Focus on the Family, until recently controlled by evangelical power figure James Dobson. It was founded in 2006 with an agenda that could basically summed up as “everything the religious right cares about”: family laws, age of consent laws (those went up under the Conservatives, incidentally), divorce, euthanasia, taxes, and palliative care. Its founders gave some interviews to the sympathetic evangelical periodical Christian Week at the time, and the weekly reported that these positions would be approached “all from a Christian perspective.” Interestingly, the IMFC itself is no longer in any hurry to promote its Christian background; its official introductory pamphlet says merely that it exists to take “a growing body of scientific research” and turn it into “practical ideas.”

In 2006, the Edmonton Journal covered the creation of the new group and wrote that “their mobilization was not ignited by Harper.” Oh, really? Well, maybe not directly. But let’s move through the list of employees. The first is executive director Dave Quist. For six years, Quist was the executive assistant to Alliance and then Conservative MP and former Baptist pastor Reid Elly. He ran for the Conservatives in 2004, lost, and then spent a year working as Stephen Harper’s director of operations. There’s about a five-month gap between the time he left Harper’s office and the time that the new think tank was announced in the media. Quite a number of his old Conservative colleagues were in attendance at the grand opening, including Stockwell Day and Jason Kenney.

Mrozek, the author of the recent newspaper op-eds, is listed as the Manager of Research and Communications. Her background is in journalism, but her recent work was at the right-wing Western Standard (her bio on IMFC generalizes to only “an independent news magazine in Calgary,” just to make sure people don’t make that connection), and at the even more right-wing Fraser Institute in B.C.

The researchers are a mixed bag of right-wing evangelicals. Peter Jon Mitchell is actually imported from the parent Focus on the Family organization in the U.S. – he used to work at their Institute in Colorado. Kelly Dean Schwartz is a psychologist in Calgary. Frank Jones is a retired StatsCan number cruncher who is also listed at another religious right think tank, the Christian Commitment Research Institute.

Derek Miedema, the last researcher, used to work for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, with its own possible ties to the Harper government. His bio on the Institute webpage says merely that that was preceded by a stint as a legislative assistant for an unnamed MP. I instantly suspected Conservative, and my suspicions were confirmed by a jog over to the website of Miedema’s alma mater, the religious school Redeemer University College, which is less circumspect. Miedema was the legislative assistant for Mr. David Sweet, the Conservative MP for Ancaster-Dundas. Sweet, not incidentally, is the former CEO of Promise Keepers Canada, in which function he told a journalist in 2001 that men were “natural influencers” and women were “natural followers” (his explanation for the notably unbiblical claim that “Jesus called men only”).

Interestingly, both Miedema and Jones have links to another evangelical group, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. That group has its own ties to the Conservative government – and one of their former anti-gay marriage lobbyists in Ottawa recently got appointed to the Immigration and Refugee Board. Jones served on the Fellowship’s Advisory Council on Research, and Miedema was a researcher for them.

Sunday March 29, 2009
Terrible Depths Used by permission

Have you blogged about The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada? Drop us a line and let us know if we can use and link your post in full or in part.

Blogs:
Pulpit and Politics: Harper promotes religious rightists
Douglas Todd, The Search: Evangelicals promoted to top jobs by Harper
Chyco: The Evangelicalization of The Conservative Party
Bene Diction Blogs On: 2008 Ottawa Focus on the Family fellow rebuked by American Anthropological Association
Slap Upside the Head: 2008. Anti-Gay Lobbyists warn Canada not to sign UN Initiative

Frank Stirk ChristianWeek, February 3, 2006. Focus on the Family Opens Ottawa think-tank
Richard Foot The Edmonton Journal, Febrary 18, 2006. Christians eager to flex political muscle
Gudrun Schultz Lifesite, February 2006 Focus on the Family Opens Institute of Marriage and Family Ottawa