Inscribe the Bible Canada is sponsored by B’nai Brith Canada andChristians United For Israel, founded by Texas millionaire televangelist Pastor John Hagee. John Hagee Ministries rents office space from McVety at Canada Christian College, and McVety in turn is chair of CUFI Canada. B’nai Brith VP Frank Dimant chairs a department on Israel at McVety’s college, and his appointment to that position was attended by Jason Kenney.

McVety, Hagee, and Dimant have all shared the podium at CUFI bunfests. End times are cozy times.

“The Bible and Peace House will be the jewel in the crown of Bible Valley. The Bible Valley Project intends to develop an area of 25,000 acres adjacent to Jerusalem.

The Bible Valley Project will be composed of several sub-projects.
Foremost will be the handwriting of 100 copies of the Bible in various languages by two million Bible lovers from around the world. This will be done in cooperation with the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Bible House is one of the elements in Bible Valley dedicated to bringing the Bible back to Israeli society and Israeli society back to the Bible.”

Bring Israeli society back to the Bible? Develop 25,000 acres adjacent to Jerusalem to look like biblical times? Rapture outreach tourism?

Take it away, Max …

Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour from huffpost on Vimeo.

Next CUFI Show in Washington DC in a month.

Alison also blogs at Creekside
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“Jesus talked about faith as the leaven that raises up the whole loaf; the light from the mountain that illuminates the valley below … a treasure that one discovers through constant searching; a gift from a God who invites all especially the poor and sinners to a banquet of rich foods and fine wines. This is the faith to which we witness. Jesus, in our tradition, found this faith more deeply rooted in the hearts of sinners , prostitutes, tax collectors, and shepherds than in hearts of the religious and the self-righteous. He encouraged us not to separate wheat from chaff, but to take care of the fields entrusted to our care and leave judgments to God.” Jesuit Fr. Stephen A. Privett

In 2000, Jason Kenney was invited to speak at his Alma Mater, the University of San Francisco, to a group of young Republicans. What he told them when asked about his success in persuading others to his side was: “I did not persuade them, the truth did. I used the political strategy I gained at USF when I campaigned for student government. I took the truth and I built a pluralistic coalition around it.” (1)

The “truth” for him was the orthodoxy of the Catholic church. Normally when writing about a public figure you factor in all of their life experiences, that led them to who they were. But in the case of fundamentalists or those who follow an orthodox form of religion, there is only one place to draw from. And despite all of his life experiences, everything that now shapes Jason Kenney’s thinking can be found at St. Ignatius in the mid to late 1980′s. It was there that he found his “truth”.

He has said on numerous occasions that he was “converted” while there, which I found a little puzzling. After all, Kenney’s father was the president of a Catholic college, the same college that Jason graduated from. Was he not Catholic then?

However, what I’ve discovered is that his conversion may have actually been to the “church”, the absolute “truth”, as espoused by three controversial theologians: Rev. Joseph Fessio, the founder of the school; Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, the influence for the school, and Fr. Cornelius M. Buckley, whose liturgies based on Catholic orthodoxy, were said to have inspired a “cult like” following.

In 1987 1990, when Jason Kenney abruptly left his studies, both Fessio and Buckley had been fired from their positions at the university, not only for their refusal to conform to the modern teachings of the church, but because they were constantly locking horns with the Jesuit hierarchy, and encouraging their students to do the same.

One graduate from St. Ignatius puts it this way:

I began my undergraduate life in 1980 at University of San Francisco. While there, I witnessed a virtual war between orthodox Jesuits and Jesuits of a different stripe. Jesuits who I regarded as good and holy men, were silenced when they didn’t toe the Jesuit party line. Fr. Cornelius Buckley, S.J., a professor of history, was silenced and sent to work at a small hospital in Duarte, California, where he remained for many years, obedient to his order, even though many in his order are flagrantly disobedient.

The St. Ignatius Institute, under the guidance of Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J., operated a classical Catholic curriculum within the larger confines of the university and it attracted many students … It took the Jesuits over twenty years to shut the Institute down, which they finally did a few years ago by firing its director and hiring new professors who would teach the “new” theology. The Institute now exists in name only. It doesn’t teach the same things … Both Fr. Fessio and Fr. Buckley are two orthodox priests, who when they objected to much of what was going on on campus, did not endear themselves to their fellow Jesuits. (2)

One of the things that they objected strenuously to, was the acceptance of homosexuality.

Our ‘Greatest Canadian’ Tommy Douglas, when studying to become a pastor, told a story of how a straight laced preacher had visited his home and how his mother was mortified, when his father offered the teetotaller a beer. He decided on that day that if he was going to be a minister, he would be “one who would accept a glass of beer at a parishioner’s home, who would accept his parishioners as he found them and would strive to be one of them.” (3)

In the testimonial of the St. Ignatius graduate above, he states that “It took the Jesuits over twenty years to shut the Institute down, which they finally did a few years ago by firing its director and hiring new professors who would teach the “new” theology.” This purge was accomplished by Fr. Stephen A. Privett, who in the opening quote says that “Jesus, in our tradition, found this faith more deeply rooted in the hearts of sinners , prostitutes, tax collectors, and shepherds than in hearts of the religious and the self-righteous. He encouraged us not to separate wheat from chaff, but to take care of the fields entrusted to our care and leave judgments to God.” (4)

Privett understood what Douglas understood. You take care of what was entrusted to you and leave the judgements to God. By sharing a glass of beer or reaching out to the gay community, even if you personally disapproved of such things, you reached the hearts of “sinners”.

Since Marci McDonald’s The Armageddon Factor* hit the shelves, there are many defending the enormous power of the Religious Right on the Harper government, by stating that Tommy Douglas also promoted what have been referred to as “Christian values”. But there is a vast difference.

Several years ago, in an interview, Douglas was asked: It has been suggested that you emphasize religion in politics in the manner of Aberhart and Manning. As I recall, you set yourself firmly against doing this, did you not? To which he responded:

“Yes. I’ve always been strongly opposed to using religion as a gimmick for gaining political support. I believe in applying Christian principles to politics and to government. But I think one must remember that in a political party there are people of all religious beliefs, just as in every church there are people of different political points of view.” (5)

Because this movement does not reach out to “sinners”, but passes judgement, something that should be left to their god.

I’m not a religious person, but I’m not an atheist either. I believe that everyone has a right to their own beliefs, so long as they don’t try to “force” them on others. And I don’t think that homosexuality is a “sin”, or that you need to be a Christian to have “values”.

When Jason Kenney excluded gay rights from our citizenship guide, it was not an oversight. It was part of his “pluralistic coalition”: that he had built around his “truth”.

When he was attending St. Ignatius, “… he made headlines in California trying to ban abortion groups from the university and fighting against gay rights in San Francisco.” (6) In fact, “Jason was a leader of a group of students that sued USF for false representation. USF claimed to be Catholic yet failed to espouse the teachings of the Catholic Church. Kenney, who converted while at USF, was able to see the contradiction. USF began to fund campus organizations, which undermined the teachings of the Catholic Church.” (1)

Jason Kenney went to enormous lengths to oppose abortion and homosexuality, even suing a university. He told the Western Catholic Reporter in 2003 that he felt that “Political activity is “a necessary form of charity in the promotion of the Gospel“.” (6) Or more precisely from the Young Republicans:

Kenney was initially opposed to the life of politics, believing that morality and politics are mutually exclusive. His life was changed when he read the Holy Father’s encyclical, Evangelicum Vitae. Seeing that the Holy Father’s notion of politics was a form of charity changed Kenney’s perspective. “I felt compelled to enter politics as a vocation. I was called to politics, not qua politics, but as a form of charity as a promotion of the message of the Gospel of life”. (1)

Footnotes:

*The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada, By: Marci McDonald, Random House Canada, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-307-35646-8

Sources:

1. A Mix of Morality and Politics, USF Grad Shakes Up Canadian Political Scene, By Rich Kunz, San Francisco Faith, June 2000

2. Why I No Longer Support the Jesuits, by American Phoenix, July 13, 2006

3. Tommy Douglas: Building the New Society, By Dave Margoshes, XYZ Publishing, 1999, ISBN: 0-9683601-4-9

4. Response by Stephen A. Privett, S.J., President of the University of San Francisco, to the charges made on the website of Friends of the St. Ignatius Institute, February 8, 2001

5. The Making of a Socialist: The Recollections of T.C. Douglas, Edited By Lewis H. Thomas, The University of Alberta Press, 1982, ISBN: 0-88864-070-7, Pg. 82

6. Promote human dignity - Kenney: Politician says faith and politics do mix, By Ramon Gonzalezwcr, Western Catholic Reporter, June 2, 2003

It’s not partisan. It doesn’t have a website. There is a chairman – normally two – and possibly even an independent staff of assistants. It’s been operating on Parliament Hill for the last decade, maybe more, and there still hasn’t been a public listing of its members.

The “it” I’m referring to is the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus, a theoretically non-partisan (though mostly Conservative, with a Liberal minority and pretty much no one from the other parties) group of MPs who are pro-life and would support reconsidering the current lack of national laws banning or restricting abortions. Once in a while the group pops up and garners a couple of headlines, but for the most part, it toils in obscurity. Those members who achieve political success, like Jason Kenney, probably had to sever their ties to the Caucus on their way up the ladder.

The encouraging thing about that is that it suggests, at least for the time being, that the anti-choice movement is having minimal success. Its representatives on the hill can’t even operate in the open, let alone put up legislation beyond a few disturbing fringe bills like Epp’s “murder of the unborn” law last year. This despite the fact that Lloyd Mackey, at least, believes our current prime minister might even be a former member of the Caucus. So, what do we actually know about this group?

The Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus seems to operate in the shadows as a sort of open secret organization. After chairman Rod Bruinooge’s inflammatory “kidneys outrank fetuses” op-ed was published last December (h/t Dammit Janet, Unrepentant Old Hippie), Ignatieff’s spokesperson refused to answer whether he would permit Liberal MPs to sit in the Pro-Life Caucus, and even suggested the group might not exist. This was, as socon blogger Big Blue Wave immediately pointed out, probably a lie: there’s no way the Liberal leadership wouldn’t know about the caucus. But no membership list was forthcoming, either. Bouquets of Gray expressed some well-deserved disapproval:

A secret AA chapter? Fine. A quilting klatch? No problem. A Dungeon-and-dragons cell? Whatever. MPs have a right to keeping their personal lives personal. But Bruinooge’s caucus advocates a change to public policy, and as such it should be operating out in the open.

Indeed, it is rather surprising that they do not want to operate in the open, because they can hardly hope to change public policy otherwise. If they are not going to argue their case in public, how do they expect to persuade anyone? win any votes? pass any laws?

Personally, I find it particularly bizarre that the group operates in secret and doesn’t get called on this. Its leaders claim this is because MPs who are members fear retaliation from their party leaders and from the public. The first I can understand. Maybe. But the second? If it’s something so seriously unpopular that you have to do it in secret, then as an elected representative you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. We wouldn’t stand for such convenient cynicism in other issue areas. Why should we on this one?

In honour of next month’s swiftly approaching March for Life parade, put on by the Campaign Life Coalition (a close ally of the Pro-Life Caucus), I intend to dig a little deeper into the mystery of the caucus. This is the sort of occasion when bloggers like myself just can’t match the resources of the declining mainstream media. I’m sure a few well-connected members of the press gallery could find out what I’m looking for in a single afternoon. I wish they’d do their jobs instead of leaving it to people like me and Unrepentant Old Hippie. Nevertheless, she called on bloggers to “ferret them out,” and that’s what I’m going to do.

The first Pro-Life Caucus emerged in the 1980s, during the first debate over abortion surrounding the Morgentaler decision in 1988. It collapsed in 1991 during debate over the Mulroney government’s failed Bill C-43. In 1998, Campaign Life Coalition president Jim Hughes played an unknown role in bringing together chairpersons for a new Caucus: Progressive Conservative Elsie Wayne, Liberal Tom Wappel, and then-rookie, now-immigration minister Jason Kenney, whose reactionary views at the time are probably best expressed by this article from his San Francisco Catholic university’s newspaper.

Tim Bloedow, then a Campaign Life lobbyist and writer for its paper The Interim, remarked that his group planned to step back and “work more behind the scenes” in the work of the new caucus. These intimate connections to Campaign Life may remain in place, though it is unclear. CLC is certainly an active defender of the Caucus; it fell to Mary Ellen Douglas to defend the group’s secrecy in December 2008. For his work in this regard, president Hughes was given a Catholic Civil Rights League award in 2007.

Reflecting its close connections with Campaign Life, the most significant event for the Caucus appears to be the annual March for Life demonstration, during which its chairs – and, from time to time, a few members – hold a special press conference highlighting an issue related to abortion. In 2003, the trio of co-chairs (Elsie Wayne, Paul Steckle and Maurice Vellacott) demanded the outlawing of embryonic stem cell research.

In 2005, Vellacott and Steckle suggested that an unknown but enormous number of women were being forced into abortions by abusive partners. The next year, they argued that abortion causes breast cancer, backed by American surgeon Angela Lanfranchi. Vellacott later added that the Canadian Cancer Society was refusing to study this link because it was funded by pharmaceutical companies and therefore did not genuinely want to prevent cancer. In 2007, they were criticizing sex-selective abortions, using research supplied by Andrea Mrozek of the Focus on the Family Canada-funded think tank, Institute of Marriage and Family Canada. In none of these cases have firm statistics on the alleged Canadian “violence” been presented. In their last conference together, in 2008, Steckle and Vellacott brought in Alveda King to speak on abortion as a civil rights issue (fetus civil rights, not women’s civil rights, naturally).

While scientifically dubious, these sessions are arguably less provocative than the comments some Caucus members come out with in their speeches to the annual March – Cheryl Gallant, for example, once notoriously claimed that abortions in Canada were “absolutely no different” than beheadings of Western journalists by terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Other than being a clearinghouse for information and a hosting service for pro-life speakers, it’s unclear what function the Caucus currently serves, however. Information on the website of Conservative MP Gerry Breitkreuz implies that in 2002 the Caucus canvassed all thirteen provincial and territorial governments, asking whether they had officially defined “medically necessary” abortions. That was followed in 2003 by a letter to health minister Anne McLellan “on the topic of medically necessary abortions.” Given Breitkreuz’s comments at the end of the page, the letter probably argued that public funding for abortions should be withdrawn in the absence of a definition of medical necessity.

The merger of the Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties reduced the number of chairs of the Caucus from three to two – though according to Lloyd Mackey, the caucus did consider naming a third from the New Democratic Party, Bev Dejarlais, which would suggest that at least at that point there were NDP members of the caucus. In fact, several writers, like Kady O’Malley, believed that longstanding NDP MP and United Church minister Bill Blaikie was a member of the Caucus.

In 2008, Vellacott stepped down and was replaced by Winnipeg Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge. Bruinooge linked his pro-life stance to his aboriginal heritage, and was welcomed warmly by the Canada Family Action Coalition, the Association for Reformed Political Action and the Campaign Life Coalition.

Bruinooge announced his new chairmanship in November, then, on December 29, published a widely reported and controversial op-ed in the National Post, “Why I Am Pro-Life,” in which he suggested that abortion was hindering population replacement and that fetuses had less rights than kidneys, because you can’t take out your kidney and sell it on eBay. (You can’t actually do that with your fetus either, by the way.) The article was welcomed by such writers as Andrea Mrozek of ProWomanProLife and the Institute of Marriage and Family, panned by more pragmatic conservative bloggers like Raphael Alexander, and angrily denounced by Shameless, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, and others. In a particularly odd post, Dr. Roy suggested that “radical feminists” would dismiss Bruinooge’s remarks because he was of First Nations descent!

In running the caucus, the co-chairs are assisted by one and possibly more staffers, paid by a pool of money submitted by the MPs out of their legislative office budgets and given a desk in one of the chair’s offices. In 2001 Campaign Life Coalition lobbyist Tim Bloedow took the job, which he held for at least three years, though he remained in Vellacott’s office until 2007, moving over to John Earnshaw’s job as legislative assistant.

Bloedow’s Conservative Party duties were not so onerous, it seems, to prevent him from also running as a Christian Heritage Party candidate in 2004. He then went on to write the extremist website ChristianGovernment.ca, and is now the president of Equipping Christians for the Public Square. Bloedow, it must be said, has always been good at getting into apparent conflicts of interest: he worked as a Campaign Life lobbyist while also as a religious journalist, and more recently published grand praise of Vellacott on the website of the Association for Reformed Political Action without mentioning that he was working in Vellacott’s office and had been for years.

After Bloedow moved over to become Vellacott’s personal assistant, Barbara McAdorey, administrator of Canadian Physicians for Life, then moved in to take over some of his former duties. Among her activities as the caucus administrator, it seems, was supplying information to Lutherans for Life Canada in 2006 to help them in their attempt to win charitable status.

The caucus would also seem to maintain amiable relationships with various organizations within the religious right, and especially, pro-life, communities. Lloyd Mackey says that “pro-life volunteers” supply Caucus meetings with coffee and sandwiches. They have worked with, and heard presentations from, José Ruba of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, among others. Alberta Pro-Life has been invited, too. After Bruinooge’s National Post article came under fire, Joseph Ben-Ami of the Charles McVety-linked Institute for Canadian Values leaped to his defence, arguing unconvincingly that even though the Caucus’s membership was secret, the fact that it included both Liberals and Conservatives meant that it was open and bipartisan (great, more fucking bipartisanship).

Despite Bruinooge’s inflammatory and highly publicized remarks in December, the influence of the Caucus would seem to be waning – not that it was ever overly influential in the first place. Before the 2008 election, Campaign Life president Jim Hughes somberly lamented the loss of some of the caucus’s leading lights, including Wappel, Steckle, and Norman Doyle. Shortly after his retirement, Tom Wappel told a gathering of Catholic clergy organized by Campaign Life that the caucus had never properly cultivated relations with the Catholic community. It remains to be seen what will happen to this organization in the coming years.

Tomorrow I’ll be publishing a tentative list of known and suspected members of the Caucus as a public service, since the Caucus itself apparently feels no need to make that sort of information publicly known.