'Just Priest' conference lauds radical witness of Don Heap

Catholic New Times, Feb 9, 2003 by Janet Somerville

A new centre for social theology--The Trinity College Institute for Church and Society (TCICS) at the University of Toronto--recently hoisted its introductory colours by hosting a two-day conference in honour of an old, holy and profoundly radical Anglican priest, Don Heap.

The convenor of the January 17-18 event was Rev. Gerald Loweth of the TCICS, a progressive body hoping to raise issues in the liberal Anglican Catholic tradition. Loweth named the conference "Just Priest," which focused on the meaning of Heap's 18 years (1954-1972) in a Toronto factory as a worker priest, rather than on his better known years as a city council member (1972-1981), or his even more famous dozen years as the NDP Member of Parliament for Trinity-Spadina.

As a parable of the church-world times, the "Just Priest" event was evocative. Its optics, as well as its analysis, reflected a painful shrinkage in Gospel-based radicalism as today's Christians face the war-noisy, hungry and plutocratic world.

To begin with the optics: attendance was skimpy, but intense. For the most part, silver-haired "graduates of the Student Christian Movement of the 1940s," as Dean David Neelands quipped during his welcome, gathered around Heap and his wife, Alice, as the couple quietly listened to their life history being examined. Less than a handful of Trinity College students participated. Empty seats abounded in the Ignatieff Theatre where the event was held.

On the other hand, energy was high. The solidarity of many members of Holy Trinity Church, the Heaps' parish, filled the hall with vigour and affection. Day two of the conference coincided with the day of protests against another invasion of Iraq. The conference stopped in its tracks at 11.30 a.m. to allow the whole group to hurry downtown and join the big crowd in Nathan Philips Square. In that crowd, church-related groups were highly visible. Conference participants returned after the march with their sense of connectedness obviously heightened.

The two papers prepared for the conference--one by Don Heap, the other by his friend, Rev. Cyril Powles--were blunt in their agreement that mainline churches on the whole rejected the worker-priest movement and all that it stood for.

But socially radical charisms do survive within today's church life, and conference organizers had invited three such charismatics as speakers. They were: Len Desroches, a worker-layman and radical peacemaker; Rev. Betty Jordan, whose pastoral work in Flemingdon Park nurtures the life and hopes of poor immigrant families; and street nurse Cathy Crowe, the highly effective co-founder of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, an action group against homelessness. All three have collaborated with Heap on several initiatives and all continue to address today's church.

Jim Houston, acting director of community ministries for the Anglican Diocese of Toronto, was a panelist. He spoke encouragingly about the points of influence of deeply committed activists on the ordinary social ministry of the diocese.

Beneath the optics, the conference offered an analysis of the relationship between the radical, social witness and mainstream church life, now and over the centuries.

The core document came from Heap himself, in the form of a six-page reflection made available to everyone who attended. It quietly chronicled the failure of mainline churches to take seriously the worker-priest (or worker-minister) movement that flickered into life in several countries after the Second World War.

The movement began when several French priests smuggled themselves into forced-labour gangs that were being deported to Germany by the Nazis as war still raged. As far as it is known, they died sharing those working conditions "for love of their fellow workers," as Heap noted in his paper.

After the war, "The commitment of the post-war worker-priest was to share voluntarily the lives of people whose enforced relationship to society ... was to have no means of livelihood except the capital owner's payment of their labour time. Workers ... had no share in the deciding of conditions of work or in the sale and the use of the product. Sometimes, labour-union action and political pressure were able to soften the conditions and the pay of the workers, but gave them no significant voice in the use of their product."

Such enforced passivity is, in Heap's eyes, a betrayal of God's respect for workers. He grieves that churches, and even workers, continue to take it for granted. The church, he wrote, "took little interest in that (capital-labour) relationship and did little to critique the wide spread of wealth on the one side or the cost of lifelong poverty and insecurity on the other. During the past three centuries, the church neither opposed the new wage-labour factory nor demanded that Christian owners treat their 'employees' better. It was to these people, largely abandoned by the church, that the worker priests tried to be the outreach of a Christian community. Did we fail in that? Yes."