By Lloyd Mackey
TODAY, we consider some peripheral aspects of Conrad Black's Chicago trial and Prime Minister Harper's foray into Latin America.
In introducing these two remotely-related subjects, it should be noted that all the information is available on the internet. Hopefully, my role is to connect some of the dots in such a way as to create some fresh thinking on the issues connected with the events.
* * *
The stories on former media-baron Conrad Black's Chicago trial mentioned, only in passing, that he informed the court, on Friday, the day he was convicted on mail fraud and obstruction charges, that he wanted to spend the weekend in Wheaton.
That named city was described in various stories as being a college town about 25 miles from downtown Chicago.
But to people of evangelical faith, including many OttawaWatch readers, it is much more.
Wheaton College, where Billy and Ruth Graham met, and the city surrounding it, are often collectively referred to as an "evangelical Vatican."
Christianity Today, for whom I am occasionally privileged to write news stories, is in the Wheaton suburb of Carol Stream.
The Billy Graham Center at the college houses a fine communication graduate school. My younger and more-widely-traveled brother, Barry Mackey, received his masters' degree in cross-cultural communication from that school. That education propelled him into a vocation in micro-enterprise and evangelical social development, much of it carried out in southeast Asia -- India in particular.
All of which is to say: Why would Conrad Black, a stout and devout Catholic who insisted on having a cardinal baptize him when he converted from Anglicanism, choose to spend his first post-conviction weekend in a different kind of -- and pope-deprived -- Vatican?
One way to try to fathom an answer, of course, would be to google Conrad Black and Wheaton together.
The result sent me to a web page for the Malcolm Muggeridge Society.
Muggeridge, to be brief, was an eruditely agnostic British journalist who, later in life, was soundly converted to a remarkably pietistic form of Christianity. Even later, within just a few years of his death, he started attending a Roman Catholic chapel just around the corner from his country cottage. He ended life as a confirmed Catholic.
Now, on a fairly recent MM Society web page served up by Google, Conrad Black was listed as a society patron. And the American address for the society was listed as Wheaton College Special Collections.
A further check of the website, without including Black in the google, showed that he is no longer a patron. No explanation given.
* * *
Having a consummate interest in the building of newspaper groups, I read Black's autobiography, A Life in Progress, a few years ago, at the time that the then-newly-established Black flagship, the National Post, had me write some op-ed pieces relating faith and politics from an evangelical perspective.
In Progress, I recalled two references that have remained fairly firmly in my memory.
In one, Black, quoting an early church father, affirmed that there were two choices for the person wanting to act with spiritual integrity. They were "suicide" or "the foot of the cross."
In another reference, he expressed his admiration for evangelical Christians, but more for their energy and enthusiasm than for their collective intellect.
I was not able to lay my hands on a copy of Progress between the end of the trial and this week's OttawaWatch. So I am recalling from memory, the nature and context of the quotes.
Recalling them, however, was enough to mention the Muggeridge connection. For there have been few recent figures in political or religious life who have placed a pretty firm connect between evangelicalism and Catholicism. Thus he remains a good reason for Black to wish to pay as much attention, at this point in his pilgrimage, to Wheaton as to Rome.
* * *
One other evangelical -- and one with a Roman Catholic wife, as it happens -- might be a good person for Black to consult, at this point. His name is Charles Colson and he is the founder of Prison Fellowship.
Colson was one of the bright lights in Richard Nixon's inner circle. He went to jail on Watergate-connected charges for a few months. In so doing, he nurtured his new-found Christian faith and came out from behind bars with a vision for faith-based prison reform.
* * *
Enter Georgia, Don and Sharon Rendle of Victoria.
Georgia was Don's first wife. She died, tragically, of cancer, too young. But before her death, she wrote a manual on the subject of restorative justice. That volume became the basis for Don and Sharon's work with the Fellowship Baptists in Colombia, in trying to help inmates in that nation's notoriously violent prisons, to learn something about faith-based reconciliation and restoration. (Sharon was Don's second wife, whom he married after Georgia's death.)
Prison Fellowship picked up on the project and entered into a partnership to implement these restorative justice concepts. The last I had heard, they were being well-received.
* * *
Earlier this month came word that Stephen Harper was, in the interests of enunciating a foreign policy shift toward new attention to Latin American, planning a visit to the hemisphere's southern continent. So far, he has covered Colombia and Chile. And, at his request, Governor-General Michaelle Jean had been in Brazil a couple of weeks ago.
The dot-connecting, at this point, is to note that Charles Colson's particular interest in encouraging restorative justice practices in Colombian prisons was related to the fact that many of the inmates in those institutions were right wing paramilitaries, left wing guerrillas and drug lords. And they were acting out their ideologies and their violence inside the prison system.
At the time I wrote about it, in the late '90s, the program was having considerable success and the PF people were hoping that these inmates, upon release, would help create a considerably more peaceful and drug-free society.
The fact is that perfection has not come but, according to a number of sources, there have been some positive changes.
So much so that, for the first time since diplomatic relations between Colombia and Canada were established half a century ago, a Canadian prime minister has paid a visit there. And he is talking the possibility of free trade. Further, he is suggesting that he believes Colombia's "comprehensive" approach to trade and human rights is making all this possible.
As in such far off places as the Middle East and Afghanistan, perfection is a long way from reality.
But it is worth noting that the efforts of the Rendles and Canadian-based Baptists are, these several years later, making something of a difference.
The prison restorative justice program is basically in Colombian hands now, with a tip of the hat to the Rendles' contribution. And it would not be too much of a stretch to suggest that an ex-inmate American and a Canadian evangelical restorative justice proponent had something to do with it.
Conrad Black might well want to have a little chat with Colson, if, indeed, he would like some sound counsel in this period of great transition in his life.
* * *
Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa and the author of Stephen Harper: The Case for Collaborative Governance (ECW Press, 2006). He can be reached at lmackey@canadianchristianity.com.
Related stories:
Lord Black won't be broken
Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, National Post, July 14
Conrad Black keeps the faith...
L'affaire Black is about schadenfreude, ideological skulduggery, fiscal mismanagement, misalliances corporate and personal, hubris, and media fodder by the trainload. It is also about religion, or at least the personal faith of a headline grabber of titanic proportions.
Michael Higgins, Globe and Mail, July 16
Black
What is the conclusion? I should wish to have confidence of a legal remedy further down the road, but from what I have seen, I can have no confidence in the courts. Instead I think, as a Catholic Christian, one may only turn to the pulpit. We must not expect justice in this world. We must be willing to bear the pain of earthly injustice. And we must hope not only for our salvation, but for the vindication of justice, in the world to come.
David Warren, Ottawa Citizen, July 18
Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa and the author of Stephen Harper: The Case for Collaborative Governance (ECW Press, 2006). He can be reached at lmackey@canadianchristianity.com.
July 19/2007