Organization’s activities cover climate change, reconciliation with aboriginal people, violence against women, migrant issues
By Michael Swan
The Catholic Register
TORONTO (CCN)

Caption: Bishop Douglas Crosby

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops will no longer be part of Kairos, a social justice coalition of groups of various faiths.

In a release from Ottawa Oct. 12, the bishops said: “The way Kairos is structured, while perfectly legitimate, does not foster the kind of engagement they (the Catholic bishops) need and require.”

The Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace and the Canadian Religious Conference, which includes both male and female Catholic religious orders, remain members of Kairos. The Anglican and six Protestant churches remain members.

“The CCCB remains committed to working ecumenically on justice and peace initiatives which are in keeping with fundamental principles of ecumenism,” said the CCCB release.

Bishop Douglas Crosby of Hamilton, the CCCB president, said he hoped Kairos and the bishops would continue to exchange information and consider occasional cooperation on social justice projects.

Kairos’s activities cover climate change, reconciliation with aboriginal people, violence against women, and migrant issues.

It was formed in 2001 by the merger of 10 groups dedicated to social justice in response to dictatorships and civil war in Latin America in the 1970s, apartheid in South Africa through the 1980s, poverty, economic development in Asia and Africa, and socially responsible investment. Funding has dwindled as many of the church partners face shrinking revenue.

Kairos made headlines in 2009 when Bev Oda, then the Minister of International Development, cut all federal government funding for the small portfolio of international development projects Kairos managed.

Oda never admitted that it was she who wrote the word “not” on a CIDA funding agreement which had been approved by CIDA staff, but she later apologized to parliament for ordering a Canadian International Development Agency document altered to deny funding.

Jason Kenney, then the immigration minister, told an Israeli audience the government had cut Kairos’s funding because it had advocated boycotts and divestments of Israeli companies with operations in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Kairos and its church members had in fact specifically ruled out boycotts and other sanctions against Israel in a 2007 vote.