Main Feature
Father Bob Ogle’s Remarkable and Bewildering Decision
Christopher Hrynkow, Saskatoon
Volume 33 Issue 4, 5 & 6 | Posted: June 13, 2019
INTRODUCTION
This article is excerpted from seminar proceedings at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. The event was titled “A Prairie Priest and Politician – The Legacy and Continuing Influence of Father Bob Ogle” and was held in February 2016. It featured contributions from Caitlin Ward, Dennis Gruending, Lorne Calvert and Bill Blaikie. The report on the proceedings was edited by Christopher Hrynkow, who is working on a biography of Father Ogle.
INTRODUCTION
This article is excerpted from seminar proceedings at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. The event was titled “A Prairie Priest and Politician – The Legacy and Continuing Influence of Father Bob Ogle” and was held in February 2016. It featured contributions from Caitlin Ward, Dennis Gruending, Lorne Calvert and Bill Blaikie. The report on the proceedings was edited by Christopher Hrynkow, who is working on a biography of Father Ogle.
I FIRST HEARD OF ROBERT JOSEPH OGLE (1928-1998), a Roman Catholic priest better known as Father Bob, during a theology class on United Church history at the University of Winnipeg in the fall of 2005. My instructor was Paul Campbell, a distinguished United Church minister and long-serving academic registrar at the University of Winnipeg's Faculty of Theology. Like Ogle (in 1989), Campbell (in 1995) had been granted an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from St. Andrew’s College in Saskatoon. In addition to their common experience of training for the ministry, the two men also shared a passion for authentically progressive politics and positive social action. Further inspired by engaged features of the Christian tradition such as the Social Gospel movement and liberation theology, they both discerned an important role for people of faith in such moral projects. In the Canadian context, Bob Ogle and Paul Campbell were drawn to the New Democratic Party as the best expression of their vision for a just and fair society. In the latter case, this might be expected, as the United Church is sometimes affectionately characterized as “the NDP at prayer.” Yet, Father Bob also saw a strong concordance between the Roman Catholic Church’s social teaching and the NDP platform.
So it was in 1979, after being asked to run for office and carefully seeking the necessary permissions from the Roman Catholic hierarchy, Bob Ogle sought and won the NDP nomination for the federal constituency of Saskatoon East. During the nomination process and subsequent campaign, Father Bob built on cultural capital gained through time serving as a popular parish priest, an international missionary engaged in development work, a canon lawyer, and the rector of St. Pius X Seminary, to win the seat. Notably, on that occasion he defeated Liberal cabinet minister and fellow Roman Catholic, Otto Lang. Ogle was returned to Parliament in 1980 and seemed well positioned to win another term. Yet, instructions came from the Vatican requiring that Father Bob withdraw from politics prior to the 1984 general election. Another man might have left the priesthood and continued as an MP, but after much soul-searching, Ogle obeyed Rome. A quarter of century later, that decision still left Campbell bewildered.
The four contributions that form this booklet are an attempt to unfold the legacy and continuing significance of the priest and politician that made this remarkable and bewildering decision. They have their origins in a mini-conference held at St. Thomas More College, Saskatoon, in February 2016. The immediate impetus for that event was a lunch meeting on another matter I had with the politically “undefeatable” Manitoba NDP MP (1979-2008), MLA (2009-2011), United Church minister, and current director of the Knowles-Woodsworth Centre for Faith and Public Policy at the University of Winnipeg, Bill Blaikie.
During our conversation, Blaikie mentioned that he had been entrusted with Ogle’s diskettes and tapes after Father Bob’s passing by the priest’s politically engaged sister, Mary Lou. He had also been given some of Ogle’s letters from another of his sisters, Rosemary. With only the gentlest of proddings, Blaikie expressed a willingness to come to Saskatoon and craft a lecture based on these resources and his personal experience working with Ogle as part of the NDP’s “God Squad” at the end of the 1970S and into the early 1980s.
In consultation with my colleagues, we devised a mini-conference format to take advantage of Blaikie’s offer. We would have three short presentations to introduce (and reintroduce) Ogle to the crowd, a break for coffee, Blaikie’s lecture, a panel with the four presenters, and a reception. During the resultant organizational and event promotion processes, I heard many stories about Father Bob and was much struck with the positive impression he left on people. Those with stories to share ranged from students he baptized to academics to couples he had married to ministers to fellow politicians and priests.
The format and subject matter proved popular, and the STM cafeteria was full the evening of the event. The first presentation was by Caitlin Ward, St. Thomas More College’s Engaged Learning Coordinator, who spoke on behalf of Ogle’s family. She was followed by Dennis Gruending, former NDP MP (1999-2000) and prolific writer on faith and politics. Gruending provided a fine overview of Ogle’s life, which was informed by the personal relationship between the two men over a number of years. The opening session was capped by a contribution from Lorne Calvert, United Church Minister, former Premier of Saskatchewan (2001-2007), and current Principal of St. Andrew’s College. After the break, Bill Blaikie’s lecture and the panel discussion kept the crowd captivated, with a good portion of the attendees staying on to continue the dialogue during the reception. It was Ward who earned the most rousing applause during the evening for one of her comments about the continuing values for which Bob Ogle stood. Ward argued that calling those values “progressive” too easily obscured their deep well-springs in Christian tradition.
Christopher Hrynkow, Saskatoon