Lead story
Rick Haughian: Catholic Health Care Leader
Volume 34 Issue 7, 8 & 9 | Posted: October 6, 2020
I can’t recall when I first met Rick Haughian. It may have been in Halifax when I was still a student. It was certainly in that early 1970s period that I heard about him, maybe from a mutual acquaintance when I was first taking an interest in Development and Peace, the Canadian Catholic social justice program for overseas development.
Rick was a young Jesuit making a name for himself in those circles, based in Halifax.
By the late 70s we were both married with young children living in Ottawa and running in the same circles. He was teaching some pastoral care courses at St. Paul’s University and I was employed with the Catholic Health Association of Canada (CHAC) in communications.
I can’t recall when I first met Rick Haughian. It may have been in Halifax when I was still a student. It was certainly in that early 1970s period that I heard about him, maybe from a mutual acquaintance when I was first taking an interest in Development and Peace, the Canadian Catholic social justice program for overseas development.
Rick was a young Jesuit making a name for himself in those circles, based in Halifax.
By the late 70s we were both married with young children living in Ottawa and running in the same circles. He was teaching some pastoral care courses at St. Paul’s University and I was employed with the Catholic Health Association of Canada (CHAC) in communications.
Truly gifted, he was obviously underemployed. He had left the Jesuits after thirteen years as a priest and married Julia. Penny and I were expecting our third daughter, Martha. There was a vibrant progressive Catholic community in Ottawa including Rick’s mentor Pat Kerans, also a former Jesuit, and Grant Maxwell, mine, as well as Father Everett McNeil, my boss at the CHAC.
Everett had been the General Secretary of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops during the 1960s and 70s when The Second Vatican Council was being implemented. As their chief administrator he spearheaded this important implementation process very creatively, in the words of Catholic journalist Janet Somerville.
I had been at the CHAC three years when I got a surprise phone call on April 1, 1981 from the Prairie Messenger in Saskatchewan, fundamentally offering the position of editor. This freed up my job at CHAC which I mentioned to Rick when I bumped into him at Art’s market near St. Paul’s. Art’s was an alternative market where you could expect to bump into like-minded types. This encounter proved propitious.
Everett interviewed Rick and snatched him up as his director of education, in a reshuffling of positions and the rest was history. In time Rick succeeded Everett as President of the CHAC, making a marked progressive contribution to the organization and the Catholic health care scene in Canada. The CHAC was the successor to the Catholic Hospital Association of Canada as that church ministry moved into post-Vatican II stages of the church’s holistic healing ministry.
Further stages have been reached since, but Rick was a key transitional leader in the continued opening up of the church following Vatican II in the direction of increased lay leadership. Women Religious Orders, which founded and owned many of Canada’s key hospitals, slowly shifted in their priorities due to ageing membership in the face of their ongoing commitment to the changes in the church.
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My deeper friendship with Rick dated from this major shift in both our fortunes.
While I had been at the CHAC, we developed a diocesan model of holistic health care ministry. In 1983, the Diocese of Antigonish adopted this model and I was hired under the auspices of Father McNeil, a priest of Antigonish, under Bishop Power and the Sisters of St. Martha to establish a permanent health care council in the Cape Breton region of Nova Scotia.
This was a four year process where we regularly brought in speakers and workshop leaders. Rick Haughian was a regular guest speaker including our founding annual meeting keynote speaker.
During that period as men in our late thirties and early forties, we were each going through a lot of transitional processes professionally and personally.
Our understandings of our own roles and that of the church in society were evolving rapidly as we individually and collectively reflected on our experience, including our integrative conversations as we moved through marriage breakups, single parenthood, the issues of the world and the emerging new consciousness of faith in action in a phenomenological universe, as our Catholic philosophy and theology had taught us to understand things.
Those years back and forth between Ottawa and Cape Breton were key in cementing our depth of permanent friendship. After 1986, I relocated to Victoria to start ICN. Rick married Diane in 2001 and settled deeply and permanently into Ottawa, retiring from CHAC after 24 years of leadership .
When I left ICN in 1993 for a period, Rick was a key connection in Ottawa where I came to settle during years when I was working on longer writing projects. By the mid 1990s I was back in Victoria and Rick hosted me in 2004 on a book tour with the biography of Bishop De Roo, gathering together progressive Catholics in the city. We stayed in regular contact. I was able to have two great visits with him on my 2018 cross Canada summer sojourn.
VISITS
His family would make their visits to Victoria and one time and Rick and Meaghan his daughter stayed over using my Chinatown studio for an overnight. Meaghan eventually became an artist and the curator of the Art Gallery at Ottawa City hall but then she as just finding herself. She told her father that a major highlight of the visit was discovering that funky artists loft. It seemed to inspire her ambitions. At least that is the delusion I like to hold about my minor influence.
But it was at least indicative of the role we played in our mutual process of individuation as Jung would call it. The fulfilment of ones identity and destiny through the mutual embrace of values and principles of grace. This is how I would best typify my friendship with Rick and in my experience there are few higher honours on the natural plane.
In his final couple of years, we spoke regularly and I was struck by his ability to see and understand his final process so objectively and creatively. Each diminishment he accepted fully as a fresh challenge just as he had lived his whole life, benefiting I felt from his Jesuit training of the will.
As his wife Diane said in a recent phone conversation, he was asking questions and taking a deep interest in what and how others were doing until his final hours.
Rick Haughian, leader, friend, priest, brother in arms. Rest In Peace.