Where I came from

To Leo J. Connolly 1896 - 1972

I've been doing some research on racism lately, and during a conversation on the topic, my brother Mike stated that our Dad was very much against discrimination. I hadn't formed that opinion quite as clearly, because back when I was a teenager and knew everything, I was annoyed at Dad for what I considered patronization: "I know some very fine Jews."  But I did remember that I learned the word "bigot" (always pronounced with disdain) from Dad at a very young age, and that by age 15 I did not approve of racist attitudes I saw on a student tour in the States, and I was pretty sure I'd learned that attitude from Dad, perhaps backed up by news stories of the early Civil Rights movement.

Thinking more, I remembered that whenever the second great commandment was mentioned (Love thy neighbour as thyself) Dad always said, "And who is my neighbour? Mankind of every description." Always the same words, and I had the impression it was part of a catechism recitation, though not from the catechism I had studied. It wasn't from the Bible - Jesus reponded with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. When I started hunting, I couldn't find Dad's exact words anywhere. 

Yesterday it occurred to me that in the early 1900s, Anglophone Canadians could have used an Irish catechism, so I searched that term.

I found a short poem by a great Irish poet, Seamus Heaney:

The Catechism:

Q and A come back. They formed my mind.
Who is my neighbor? My neighbor is all mankind.

Nice, but not exact. Where was that phrase emphasizing that differences did not matter?

Somewhere in the search I saw the term "Butler's Catechism", and it struck a chord. The original Butler's Catechism was published in 1775. A little more searching and I found the text below, published in 1882. And there was the source of my Dad's insistence on the equality of all people, and thus of mine. "And who is my neighbour? Mankind of every description, and without exception of persons, even those who injure us, or differ from us in religion."

Of course, individual experience had a lot to do with our beliefs, too. 

In Dad's day there was religious discrimination between Protestant and Catholic Irish in Canada, remnants of discrimination against Irish in the States, the Irish fight for independence after 1917, Hitler's Holocaust, Canadian discrimination against Jews, unfair treatment of Native Canadians and the always-present racism in the States. 

I grew up during the "troubles" in Northern Ireland and the Civil Rights movement in the States; I was a feminist before The Feminine Mystique; one of my school friends had a sister with Downs' syndrome who was not placed in an institution but was a much-loved member of the family; as a young adult I met gay people in the theatre world, and then I moved to the Arctic, where the divide between Inuit culture and Southern culture was much more important that skin colour (but religious tolerance left a lot to be desired), where the Inuit had had less maltreatment than the First Nations of the rest of Canada, but still lacked legal and economic equality, and then there was the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1982.

So here I am in 2013, age 69, highly intolerant of bigotry of all kinds, because of a seed sown in 1775 and nourished by an Irish Canadian born in 1896.

Thanks, Dad.

http://archive.org/stream/cihm_26727#page/n5/mode/2up