LEYS o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-04-04 published
Kassie (Katharine)
TEMPLE
By Colin LEYS
Friday,
April 4, 2003 - Page A18
A Canadian who served God and defended the poor of New York.
Born June 8, 1944, in Port Hope, Ontario Died November 22, 2002,
in New York City, from cancer, aged 58.
No one who talked with Kassie
TEMPLE for more than 10 minutes
could fail to realize that she was one of the more remarkable
people they were ever likely to meet.
Kassie was an Anglican who worked in a Catholic organization
and wrote regularly for its newspaper. She was a radical social
critic, but opposed to all political parties. A passionate seeker
after religious truth, she spent long hours studying the Bible
in Hebrew. She was a gifted teacher and powerful debater (woe
betide anyone who rashly assumed this religious social worker
would be easy to outsmart); above all a fearless, tireless worker
with the homeless, sick and abandoned people of her quarter of
Manhattan.
She was born in Port Hope, Ontario, where her father was bursar
of Trinity College School. After high school, Kassie studied
religion at McMaster University. From there she went in the mid-1960s
to work for the Canadian International Development Agency in
Ottawa and then headed off for two years to Sierra Leone in West
Africa, looking after Canadian teachers with the Canadian University
Students Overseas. She retained several close Friends from the
Canadian University Students Overseas contingent.
She returned to Canada, and McMaster, in 1970 to work with the
eminent Canadian philosopher George
GRANT, writing a doctoral
thesis on the French theologian and sociologist Jacques Ellul.
In 1975, she began teaching at the University of Manitoba at
Brandon.
One day in 1977 she travelled to New York to see Dorothy
DAY,
who with Peter
MAURIN had founded the Catholic Worker, a group
dedicated to nonviolence and solidarity with the poor and other
victims of capitalist society. Kassie had been introduced to
them some years earlier through a friend at McMaster, but this
visit proved a turning point.
From New York she called a friend in Brandon and asked her to
get rid of all her belongings, and from then until her death
she lived in Mary House, one of two Catholic Worker homes in
Manhattan's Lower East Side (she remained an Anglican, however
one with a lifelong interest in developing closer understanding
between beliefs, including between Christians and Jews). She
took to wearing cast-off clothes donated by well-wishers, making
her famous soups and stews, caring and fighting for anyone and
everyone who was underprivileged, poor, sick, or neglected: prisoners
in jail, patients in hospital, elderly people trapped in dingy
nursing homes. She took time out only to look after her father
in Port Hope for his last three years, saying "it's too bad if
you can't look after your own father."
Kassie's religious faith was intense, but she had no trace of
religiosity. Last year a visitor asked her why she was wearing
a Yankees hat back to front. Oh, she explained, it was just a
hat that had been donated, "and we're all Mets fans here."
She could have been a professor, a civil servant, or a diplomat.
Instead she identified herself with the poor. However unhappy,
sick or difficult they might be, they were never people she worked
for or did good to; they were family and Friends.
Kassie was diagnosed with cancer early in 2002. After bearing
intense pain very bravely she died peacefully at Mary House,
surrounded by her Friends. During the three years she had devoted
to looking after her father in Port Hope she made the same sort
of impact on that small community as she did in New York. A huge
congregation attended her funeral service in Port Hope.
She leaves a painful gap but also an inspiring example, for Canadians
as well as her much-loved New Yorkers.
Colin LEYS is Kassie
TEMPLE's cousin.
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