“It was not just to hold up hope and prayer. It was actually to be active,” said Kennedy, the 48-year-old candidate for Toronto’s Parkdale-High Park. “To me, it’s always been that the strength of your ethic is proven by the strength of your praxis. You cannot isolate the two.”

Kennedy, a former Ontario education minister whose uncle was a Redemptorist priest and two-term city alderman in Edmonton, said faith has also played a role in his anti-poverty community activism. Twenty-five years ago, Kennedy became the first director of Canada’s first food bank in Edmonton and later headed up Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank.

But he admits that once faith mixes with politics, things can get complicated for Catholic politicians. An example — although Kennedy doesn’t support abortion, his party does.

Kennedy said politicians have to reconcile their religious beliefs on socially divisive issues like abortion and same-sex marriage with the beliefs of others.

“Some people felt that things were being imposed and that they were going to be a threat to their private faith,” he said. “But in order to be effective, you have to be able to keep the integrity of your own beliefs and be able to work with others who hold different beliefs.”

Pope John Paul II recognized the dilemma that Catholic politicians can face in the public arena where competing values could lead to compromise policies. In his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, John Paul emphasized that abortion is a crime which “no human law can legitimize.”

But he also wrote that “when it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences.”

Kennedy said he doesn’t judge others with different views on abortion. And he said he supports government action addressing abortion, such as anti-poverty measures, which respect individual rights and don’t call for criminal prosecution.

“It’s my genuine intention to work to help create (an abortion) dialogue,” Kennedy said.

But he added that conditions have to be created for the dialogue to take place. It’s a challenge that many Catholic politicians face: how to navigate in the public sphere as a public servant to everyone and as a practising Catholic. The 2007 post-synodal apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis by Pope Benedict XVI underscores the message that faith is not a purely private matter. Rather, it demands a “public witness” to that faith.

The Pope introduced a set of values he called non-negotiable: “respect for human life, its defence from conception to natural death, the family built upon marriage between a man and a woman, the freedom to educate one’s children and the promotion of the common good in all its forms.

“Consequently, Catholic politicians and legislators, conscious of their grave responsibility before society, must feel particularly bound, on the basis of a properly formed conscience, to introduce and support laws inspired by values grounded in human nature,” the document said.

It’s the area of pro-life teaching which has tested Catholic politicians in Canada, no matter their political stripe.

As Liberal justice minister, Pierre Trudeau changed divorce laws and liberalized laws on abortion and homosexuality in the late 1960s. In explaining his decisions, the Catholic Trudeau said, “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.”

This summer, news of abortionist Dr. Henry Morgentaler’s nomination for the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian award, put the spotlight back on abortion. A group of 106 MPs signed a petition in early September to oppose the award, including Peterborough Conservative MP Dean del Mastro.

Del Mastro said he doesn’t support abortion and that his belief in life being created at conception is based upon his Catholic beliefs. But his party’s policy is that it will not revisit the issue.

The Liberals, NDP, Bloc Quebecois and the Green Party are pro-choice and support same-sex marriage. The Conservative government held a free vote on same-sex marriage in 2006 where MPs voted 175-123 against a Conservative motion to restore the traditional definition of marriage.

“I don’t see reopening this question in the future,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said at the time.

The Vatican and Canadian bishops voiced their opposition to same-sex marriage in 2003.

According to a 2003 Vatican document on same-sex marriage authored by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) when he was heading the Congregation of the Doctrine for the Faith, “the Catholic law-maker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it.” 

But the Canadian law on same-sex marriage was passed under Liberal prime ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, both of whom are Catholic.

Cabinet minister Joe Comuzzi resigned after the law was passed, saying he promised his constituents that he would defend the traditional definition of marriage.

This September, the issue of faith in politics came to a head for Bloc Quebecois MP Fr. Raymond Gravel. The Montreal-area priest resigned his seat in the House of Commons after receiving an ultimatum from the Vatican on choosing priesthood or politics. Gravel had publicly supported same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to choose abortion.

While pro-life issues can become political land mines which few politicians want to step over, many Catholic politicians have embraced the church’s social justice teachings tackling poverty and environmental pollution. Nick Capra, Green Party candidate in Toronto’s York West riding, said there are instances where politicians have to accommodate other views.

“Sometimes there are issues within our party that we don’t agree with but in a democracy, we have to go with what the majority wants,” he said.