World Day of Social Justice

Don’t Miss This!

In 2007, the General Assembly of the United Nations declared that, starting from the sixty-third session of the General Assembly, the 20th of February will be celebrated annually as the World Day of Social Justice.

On Sunday February 18^th, at our 10:00 a.m. service, we will celebrate the World Day of Social Justice, and Mary Boyd, an Islander well known for her work in the field of Social Justice, will be our guest preacher.

Mary was invested into the Order of Canada in 2013. Her citation singled out “her contribution to the social justice movement, notably by introducing community-based initiatives to fight homelessness, poverty, and underemployment”. Mary continues to be quite active in all these areas.

We invite you to join us in our celebration, and to invite friends and/or family to come along.

About Mary Boyd

At our celebration of World Day of Social Justice our guest speaker will be well-known islander Mary Boyd. She is remarkable for her faith. She believes that if enough of us champion social justice, then poverty, and the infrastructures that perpetuate poverty, will crumble.

Born in West Lakeville, Nova Scotia, the fourth of ten children, Boyd was raised on a small farm and, thanks to her mother, a teacher, grew up well aware of the damage done by poverty. She pursued a BA in history at St. Francis Xavier University and studied the Antigonish Movement during a period when community, co-ops, and credit unions were economic buzzwords in the Maritimes. Boyd remembers that for her family, neighbours, and friends, “the whole social justice question was very much present.”

By 1965, Boyd was working at a YMCA in a black neighbourhood in Cincinnati. Already active in the civil rights movement, she leapt at the chance to participate in the historic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. She will never forget hearing him speak: “I could hear the moans and groans of the people in that hall and it was as if they were unloading decades of oppression, of exploitation, of misery of all kinds, of having to endure being not only second-class citizens but just having very little because of the colour of their skin… to see the effect that man had on his people and how he raised their hopes, that was enough in itself to make anybody want to march.”

Boyd later spent six years as a lay missionary and teacher in West Africa before being appointed director of Social Action in the Diocese of Charlottetown—a post she held for twenty-two years. When funding for that job dried up in 1995, she founded the MacKillop Centre for Social Justice, relying on donations as she and her cohorts continued the fight for peace and against poverty, homelessness, low wages, and underemployment. Boyd takes no salary for this work, relying only on her pension. “I live close to the poverty line for sure,” she says. “It’s been a struggle.

Boyd has led protests (an arms manufacturer trying to set up shop on Prince Edward Island was sent packing, for example), addressed politicians in both Charlottetown and Ottawa, and railed against leaders who ignore the marginalized. “Poverty,” she laments, “is just not on the radar when governments are making decisions about budgets.” What Boyd has long advocated is an idea finally gaining traction: a living wage for every Canadian citizen and eradication of poverty through adequate social programs.

What drives Boyd is both compassion and common sense. “It would cost half as much to eradicate poverty,” she says, “as it costs to maintain poverty. I don’t know why [politicians] cannot see that. It costs an enormous amount to governments and society to have a situation with so much poverty—to say nothing of the human suffering of the person who is in poverty and can’t live life to the fullest.”

But Boyd remains an optimist. “Deep down in just about every human being,” she says, “is that desire to help one another and make the world a better place.”