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Ten Years Later: A Look Back at the PFPC
BY Gina Ellis
The PFPC (Pagan Federation/Fédération païenne) is ten years old. Time to look back in order to move forward.
We organized in 1994 (incorporated in 1998), largely to provide backing for prison visitation. Since then we've visited Pagan inmates in the nine federal prisons in the Kingston area, plus one in Quebec. We located people in Alberta to visit a Pagan group at the Drumheller prison and have advised chaplains at other Prairie prisons regarding Pagan inmates.
In Ontario, we visit a couple of provincial prisons and have joined the Ontario Multifaith Council (OMC), which oversees religious accommodation in provincial institutions. Our prison visitors will be attending the OMC conference in Toronto in June.
In B.C., one of our founders and former directors, Pashta MaryMoon, did prison visitation under Temple of the Lady and, when it disbanded, came under the PFPC umbrella, where she maintains an extensive correspondence course with inmates in Canada and the U.S.
Last year Pashta and I composed material on Paganism and Wicca for the Corrections chaplaincy handbook, which has just been published and is on the Correctional Service Canada (CSC) website. It's available in-house only at the present time, but eventually will be accessible by the public. The manual provides information and guidelines for chaplains in all federal prisons. Last year Pashta did a piece on Restorative Justice from a Wiccan perspective, and this is available on the CSC website (here and
here).
Since 2000, PFPC has had a contract with CSC to cover chaplaincy services (which got us a front-page story last year in the National Post and some unwanted commentary by Michael Coren in several of the Sun papers and Le Journal de Montréal). We have attended the Ontario regional chaplains' meetings and in June will be attending the federal chaplaincy conference.
However, PFPC is not a "faith group" in the usual sense - it's not a church, but an association. It cannot "ordain", nor even endorse "clergy". In order to have a structure to provide for continuity and accountability, we have formed the Pagan Pastoral Outreach (PPO) organization for people who work in Pagan hospital and prison chaplaincy; membership is also open to people who are interested in and supportive of such work. PPO functions like a professional organization, allowing people in the field to share information and set standards.
Most of the people involved in founding PFPC, and most of the membership over the years, were not directly involved in prisons so we made efforts to extend our scope.
Dale Dalessio, one of our directors, got "Paganism/Wicca" listed on Ottawa hospital admissions - previously Pagans were "other" or "no religion". She's done Pagan chaplaincy visitation there for several years (now under Pagan Pastoral Outreach). Pashta has been doing hospital chaplaincy (for anyone, not just Pagans) in Victoria and is currently community chaplain there. Another current board member, David Young, has done hospital visitation in Kingston).
Some years back, National Defence HQ contacted another of our directors, Lucie DuFresne, a professor in the Dept. of Religion at the University of Ottawa, for information on Wicca for their chaplains. A PFPC member was the first member of the Forces to get a Pagan holiday (Samhain). After our success with the CSC chaplaincy handbook, we recently asked the Forces chaplaincy HQ regarding their chaplains' handbook - however, so far they have been unresponsive.
The PFPC website is used as a resource at the University of Ottawa for courses on New Religious Movements and the very popular Magic, Witchcraft and Occult Traditions, and print-outs of our FAQ sheets are handed out in some classes.
Lucie says, "Ottawa Pagans from university backgrounds have also been influential: Sian Reid, Prof of Sociology at Carleton, Shelley TSivia Rabinovitch and Lucie DuFresne, profs in Religious Studies at Ottawa U. Among us, we teach close to 15,000 students a year, ALL of whom hear something about Neo-Paganism in Canada and the presence of PFPC".
PFPC has an entry in Shelley's Encyclopedia of Neo-Paganism and Modern Witchcraft, Citadel Press, by Rabinovitch and Lewis. The book is illustrated by PFPC member Lauren Foster-McLeod. Lucie says that, "Because PFPC exists, just because it exists, when I'm at a national or international conference as a scholar of new religious movements and I mention Neo- Paganism in Canada and that PFPC is part of it, people sit up and take notice. That PFPC has lasted this long with little or no scandal and NO money, is extraordinary". (Quotes from the Fall PFPC newsletter.)
Where do we go from here? Well, it's been suggested that the time is ripe for a national Pagan conference. PFPC members , in cooperation with other people across the country, are involved in a feasibility study and tentative plans (http://cnpc.officeprofessor.ca/). We're finding out what people think should be discussed at such a conference. Those discussions will show where PFPC should work in future years towards fulfilling our mandate: to protect and promote the reputation of Pagans and Paganism in Canada.
Postscript - Since writing the above, we have heard from Pam Fletcher (Kaleidoscope organizer), also a PFPC director, that she and Jim Findlay (of WicCanFest and HarvestFest) are planning a Pagan conference in Toronto on Feb. 4, 5 and 6th. The question now is - shall we work on a regional conference, perhaps in the West, where a lot of the interested people live? Watch this space.
Gina Ellis is a founding member and current President of the PFPC.
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© 2004. This article appeared in the Midsummer 2004 issue of WynterGreene. Permission to reprint, with full credit, must be granted by the author. If you would like to reprint this article, please email Wyntergreene. |
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