Supreme Knight Carl Anderson with Dan Heffernan at the 2008 National March for Life.
Heffernan first became active with the Knights in 1988. He had just moved to Alliston, having resigned as vice-president of the Power Workers Union to take a staff officer position with the union, based out of nearby Toronto. A hockey teammate invited him to join the Catholic fraternal organization. As the brother of actively pro-life priest Fr. Vince Heffernan, he was personally pro-life, but his constant job-related travel kept him from devoting much thought or volunteer time to the issue.
The next four years would see Heffernan become active in many of the charitable works carried out by his local K of C council. One of his favorite activities was to man the K of C table at Alliston’s annual potato festival. During this time, he and wife Rita moved to Angus, where he helped found the K of C Father Allan B. McRae Council 10818. The council would elect Heffernan as its first grand knight (that is, local president).
It was then that he caught his first taste of pro-life activism. At the urging of his parish priest, Heffernan organized local knights to take charge of a street corner at Toronto’s 1992 Life Chain. He was blown away by the hostile reactions he and fellow parishioners received to Life Chain’s silent and prayerful witness. “People would drive back and forth – the same car would drive up, turn around and come past us again,” he told The Interim. “They would be leaning out the windows, shaking their fists, giving us the finger and cursing and swearing at us. You almost had the feeling they were possessed of the devil. That was a real eye-opener for me. I had just assumed that everyone thought the same way I did, that abortion was wrong.”
Dan Heffernan with his wife Rita.
Dan and Rita Heffernan returned to Angus to discover their son similarly shaken. The teenager had recently obtained his driver’s licence and his best friend’s girlfriend had asked him for a ride to Toronto to procure an abortion. Heffernan’s son refused, stating his moral opposition to abortion. “I thought that’s an awful lot of pressure on a 17-year-old kid to make that decision. In the end, this broke up their friendship,” he said.
These two incidents convinced Dan and Rita to take a more active stand. They began slowly at first, with Dan keeping local knights informed about pro-life initiatives taking place in their community and encouraging them to support these activities through their presence and financial donations. The council wrote a regular column for their community newspaper which Heffernan often used to promote a pro-life message. “I saw that there was a need for us to be speaking out more,” he said. “It wasn’t like a lightbulb went on, but rather, little by little, we became more involved with the pro-life movement.”
Heffernan discovered that several knights in his council were already quite active in the pro-life movement. Despite some of the criticism the council received from outside the organization for its growing pro-life activism, support from within the council grew for a stronger commitment to the pro-life movement. “A person who is going to be a knight is a person who is already active in his Catholic faith,” he said. “So they have already heard the pro-life message.”
The council invited pro-life speakers from pregnancy crisis centres, supported pro-life education efforts and took part in local pro-life activities. There was no one major pro-life activity or event organized by the local K of C, Heffernan said, but rather, the council involved itself in a string of small activities. “What’s important is to get people active in the pro-life movement,” he said. “Once you’re involved, you stay involved.”
In time, Heffernan’s local pro-life leadership in the K of C would inspire other knights and pro-life activists from across Ontario. Strengthening his pro-life witness and commitment to the culture of life were several personal trials he and his wife suffered in the two years following their pro-life awakening. A car accident in 1993 left Rita hospitalized and in a coma for a month. This was followed by a slow recovery. While caring for Rita and the couple’s two sons, Dan developed fibromyalgia, which by 1994 forced him onto long-term disability and made him unable to work full-time.
Not to be discouraged, Heffernan saw these events as an opportunity to expand his budding pro-life activism into other life issues, such as disability advocacy, euthanasia prevention and eventually, the fight for traditional marriage. In recent years, he has also become active in the movement to raise awareness about the negative impact of contraception on society.
Heffernan’s pro-life leadership within the K of C has earned him the respect of his brother knights and fellow pro-life activists. In 1999, the organization’s Ontario head appointed him as district deputy for the councils in his area. During Canada’s debate over same-sex “marriage,” Heffernan was appointed the pro-life chair for the Ontario knights. This position allowed him to shape and lead the organization’s response to Canada’s latest social experiment. As the liaison between the fraternal organization and the pro-life movement, Heffernan’s activism resulted in thousands of knights attending rallies in support of traditional marriage and tens of thousands writing to politicians at all levels of government.
During the debate, Heffernan was particularly tough on politicians who claimed to be Catholic in their personal lives, but voted for the culture of death in their public lives. “It is not true that politicians (should) leave their religion at the door when they enter the House of Commons,” he stated in one news release during the debate. “To do so is hypocrisy.”
By 2006, Heffernan was elected to the Ontario State Council, the board that oversees the K of C in the province. There, he has continued to press for more pro-life activism from the Knights. As Ontario state advocate, he encourages every local council to appoint a pro-life chair who can liaison with local pro-life activists. “Keep an eye on what’s going on in your community,” he said. “Look for opportunities to introduce pro-life programs, support local pro-life activities and look for opportunities to bring in pro-life speakers.” Of particular importance is the annual Life Chain and National March for Life in Ottawa, he said.
Likewise, Heffernan encourages pro-life activists to get in touch with their local K of C councils, find out who the pro-life chairs are locally and invite the knights to become more active. “Maybe your local council doesn’t have a pro-life chair; perhaps there is someone within your local pro-life group who can volunteer for the position.”
As past grand knight of Northern Ontario’s oldest council and the chair of CLC in Sault Ste. Marie, Bill Murphy has spent the past 10 years collaborating with Heffernan in both the K of C and the wider pro-life movement. The two became particularly close five years ago, when Dan and Rita retired to Iron Bridge, a small northern community about an hour east of Sault Ste. Marie. “Dan and Rita are a team who work tirelessly to promote the pro-life message,” Murphy said, while noting the couple remain active at the local level. “Every year, they rally the knights to come out to our Life Chain.”
“We know that in the end the Lord will triumph, but we’re the foot soldiers who do what needs to be done between now and then,” Heffernan said.
