Josie Luetke:
When I was still a high school student, my dad pointed out to me Campaign Life Coalition national president Jim Hughes, unassumingly standing at the back of a Halton Pro-Life event. I don’t think he spoke; I think he just attended because he was available, and his heart lay with this cause.
He quickly grew fond of me (I believe), because my grandparents had forwarded to him emails I had written to my trustees expressing my disappointment that they hadn’t seconded a motion to condemn the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association’s choice to march in the Pride Parade. The board chair responded with blathering excuses and non sequiturs, which I frankly labelled “poppycock” in my email back to her. Jim was so delighted by my spunk that when I began to work for CLC the following year, he made me read the whole thing aloud at a clergy meeting.
I spent some weeks filling in as his executive assistant—ordering flowers; buying chocolates; requesting Masses; transcribing Jim’s well wishes, lame jokes, and offbeat references in letters and cards; and fetching him lots of coffee (which he wasn’t supposed to have). He was much loved, with countless supporters asking, “How’s Jim doing?” or “Say ‘hi’ to Jim for me.”
He would offer much counsel to the summer interns, attuned as he was to young people. His oft repeated line was “Youth are not the future of the pro-life movement; they are the present.”
The most memorable morsels of wisdom he would dole out were pro-life in the broadest sense, less about abortion and euthanasia, and more about how to live. Buy your mother roses on your own birthday. Greet everyone you walk by on the street. One of the stories he told was how from his veranda he slowly trained the passengers on the city bus to wave back at him. (Another story was how he once told a woman passing by “Nice boots!” and she replied, “Excuse me?”)
Jim was prophetic, not just in how he possessed an innate understanding of which battles to fight and predicted Canada’s trajectory on life and family issues, but mainly in how he daily gave witness to a Culture of Life. He valued people deeply, including and perhaps especially Henry Morgentaler. If Jim was father to the Canadian pro-life movement, Morgentaler was father to the pro-abortion movement here, and yet Jim prayed earnestly for him and treated him with kindness, as a peer.
I had the privilege of interviewing Jim a few years ago for DunnMedia & Entertainment’s film ROE Canada: The True North in a Post-Roe World. I started rewatching the footage, and in the first minute, while the sound and lighting are being adjusted, I tell him about how we interviewed a retired abortionist. Jim replies solemnly, “Every single person—since we’re all created in the image and likeness of God… every single person is important.”
There is an irony to the fact that Jim’s vision deteriorated so much at the end of his life, because Jim was blessed with eyes that saw.
He was always attending funerals and calling people who were lonely or ill, particularly on holidays. He had an amazing memory, which made him a walking encyclopedia for the movement, and our history was valuable to him—so that future generations could learn from what had already been done before. His terrific recall gifted him with the ability to ask about your friends and family members, even if you only mentioned someone once during noon-time prayer at the office.
He wouldn’t do the sign of the cross when we’d pray, which seemed odd, as he was a man of deep and enduring faith, and a daily Mass-goer. I learned that he didn’t want to ostracize the protestants at CLC. Again, irony of ironies, he was truly inclusive, not in the inaccurate sense that woke bureaucrats use the word, but in the sense that he would make everyone feel welcome despite differences and without compromising his own beliefs. Surely, that was a necessary skill, being the president of one of the most notoriously “bigoted” organizations in the country and living in the Beaches, in Toronto, with many liberal and homosexual neighbours.
He carried a heavy cross that went largely overlooked because he seemingly carried it so well. He was always bringing levity to dark situations. It must have been heartbreaking, though, to have a front row seat to Canada’s rapid decline, to be constantly betrayed by politicians you helped get elected and disappointed by clergy members for whose spiritual leadership you begged, and to get blamed by other pro-life activists for the legal vacuum in which abortion now exists.
There was a reason he would say, “Trust in God; all others pay cash.” This was God’s work, he would repeatedly remind us, and each day, we just have to pray and do His will to the best of our respective abilities and leave the rest in His hands. There is no job beneath any of us, no room for egos. We would all wear different hats, as necessary. He was humble and shunned the spotlight.
He was keen on honouring the dead, the pro-life warriors who preceded us. It is in large part due to him that there’s a two-page “In Memoriam” section in this paper.
My dad recently asked me if I missed Jim. Of course. I will never get to talk to him again, at least in this earthly life. There are things I wish I could tell him. Yet, I am greatly consoled knowing that as far as lives that could be lived go, his was one of the best.
He was fond of quoting Mother Teresa: “The beautiful thing about the pro-life movement is ordinary people doing extraordinary things for God.” He did many extraordinary things, but I will also lovingly remember him as an extraordinary person.
