Roland de Corneille with Pierre Trudeau.
Both before and after his nine-year incumbency as a member of Parliament, Rev. Roland de Corneille made extraordinary efforts to bridge the gap between Christian and Jewish communities in Canada. Though many Christian groups sought to convert Jews to Christianity, Mr. de Corneille, an Anglican priest, was against that. All he wanted was a greater understanding between the two religions. He was the only non-Jew to be the director of the League for Human Rights of the Jewish advocacy organization B'nai Brith Canada.
Mr. de Corneille, who died last month at the age of 87, had something in common with many Jewish families from Europe: His father, a Protestant cleric in France, was killed by the Nazis during the Second World War.
Roland de Corneille was born in 1927 in Lausanne, Switzerland, while his American-born mother was there on a skiing holiday. The de Corneille family lived in some splendour in Germain, a village on the edge of Paris, now part of the city, in a house that once belonged to Josephine Bonaparte. Young Roland was educated by a British governess and spoke English and German, as well as French.
His father, Jacques de Corneille, was an Anglican priest – the family had converted to Protestantism in the 19th century – and also the Protestant Chaplain-General of the French Army. In 1938, he sensed war was coming and sent his wife and 11-year-old son, Roland, to live in the United States. He sent money to them so they could have comfortable lives, but the payments abruptly stopped when Germany occupied France in June, 1940.
Back in France, the senior Mr. de Corneille was imprisoned. It appears he was released for a time, but he started working with the French resistance, in spite of his high profile.
"Roland's father helped smuggle Jews out of France to Spain over the Pyrenees," said André Sipos of Montreal, whose own family fled Italy in 1939 and who worked with Mr. de Corneille for B'nai Brith Canada. "He was caught by the Gestapo and shot."
In the United States, Roland and his mother, Muriel Schlager, lived from hand to mouth with the help of friends. Mr. de Corneille attended Amherst College, an Ivy League University in Massachusetts, and graduated cum laude in 1946, when he was just 19. He wanted to join the Anglican priesthood but could not get into a divinity school in the United States.
He worked at a number of jobs, including a stint as a statistician at Time Inc. and in brand promotion at Proctor and Gamble's headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. Eventually he enrolled at Trinity College at the University of Toronto. He graduated in 1953 and was ordained a priest that same year. He worked as a curate, or assistant parish priest, at St. John's Anglican Church in West Toronto and St. John the Evangelist in downtown Montreal.
After returning to Toronto, he was given his own parish, first at St. Andrew by-the-Lake and then St. Laurence Anglican Church. While in Toronto, he worked raising money and awareness for the civil rights marches in the United States and was chairman of the Martin Luther King Fund in Toronto. He met Dr. King on a trip to Chicago in the early 1960s.
It was during this time that he became involved with projects with names such as "The Church and the Jewish People." In 1966, he published a book with Harper and Row called Christians and Jews.
He called for a "radical rethinking" of the Anglican Church's relationship with Jews and he was made director of the Christian Approach to the Jewish people.
"Through that position he brought the official Church, for the first time in history, into dialogue with those of the Jewish faith," wrote the Anglican, the Canadian church's newspaper. "In recognition of his contribution in the field of Jewish-Christian relations, Father de Corneille, in 1971, was made director of the League for Human Rights, an agency of B'nai Brith."
Many people in the Jewish community in Canada viewed this cozying up with some suspicion, thinking the idea was to convert rather than converse. One Toronto rabbi was critical in a newspaper article in 1962 when the dialogue started.
"True dialogue would be valuable, but I doubt if Christians can conduct such a thing because of their faith's missionary background, and I don't think a remodelled missionary effort would have much impact on the Jewish people in Toronto," Rabbi Erwin Schild said.
Mr. de Corneille said he did not have ambitions of converting Jews, but wanted to erase centuries of prejudice.
He said that Christian teaching that depicted Jews as Christ-killers "… contributed to the ethos over the centuries that set up a man like Hitler to draw upon these prejudices," he told an interviewer in 1986
During his time at B'nai Brith, Mr. de Corneille came to admire Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his ideas on human rights. He was convinced to run for office and was first elected to the House of Commons as a Liberal in June, 1979, at the age of 52. It was the election in which Joe Clark's Progressive Conservatives won a minority government, defeating Pierre Trudeau, who had been in office for 11 years. The Liberals were back in power in the spring election of 1980. Like many new MPs, he began with high ideals.
"There has been a sapping of confidence in the free world in government," Mr. de Corneille said in his first interview after his 1979 election. "When intelligent people begin to think there's no use in appealing to their political leaders, I think we're in a time of crisis."
When he sat in the House of Commons, Mr. de Corneille often wore his Roman collar, a reminder that he was still a priest as well as a politician. He was a strikingly handsome man, with a chiselled face.
During the last Trudeau government, Mr. de Corneille was Parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Veterans' Affairs. In opposition after the Liberals lost the 1984 election, he became the official critic for External Relations and Human Rights.
"He worked with Pierre Trudeau on the Charter of Rights and played a huge part in that," his wife, Julie de Corneille, said.
Mr. de Corneille was pro-Israel but refused to clash in public with some of his fellow Liberal MPs who were not.
He represented the riding of Eglinton-Lawrence, which stretched across the north end of Toronto. Jewish voters dominated the eastern section, while there was a large Italian community in the west. He never lost an election. Though Mr. de Corneille was elected in 1979, 1980 and 1984, he was defeated in the battle for the nomination in the 1988 election, when the Italian side of the riding backed another candidate.
After politics, he returned to the church, taking on various parishes on a part-time basis. He retired from pastoral duties in 1995 but remained active in politics and for a time was president of his local Liberal riding association.
Mr. de Corneille died on Dec. 30. He leaves his wife, Julie; his two children, Christopher de Corneille and Michelle Sullivan, from an earlier marriage; their mother, Elizabeth de Corneille; two step-daughters, Jessica Norup and Adrienne Spafford; grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
To submit an I Remember: obit@globeandmail.com
Send us a memory of someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page. Please include I Remember in the subject field.