Catholic activist sought reform
Factory work led to lifetime fight for social justice on shop floors and at Vatican
He was one of Canada’s foremost left-leaning Catholic layman, social activist and critic, indefatigable lecturer and writer, street philosopher and teacher. A highschool dropout at 15, Romeo Maione rose to hobnob with popes and governors general, received an honorary university doctorate in social sciences from the University of Ottawa, worked for the poor and disadvantaged in underdeveloped countries, and sought to reform the social face of Catholicism.
It was into a Montreal home of poor Italian immigrants that Romeo Maione was born in 1925. This early high-school dropout gave little indication of his subsequent life of leadership and honours in the private sector, government, union movement, and the Catholic Church.
In later life, fluent in English, French and Italian, and with a powerful, dynamic and forceful personality, his career embraced a staggering variety of diverse challenges that all started from the humble beginnings of working in a Montreal factory in 1940.
His life’s work was shaped by manual labour in these early teenage years. As the eldest of seven children, and at the end of the Depression, he felt a responsibility to get a job, first with the railway (Canadian National Railway), then RCA Victor, and finally inserting valves into engine blocks as they rolled by at a Ford Motor Co. assembly line in the United States. This experience gave him a sense of the demeaning and dehumanizing aspects of factory work in the early 1940s and led to a lifetime of seeking social justice in all its forms.
However, the second-most important conversion experience of his early life was his discovery, in 1948, at 23 years of age, of a lay Catholic movement in Montreal, the Young Christian Workers. The formation and social thrust given through the Young Christian Workers and the Young Christian Students were to have an important influence on the lives of Maione’s fellow Quebecers entering political life, Pierre Trudeau, Jean Pelletier, Jean Marchand, Jeanne Sauvé and Claude Ryan.
One of Maione’s first actions in the YCW was to attend his own union meetings. After a few months he was asked to take over as chief shop steward of a 2,000-worker union. This task made him a father confessor for all the workers with grievances toward management. In addition it gave him an understanding that his life would be one of serving others and seeking social justice for the weak, the underdog, and the disadvantaged.
His rags-to-riches life pilgrimage from high school dropout to the end of an illustrious and fruitful life is like reading pages out of Believe It or Not.
In 1950, at age 25, he took a sixweek training course with the young Christian Workers in London, England, and he spent four years organizing the movement in Canada, particularly Toronto and Montreal. In 1954 he became the Canadian president of the YCW.
The Canadian Catholic bishops in 1956 asked Maione to go to Rome to help organize an International Congress of the Catholic laity. While in Rome in 1957, he was one of the chief organizers of a YCW rally that brought 32.000 young workers to that city. His continued activity in the YCW resulted in his election in 1958 as the first international president of the YCW, stationed at the world headquarters in Brussels.
In 1959, as YCW president, he had a remarkable personal meeting with Pope John XXIII, who had initiated the Second Vatican Council. Maione recounted that upon entering into the room to meet the pope there was only one chair, obviously for the pope. Whereupon Pope John, at the age of 70, crossed the room, found an additional chair, and began carrying the chair to their meeting. Romeo immediately rushed over to help, but the pope insisted on finishing the job.
He also pointed out that the pope was, at heart, a real peasant, who came from a farm in Northern Italy. The pope said to him, “Maione is an Italian name. Do you speak Italian?”
“My parents are Italian, and I was born in Canada, so I speak a dialect,” replied Maione. The pope then asked him to speak in his dialect and he would try to identify his family area in Italy. After saying a few words, the pope said, “You come from Campobasso.”
Maione replied, “No, I come from about 150 kilometres away.” The pope replied: “Well, in these things even a pope is not infallible, but I and sought to reform the social face of Catholicism. was close”.
His subsequent career included work with the Catholic Bishops Conference, Canadian Labour Congress, the United Steelworkers, the Catholic Organization for Development and Peace, and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
In addition, in May 1979 Maione was chairman of a committee to oversee Project 4000, an organization set up by the late mayor, Marion Dewar, to assist 4,000 Vietnamese refugees to settle in Ottawa.
In the last years of his life, Romeo Maione refused to go gently into the good night. He took to his computer to continue his lifetime fight to seek justice for the weak, the poor, the marginalized, and to plead for continual renewal and reform in Catholicism.
A voracious reader, he devoured left-wing websites and sent out daily heat-seeking missiles to a wide range of friends, family, and social-activist contacts.
After a heart attack in November 2008, within three days, more than 500 people from around the world had sent cards and emails of sympathy and support in his illness.
Romeo Maione died on May 12, at the age of 90. He is survived by his wife Betty, four children and 11 grandchildren.
His rags-to-riches life pilgrimage from high school dropout to the end of an illustrious and fruitful life is like reading pages out of Believe It or Not.